Rounding out the Utah squad are four baseball players who played at the minor league professional level in Salt Lake City. Pitcher Eric Cyr and outfielder Jeff Guiel, who once played for the Stingers, and Ryan Radmanovich, who played for the Buzz, are members of the Canadian baseball team that is picked to win bronze behind Cuba and Japan, while ex-Stingers utilityman Clay Bellinger is a member of the Greece national team.

Another four Olympians may be of local interest due to their membership in the LDS Church. At the head of this list is U.S. rower Megan Dirkmaat, a California native who attended BYU as a student only before transferring in 1998 to the University of California-Berkeley to join the rowing team. Dirkmaat is part of an eight-woman U.S. team that is undefeated in World Cup competition this year and is the odds-on favorite to win gold in Athens. Other LDS Olympians include rower Lucia Fernanda Palerma, who will compete for Argentina; race-walker John Nunn, a member of the U.S. Olympic Team from Indiana; and the aptly named Mosiah Rodriguez, Brazil's top male gymnast.

Besides the Canadian baseball players, the Jazz's Boozer, who should ride the unpredictable but still enormously talented U.S. men's basketball ship to at least some color of medal, and Pavlovic, who plays for defending world champion Serbia-Montenegro, a number of others named above have better-than-average chances at standing on a podium in the land where the Olympics began 2,780 years ago.

Speaking of Gardner, the talk of the Aussie Games is generally considered a good bet to defend the Greco-Roman super heavyweight wrestling title he claimed in Sydney when he hung the first and only international loss, not to mention retirement, on superhuman Alexander Karelin. Gardner has proven capable of beating anyone in the Athens field, although it remains to be seen how much of a toll the snowmobile, motorcycle and assorted other crashes he has endured during his four-year break has taken.

In freestyle wrestling, Heber City's Sanderson never lost in 159 matches in four years of college competition at Iowa State, but since turning "international" he has lost close matches to Russia's Sajid Sajidov and Cuba's Yoel Romero — the two men favored to relegate him to bronze in Athens. Young, inexperienced but unstoppable once he gets on a roll, the former Wasatch High School Utah state champion and four-time NCAA champion could be four years away from a gold medal or on the cusp of an undefeated Olympic run to match his college days.