WinterSports2002.com, Friday, February 08, 2002

Speed, style mark high-flying Olympics

By Scott Taylor
Deseret News sports editor

The buzzwords at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games — new, speedy, stylish, powerful, accelerating, high-flying, quirky and breathtaking.

These are not your father's Games anymore.

What sounds like a marketing campaign for a new car actually describes the 17 days of competition that starts today with ski jumping qualifications and ends Feb. 24 at the E Center with the men's ice hockey gold-medal game.

In all, nearly 2,500 Olympians will vie in 15 disciplines and 78 events at 11 competition venues for the right to have one of the 238 gold, silver or bronze medals draped around their necks.

New for 2002 — the addition of 10 events since the 1998 Nagano Games, including an inagural women's bobsled event, cross country mass starts and the return of skeleton, the face-first track sledding that hasn't been contested in the Games since 1948.

You want speed?

Speedskaters are expected to shatter Olympic records on the ice of the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns. Nearly a dozen official and unofficial speedskating times have already been posted in pre-Olympic competitions there. Over in Summit County the track at Utah Olympic Park has afforded fast times itself in bobsled, luge and skeleton.

And then you've got Grizzly and Wildflower — Snowbasin's menacing downhill and super-G runs not meant for the faint-hearted.

Salt Lake City will feature plenty of style, which factors in the judging of sports like figure skating, snowboarding halfpipe and freestyle aerials and moguls. A buildup of speed will give way to athletic artistry, whether it's landing a quad on the Delta Center ice, wowing the Gen-X crowds at the Park City halfpipe or busting through the bumps and off the kickers at Deer Valley.

Power appears in bulky bodies banging against the boards, as players try to separate opponents from the puck and before sending rocket-like slapshots toward the hockey goals at the E Center and The Peaks.

When it comes to high-gear action, short-track speedskaters will try to pass from a spot back in the pack to the front with one deft maneuver around a hairpin curve at the Delta Center.

And nobody soars quite like the human eagles in ski jumping and the jump portion of nordic combined. Granted, the jumpers actually will be only 10 to 15 feet off the Utah Olympic Park's sloped hill — but to spectators they look like they end up landing just this side of Evanston.

Curling may be quirky and often serves as the butt of winter-sports jokes. But it will require a keen eye, a trained wrist, a quick sweep and experience to choose between sneaking one's stone into a tight, strategic spot or simply blasting the opponent out of the house at the Ice Sheet at Ogden.

And breathing will be hard to come by at Soldier Hollow, the lung-busting cross country and biathlon venue built to push the maximum altitude allowances afforded by international standards. Biathletes in particular will be looking to catch their breath — and slow down pulse rates in the neighborhood of 170 beats a minute — as they pause from skiing to fire their .22s at targets not much bigger than a grapefruit.

Fast, furious and fashionable and rapid-fire — welcome to the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.

E-MAIL: taylor@desnews.com

© 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company