The Spirit to Go Fourth

It’s still there. It took an hourlong bus trip Sunday to find it, but it’s still there.

Beyond the punks and professionals, away from the charlatans and cheats, there still exists a Winter Olympics.

It was discovered in a white-blanketed valley in the shadow of Mount Timpanogas, classical music in the air, children rolling in the snow, the sheesh of cross-country skis across the hillside.

A spandex lump on the finish line.

The lump tried to stand up, but couldn’t. Workers hovered over it offering relief, but couldn’t.

Fans stared at it. Skiers slid around it. The lump curled and writhed and stood and fell again.

Later, after it was pulled from the slick track and affixed with oxygen and given the strength to walk away, the lump stretched out into U.S. Nordic combined athlete Todd Lodwick.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said softly to a reporter. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Underneath his mirrored sunglasses, he began to cry.

“This was going to be our day to shine,” he said. “But the clouds came in and poured on us....”

He took three steps and doubled over again in silent grief.

Lodwick’s U.S. cross-country relay team, after a third-place finish in the earlier ski jumping portion, was set to win a medal in this sport for the first time in 78 years of trying.

Except Lodwick lost the edge on the first five-kilometer leg around the hilly track, and the Americans were overtaken by the fourth-place Germans, and that was that.

In the end, they had actually gained ground on eventual winner Finland. But they never caught Germany or Austria, and finished a distant fourth.

The best finish in U.S. Nordic combined history.

A race that ended with four guys either collapsing in breathless despair, or wandering around in sad confusion.

Amid the silence of a small crowd, it felt as if it might be 78 years before they get this close again.

But Lodwick was wrong about those clouds.

For one painful, special hour, the light could not have been clearer on the mission of these Games and those who dare play them.

This was not about money. It was about four young ski bums from Colorado, three of whom rent rooms from the locals, one sleeping for the last three years in a converted chicken coop.

“At least there’s no more chickens,” Bill Demong said. “But now I have goats.”

This was not about popularity. There were fewer than a dozen U.S. media members at the event, which ended with a news conference in a room filled with empty chairs.

“For us, it’s great just to hear people cheering,” Matt Dayton said.

This was, amazingly enough, also not about gold.

On a day when the Olympics held a phony medal ceremony to unfairly hand a gold medal to a Canadian pairs figure skating team that had lost it on the ice, that concept was as foreign to these four guys as a sandy beach.

Forget the gold.

They simply wanted to finish on the podium.

After 19 skid-filled Olympics, they wanted to finish the race standing.

“There’s something about that podium, and we all talked about it,” Demong said. “On bad days, you don’t think about it. But on good days, it makes it easier to go to bed and dream about it.”

Saturday had been one of those days. The Americans had performed far better than expected in the ski jumping. Everything was set up for a blitz in cross-country.

They were finally going to elbow their way into the history books of a sport that belongs to someone else.

Just look at the name. Is there any other sport in the Winter Olympics named after an entire region?

This being like Greco-Roman wrestling, any medal would have been as large as Rulon Gardner.

Archeologists have discovered ancient Scandinavian wall carvings showing humans racing on skis. Nordic combined contests were being held in Norway as early as the mid-1800s.

It’s considered one of the purest and most original of Winter Olympic activities. And something far too diverse for the one-sport-only mind-set of Americans.

“You need the grace and courage to ski jump, and the stamina to race,” explained Dayton. “It’s a very difficult combination.”

But after Saturday’s ski jump, the Americans had finally figured it out, or so they thought.

Twenty-four hours later, it became apparent they had thought too much. “We had to leave that jump feeling fantastic ... but then we had 24 hours to deal with the pressure,” Coach Tom Steitz said. “That may have been a little part of it.”

Pressure from an outside world that doesn’t even understand the sport?

“No, it wasn’t really about everybody else,” Demong said. “It was about us. After all this work, we wanted to do it for us.”

What a notion, to attempt to achieve something simply for one’s own sense of self. From snowboarders pushing helmet companies to figure skaters driving Mercedes, that notion has been sort of lost this week.

And once they, in their minds, have failed?

They didn’t blame a judge, or the wind, or a competitor.

Each of them, individually, blamed himself.

Said Lodwick: “I just had a bad day.”

Said Demong: “I could have saved more for the end.”

Said Dayton: “I just couldn’t get it together.”

And so on....

“That’s the strength of our team,” Steitz said. “If we had gotten on that podium, they would have credited each other. But because we didn’t, they are each blaming themselves.”

Strength indeed.

Addressing the few reporters at the news conference, Luke Bodensteiner, U.S. Nordic director, said: “Now I know you’re getting ready to write a story about how the medal slipped away from us.... “

Quite the contrary.

This afternoon in the quiet hills far from maddening Salt Lake City was about something gained.

One by one, despite wearing faces that dropped to the floor, each of the four young skiers ended the day by saying they hoped to return as a team in four years in Italy.

I want to be there when they do.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.