At Least, They Are Genuine Losers

Here’s to the losers:

(Who are not to be confused with the lugers, unless they’re competing against Germany’s three-time Olympic champion Georg Hackl. In that case, they’re usually one and the same.)

Winners at the Olympics get the nicest medals, get the best spot on the podium, get their national anthem played for them, get to be interviewed by some overheated (“You really rocked out there!”) NBC field reporter and get their pictures in the next day’s newspapers. And what do they give back in return? Just a lot of platitudes and thank-yous and it-feels-greats and sorry-that’s-my-agent-on-my-cell-phone-nows.

Losers give the Olympics life. They are generally not happy, so manners matter less to them. They have failed at something for which they have trained for years, so honest emotions flood freely from the heart.

They gripe. They grouse. They lament. They wallow in the mire.

They give Olympic columnists great fodder.

“You just want to chop your legs off and toss them in the garbage” was U.S. speedskater Jennifer Rodriguez’s reaction to finishing seventh Sunday in the women’s 3,000-meter competition.

Which might be the all-time best working definition for the agony of defeat.

“It’s a tough one to swallow,” said U.S. Alpine skier Daron Rahlves after finishing 16th in the men’s downhill, 13 places out of the medals and seven behind little-known teammate Marco Sullivan. “I’m still kind of in a daze right now. It was just a very poor performance.”

Rahlves said he was thankful he had another race left to redeem himself. But if Saturday’s super-G doesn’t work out, Rahlves sounds as if he has what it takes to launch a long and successful career as a sportswriter.

Case in point: Todd Lodwick placed seventh in Nordic combined, the United States’ best Olympic finish in the history of the event. Good news, no? Not when you make your living as a sportswriter, occupying a world where the beer schooner is perpetually half-empty and a dark cloud is always prettier once the silver lining has been detached and discarded.

After Lodwick’s historic performance, members of the U.S. media corps wanted to know why Americans can’t get the hang of Nordic combined.

“Do you watch a lot of Norwegians?” Lodwick shot back. “They don’t have a clue how to throw a football. It’s pathetic.”

Norway Alpine skier Lasse Kjus, who probably throws a lousy deep ball, is pretty good schussing down the slopes. Not great, mind you--Kjus finished second to Austria’s Fritz Strobl in the men’s downhill and concedes, “I can get some good results, and also some really bad ones.”

Kjus was asked why more Norwegian athletes aren’t interested in his sport, considering the abundance of snow and Lycra up there.

“Interest is there,” Kjus insisted. “Norway is a very small country. We as a nation have to live with that result. Interest will go up and down.”

So true.

Besides, there’s only so much time in the day in Norway. It can be tough getting enough downhill training runs when you’re working overtime on your screen pass technique.

Then again, lack of interest in particular Olympic activities isn’t always a bad thing. Take ski jumping. Not many around the world have a desire to go hurtling down a 90-meter hill and off a cliff with nothing cushioning the eventual fall except two thin slabs of fiberglass.

“Nobody can understand what ski jumping is like,” said Germany’s Sven Hannawald, who finished second in the 90-meter ski jump. “If everybody tried, they would probably need very good insurance.”

See, the losers at the Olympics are the life of the party. The winners, even if they happen to be interesting people who lead otherwise fascinating lives, tend to turn dull when the golden spotlight hits them.

Finland’s Samppa Lajunen is a Nordic combined skier by day and a rock and roll guitarist by night. He plays in a band called Vieraileva Tahti--Guest Star, in English--with teammate Antti Kuisma and a few Finnish ski jumpers. A couple years back, Guest Star had a hit single in Finland, “The Lightest Man In Finland.”

Naturally, the international media in Salt Lake wanted to know more about Guest Star. What kind of rock do they play? Progressive? Metal? Ska Danavian?

“Forget the band,” Lajunen snapped, throwing a wet blanket over the interview. “Hey, I won the gold medal.”

Yeah, yeah, we know. Give us the fifth-place finishers, such as U.S. women’s halfpiper Shannon Dunn, who failed to repeat her 1998 bronze-medal performance and watched teammate Kelly Clark take bows from the top step of the podium Sunday.

Halfpipe snowboarders and figure skaters have one thing in common and one thing only: They perform to music. Figure skaters choose their own, not always a good thing, because figure skaters tend to favor show tunes and Muzak versions of rock classics. Halfpipers also choose, kind of--they are presented with a list of options, from AC/DC to Queen to Guns N’ Roses to Cyndi Lauper, and told to pick one.

Way too conservative, said Dunn, who said the official play list reminded her of “a junior high school dance.”

Guest Star might have been able to provide a better selection, but we’ll never know. The guitarist didn’t want to talk about it.