The Vancouver Games, two days away, may be remembered as a major turning point for the U.S. Winter Olympic movement. Specifically: the moment when this nation of 304 million got over itself and learned how to compete in offbeat sports like Nordic combined.
The emergence of gold-medal contenders Todd Lodwick, Bill Demong and Johnny Spillane in this unheralded sport—a combination of ski jumping and cross-country skiing—and Andy Newell, Kris Freeman and Kikkan Randall in cross-country skiing, is the result of a plan scratched out nearly 20 years ago by a winter-sports coach named Tom Steitz.
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Bill Demong of the U.S. during the ski-jumping event at a World Cup Nordic combined in Italy in January.
Mr. Steitz, who lives in Steamboat Springs, Colo., knew that Americans could compete in these events. But to do so, he figured he had to lay waste to the oldest Olympic cliché in the books: the ascetic athlete who toils in solitude for years practicing some obscure sport in the hopes of achieving one singular moment in the spotlight.
His plan was a system of constant oversight and accountability that was uncompromising and almost Orwellian in its outlook but has, so far, shown great promise as a way of boosting the U.S. medal count. "These kids don't have any more talent than the guys who came before them," said Mr. Steitz, who coached the U.S. Nordic combined team from 1988 to 2002. "We just had a better system and a better plan."
Mr. Steitz is a management consultant now, but he remains a godfather figure to the Nordic combined athletes he first got to know as pimply teenagers, as well as to much of the staff at the United States Ski and Snowboard Association, which later adapted his plan for Nordic combined success as the template for success in all sports. (Tim Burke, who's a contender in biathlon, and Erin Hamlin, a contender in women's luge, were developed under a system similar to what Mr. Steitz developed for the Nordic combined).
When he came up with the idea of beating the Austrians, Norwegians and Germans who literally grow up on Nordic skis, Mr. Steitz was one of the only believers. Luke Bodensteiner, the vice president of athletics for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, competed for the U.S. in the 1992 and 1994 Olympics in cross-country skiing. In 1993, he met a Norwegian woman he later married. "Her mother knew more about cross-country skiing than any coach I'd ever had," Mr. Bodensteiner said.
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At that time, investment in Nordic sports by the USSA and the U.S. Olympic Committee was minimal, and respect abroad was even harder to come by. In the early 1990s, Mr. Steitz said the USSA gave him $50,000 to cover expenses from October through March, when his 20-member team spent most of the time training and competing in Europe. They traveled with sleeping bags and had a rotation of who would sleep on hotel-room floors. At one event in Norway, organizers didn't even bother to give the U.S. squad a heated tent like all the other teams received to tend to their equipment.
"When we complained they told us it wouldn't matter in terms of the results anyway," Mr. Steitz recalled.
Mr. Steitz knew it was absurd to think that a cross-country-skiing prodigy would appear out of the blue. So he decided to create a factory, albeit a small one, where the focus would be on finding and bringing together raw teenagers, then teaching them a largely obscure skill over the course of a decade the way the former Soviet machine did.
When Mr. Steitz found Mr. Lodwick, the Vancouver medal contender, he was a fearless 15-year-old who liked to hang around the Howelsen Hill ski jump in downtown Steamboat. He had no idea how to race on cross-country skis. During Mr. Lodwick's first summer of training, Mr. Steitz made him trek on his dry-land skis to the ski jump each morning to hone his racing technique while everyone else rode in the team van.
"I didn't get into the sport to make a billion dollars, it was something to do to have fun, and I just ended up doing it pretty seriously," said Mr. Lodwick, now 33.
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Todd Lodwick at a Nordic Combined in France in January.
Mr. Steitz found another of this year's contenders, Mr. Spillane, in Steamboat—living just six houses down the street from his own home. He said Mr. Spillane, now 29, didn't have a lot of natural talent but trained harder than any young teenager he'd known. Another member of the team, Mr. Demong, was a solid 15-year-old junior level cross-country skier from upstate New York when Mr. Steitz found him—but he wasn't much of a jumper.
Mr. Steitz made everyone on his team move to Steamboat, where he found host families for the kids (in 2002 the team moved to Park City, Utah). Training took place all year, instead of during periodic camps.
Each athlete's progress was carefully measured and tracked. Simply being the best American at the discipline wasn't enough to maintain a spot on the national team. If an up-and-coming athlete wasn't progressing at the same rate as the up-and-coming athletes in Europe, Mr. Steitz would cut him, along with the coaches whose charges weren't producing required results. Searching for the right mix, Mr. Steitz churned through 10 coaches in 10 years and dozens of athletes. "We placed bets on a few young guys, and fortunately they paid off," Mr. Steitz says.
Mr. Steitz's Nordic squad had little money, especially when compared with the government-funded programs in Europe. But in 1996, Mr. Lodwick, then 19, scored Nordic combined's first breakthrough with a win at the junior World Championships in Italy. Later that year, Bill Marolt began his tenure as chief executive of the USSA, and during his first week, Mr. Steitz drove to Utah and, over sandwiches, outlined his program on a luncheonette napkin, showing how the success and progress could be measured from an early age. A day later, Mr. Marolt signed on. By 2000, the USSA was spending about $600,000 a year on Mr. Steitz's Nordic combined squad and using the basic underpinnings of his system as a model for other sports. Mr. Steitz augmented that funding with a half-million dollars in private donations.
After seeing Mr. Steitz's success, the USSA in 2000 developed a residency program near its headquarters in Park City for its cross-country team. Ms. Randall and Messrs. Freeman and Newell all moved there as teenagers and spend much of the next eight years training under the close supervision of USSA coaches.
Depending on sponsorships, the USSA now spends $550,000 to $850,000 a year on Nordic combined, according to Mr. Bodensteiner, and has about 80 kids, teenage and younger, in a development pipeline. In addition, team members benefit from some $800,000 the USSA spends each year at its Center of Excellence in Park City.
"If you're young and on the way up," says John Farra, the current Nordic director, "we're going to want to be with you every day."
Just as Mr. Steitz would have it.
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
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![[OLDSKIIER]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tvCHbhviIIhSEQh_f-Hwc7m11Xdb8K8LAxCh9F8p9tvUfevop9Yr53xb6kM98czrd3yDiGMVBddCdnb9FBGxHaEywMyhzJ5JdW2NzdE7PT3nxbqnP4wEZUn29E2xB_hPlkC97WsxNQnb7LK2DGRqKtWw=s0-d)
Swiss downhiller Didier Cuche, the favorite.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Didier Cuche is an Olympic senior citizen at 35 years years old, so you might assume that his event is curling. But instead of pushing a stone across the ice Saturday, Mr. Cuche will be careening down an icy slope at 80 miles an hour as the gold-medal favorite in the men's downhill competition (if the race isn't postponed by weather).
The Swiss skier is in good— and aging—company. In 1980, the top 12 finishers in the Olympics' downhill event averaged a young 23.6 years. This year's top 12 men's downhill skiers are ancient by comparison: 29.9 years.
"It's become an event that's all about experience," said Phil Mahre, who won silver and gold medals in the slalom in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. "And it's a lot more technical than it's ever been."
Despite its reckless abandon, downhill has always been friendlier to veteran skiers than other Alpine events. The turns in slalom and giant slalom can wear on aging knees in ways that the bomb-and-tuck style of the downhill race does not. So it's not surprising that this year's slalom and giant slalom skiers are nearly 2½ years younger than their downhill teammates.
But changes in the nature of competitive skiing and advances in ski technology are making the downhill race even more of a haven for the veterans of the world's most famous downhill runs. Among these new factors: fewer training runs, chemicals that make the snow harder and faster than ever, and a new generation of dramatically curved slalom skis. It's hardly surprising that the venerable Mr. Cuche is a favorite for the gold. He turned in the fastest training run Wednesday, before the run was canceled for fog. (He was disqualified in Thursday's training run for missing a gate.) He is joined on the list of skiers who are expected to do well by two other relative old-timers, Austrian Michael Walchhofer, who is 34, and American Bode Miller, who is 32. Liechtenstein's Marco Buechel is 38.
Of course, younger skiers have come out of nowhere to shock the Olympics before, most notably American Bill Johnson, who took the downhill gold at age 23 in 1984 in Sarajevo. But downhill skiing is unique among the skiing disciplines in that its courses hardly change from year to year. In slalom, giant slalom and super giant slalom, which is known as SuperG, the course changes depending on how race managers set up the gates through which the athletes ski. In downhill, skiers race down essentially the same course year after year, whether at Colorado's Beaver Creek or Vail resorts, or Europe's legendary downhill runs, such as Wengen, Switzerland, or Kitzbuhel, Austria.
![[SP_HOL1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s-RP17g1vkrqoCSlNQv4hlBhFvznnd3JIjfYPMBqvu067bziaK294D9Hh-SRHoO8LQQbAEVta1zBL0DhaGT6l926YHDeRnn_9P_hWPUHvAciUBm0xw5Njm7tGa3KItWmSR2vvJCV1V5aaHnDHst6Of=s0-d)
Austrian Michael Walchhofer, above, and Bode Miller atop the downhill course on Wednesday, below.
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The more times they race down a course, the more familiar they become with what skiers call the "line" of the slope, which means the most direct route from the top to the bottom. Skiers with the greatest familiarity of the line know the high-speed adjustments they need to make as they approach the treacherous turns and jumps of a typical race.
"There is no way to plan for these big events other than to have been there before," said Mr. Miller. "If I come in and race hard, it comes down to whether I can make the tactical decisions to make it down error-free."
Making matters more challenging for young downhillers is the now-common practice of injecting a course with water to ensure that the slope remains consistent for every competitor throughout a race day. With that consistency come icy-hard and lightning-fast conditions that put a premium on split-second decisions made by instinct and experience. "It's the judgment factor," said John McMurtry, the former Alpine coach for the U.S. ski team. "And it takes years to develop that judgment."
Especially now. Mr. Mahre said that when he was on the World Cup circuit, organizers would allow competitors to take four or five practice runs on the course before the actual races. Now, partly because the World Cup circuit includes more events, training runs have been cut back to just one or two for each downhill race.
"Used to be you could get 15 or 20 runs on a course within a few years," Mr. Mahre said. "Now it'll take you 10 years to get up to that level."
For many younger skiers, though, those years aren't wasted. Instead, they are using the sharp reflexes and fast-twitch muscles of their youth to win slalom and giant slalom events, which require a series of jagged turns through gates. As those physical advantages begin to deteriorate in their mid-to-late 20s, the aging skiers begin to gravitate toward the speed events, like downhill.
Since the 1990s, slalom skiers have used skis that are shaped like a parabolic arc—skinny in the middle and widening toward the tips. While the shape makes it easier to carve out the quick turns of a slalom, the skis put tremendous torque on the knees and lower legs, body parts which only hurt more as skiers age.
"I've seen people blow out their tibia and fibulas just by going through a turn," said Picabo Street, the silver medalist in the Olympic downhill in 1994.
American skier Bode Miller first broke onto the World Cup skiing circuit in 1997 as a top slalom racer out of New Hampshire. His first World Cup downhill victory, however, didn't come until 2004, when he was 27 years old. This year, the downhill and SuperG are considered his best shots at the podium, though he may also be a contender in the downhill-slalom combination event known as Super Combined.
Brandon Dyksterhouse, who grew up racing with Mr. Miller and is now the head Alpine coach at the Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont, which trains some of the country's best young skiers, said Mr. Miller is lucky to have made it into this stage of his career without having blown himself into pieces. "If you can hang in without breaking your body apart, there's no reason you can't stay competitive until you're 40."
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
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Clayton Kershaw looks down after giving up a home run to Colorado's chris iannetta, right, during the fifth inning of the Dodgers' 3-0 road loss Tuesday. (Chris Schneider / Associated Press / April 5, 2011)
Reporting from Denver — More than 100 major league players have hit at least as many home runs as the entire Dodgers team: one.
The Dodgers didn't look like an offensive machine on paper and they haven't looked like one in the flesh. They have been shut out twice in five games, most recently in a 3-0 defeat to the Colorado Rockies in Coors Field on Tuesday night.
Clayton Kershaw pitched well, but not well enough, making a few mistakes that created an obstacle far too great for the Dodgers' lineup to overcome.
Frank McCourt's representatives call on commissioner's office
The Dodgers (3-2) have scored 13 runs in five games and are batting .233.
Predictably, rookie Manager Don Mattingly and the players said they weren't concerned.
"It's game No. 5," Tony Gwynn Jr. said.
Hitting coach Jeff Pentland noted the quality of pitching they have faced.
They were held to a combined six runs in the three games against the San Francisco Giants that were started by Tim Lincecum, Jonathan Sanchez and Matt Cain. In the game pitched by the more hittable Barry Zito, they scored seven runs.
Their tormentor Tuesday was Jhoulys Chacin, who posted a 3.28 earned-run average last season. Chacin (1-0) held the Dodgers to five hits over seven innings.
"I don't think we were up there hacking wild," Mattingly said. "That guy pitched good against us."
The Dodgers had only three men in scoring position.
Still, Mattingly said, "I felt like we were going to score."
Giants fan sent text message saying he was 'scared' before beating
With two outs and Gwynn on second base in the third inning, Chacin intentionally walked Andre Ethier to face Matt Kemp. Chacin got Kemp to fly out to center field.
The Dodgers' best scoring chance probably came in the fifth inning, which Jamey Carroll led off with a single. Carroll advanced to second base on a bunt by Kershaw, but Rafael Furcal and Gwynn grounded out to end the inning.
The Rockies went ahead, 1-0, on a home run by Troy Tulowitzki in the fifth inning. They doubled their advantage in the next inning on a home run by Chris Iannetta.
Jose Lopez put the game out of reach with a run-scoring single in the sixth inning.
Kershaw was typical Kershaw when speaking after the game, blaming himself for the defeat.
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