Ready ... set ... Torino

A little after lunchtime tomorrow, Mountain Standard Time, the Salt Lake Olympic Winter Games of 2002 will officially take their place in the pantheon of Olympic has-beens when the 2006 cauldron is lit in Torino, Italy.

The "Passion Lives Here" Games will be in and the "Light the Fire Within" Games will be out.

But it will take the next 17 days to determine exactly how much of a perpetual flame was ignited in Salt Lake, where venues were habitually filled to capacity and the United States home team, after six decades of mostly having snow kicked in its face, kicked some back.

After never winning more than 13 medals in any single Olympics, the U.S. men and women burst loose for 34 medals up and down the Wasatch Range, a grand total that ranked second only to Germany's 36 and a bunch ahead of Norway's 25. And while it wasn't unprecedented to finish so high in the nation standings — the U.S. was tops with 12 medals in the 1932 Games it hosted in Lake Placid — it was the overall American presence that was different. The Yankees looked like, well, the Yankees. At virtually every venue, even in the foreign Nordic sports, America was in the thick of things, a contender. Making it all the more pleasant was the fact that the success was largely unexpected.

Now comes Torino. Will the United States use the Italian Alps as a backdrop to put the world on notice that it is an emerging world power, about to embark on a Rolling Stones-esque run? Or will a lack of consistency and across-the-board strength revert the U.S. team to pre-Salt Lake levels?

In the esoteric world of winter sports in America, no one can ever say for sure, but all signs point to an encore performance in Italy that will rival, if not surpass, the one that brought it on.

Speaking strictly metaphorically, Torino could be Salt Lake on steroids.

The simple reason is momentum. The games of Salt Lake were infectious to American athletes in a good way. Almost no one stopped training, or even slowed down much, after the competition ended. No sooner had the echoes from the last Barenaked Ladies concert receded from the pavement of the torn-down medals plaza than athletes began plotting for seconds.

No one retired, at least not because they wanted to. The sport of skeleton is a good example of the competitiveness that has pervaded the U.S. winter sports scene since Salt Lake. Neither of the 2002 gold medalists, Jim Shea and Utah's Tristan Gale, will be in the Torino Games, but it's not for lack of trying. They were simply out-slid by rivals who wanted to experience what they saw Shea and Gale experience in Salt Lake.