Smooth sailing — Where's passion, scandals?

TORINO, ITALY — Winter Olympics, Day 4, and there is an unsettling feeling that nothing is unsettling.

This is Italy, after all, the land of arm waving and hand flailing, the place where people give you an offer you can't refuse, the home of Da Vinci. Arguing is a national sport. The slogan for the Torino Olympics is, "Passion Lives Here."

And on the fourth day, still, nothing.

No controversies. No tantrums. No conspiracy theories. Not a single judging scandal.

There hasn't even been a cloud in the sky.

Four years ago in Salt Lake City — even though, given the commotion over how we won the Games, we would have paid good money to avoid any more of it — we had plenty of controversy.

By Day Four, Olympic boss Mitt Romney had already performed a decent Italian impersonation when the traffic bogged down on the way to the downhill at Snowbasin, and then, in pairs figure skating, well, who can forget the pairs?

When the judges didn't award the gold medal to the Canadian team of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, the crowd in the Olympic Skating Arena/Delta Center turned ugly, raining boos on the judges like they were NBA referees. This wasn't necessarily the world's most sophisticated figure-skating crowd. The arena was full of people from West Jordan and Orem and Holladay who didn't know a toe loop from a tow truck.

But they knew injustice when they saw it. They knew the Russian pair of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze — the ones who got the gold medal — had nearly stumbled on one jump and landed rough on a couple of others. Maybe Elena and Anton were two-time world champions, and maybe Russia had won every Olympics pairs title since 1964, but on this night they weren't better than Jamie and David.

In figure skating, it's usually the performers who end up whining; in Salt Lake City, it was the spectators.

It turned out that they knew what they were screaming about. In the investigation that followed, French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne, while stopping short of incriminating herself, admitted that she had been "pressured" into voting for the Russians in exchange for a Russian vote later in the Olympics for the French ice dancing team.

To calm things down, the International Olympic Committee agreed to award a gold medal to Sale and Pelletier, too.