It happens before every Olympics, and it happens with every nation. We all pick out poster boys and girls to carry the medal hopes, pump up the home crowd and generate some buzz for a quadrennial Winter carnival that blends an orgiastic mix of corporate money-making (and losing) with athletic perfection.
It happens before every Olympics, and it happens with every nation. We all pick out poster boys and girls to carry the medal hopes, pump up the home crowd and generate some buzz for a quadrennial Winter carnival that blends an orgiastic mix of corporate money-making (and losing) with athletic perfection.
And nobody does pre-Olympic hype quite like the United States. And nobody came to Whistler looking quite so all-American as Lindsey Vonn. Blond, ambitious, and dominant, she was the golden combination. She was also the best at what she did, or close to it, long before she struck those risqué poses for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition or tucked that handy pre-Olympic excuse in her hip pocket by pointing out -- ad nauseam -- that she was entering the Games with an injured right shin.
Yesterday it was a broken right pinky finger that had Lindsey singing the blues, though she was not blaming the fractured digit for her final flameout on Whistler Mountain.
"My finger had absolutely nothing to do with me going out," Vonn said after straddling a gate in her first slalom run to post her third DNF of the 2010 Olympics. "That was just pure bad luck, or bad skiing, whatever you want to call it."
Well then, how about calling it the end, since that is what it was. The Lindsey Show is pulling up stakes and leaving town with its sore right shin -- still? -- and busted right pinky finger, and with a suitcase that is not quite as medal-laden as many predicted it would be.
That is the thing about poster boys and girls: they are expected to do the impossible. Vonn's hype-driven assignment was to win five gold medals in Whistler.
"Five gold medals was never my goal," she says. "Of course, I wanted to try, and looking back four medals were very realistic, but nothing ever goes the way you want it to."
For Vonn, it did not go so bad at all. The 25-year-old earned gold in the women's downhill, collected a bronze in the super-giant slalom and failed to cross the finish line in three other races.
There were other episodes of intrigue connected to her apart from watching to see if she could successfully make it down the hill and, for the millionth time, get asked about her bruised right shin at the bottom.
There was the rift -- or was there really? -- between Vonn and her U.S. teammate and double-silver medallist, Julia Mancuso. The crash that did in Vonn's pinky disrupted Mancuso's gallop down the giant slalom course three days ago. Mancuso was forced to start over, in a later slot, on a course where the conditions were rapidly deteriorating. She wound up finishing 18th in that run and eighth overall.
"People are having a hard time reaching their potential because it's such a struggle for attention," Mancuso said, speaking to Sports Illustrated about what life on the Lindsey Show was like for the rest of her teammates. "You come to meetings after races and it's like it's a bad day if Lindsey didn't do well."
Even when it is a good day for someone else -- from another country -- Vonn has a way of making a cameo on the podium. Germany's Maria Riesch won yesterday's slalom. It was her second gold medal of the Games. The third question she was asked at the gold medallist's news conference was about an American who did not finish.
"Lindsey was having lots of bad luck altogether," Riesch said. "She had a broken finger, you have to put down the gates with your hand, and with a broken finger it is pretty painful."
Vonn was wearing a splint on her latest wound. She confessed to feeling physically beat up and emotionally beat down by the Olympic experience.
"It has been interesting," she says. "It has been hard sometimes to hear some of the things people say. Sometimes people say positive things, sometimes people say negative things; for me it was important just to stay focused on what I was here to do, and not to think about what people were writing and what people were saying."
And now it is time to say goodbye. But don't worry. The Lindsey Show will be back. Four years will flash by in a blink and the pre-Olympic buzz will start anew.
Only next time around in Sochi, in 2014, Vonn says she is going to know exactly what to expect. She will have already been on the posters once before.
"I have never gone in with so much hype and expectation," she says. "When you have been in the starting gate with millions of people expecting you to win, and you actually do win, and to know that I can achieve that no matter what anyone says, that gives me a lot of confidence.
"I know I can do it again. So I am going to be a heck of lot more prepared for Sochi than I was for Vancouver."
Let the hype begin.
