Surprise Winners by the Sledful

They will be remembered by many as the comeback Games. For the athletes, for the host city, for the host nation.

A joyful 16-year-old from Great Neck, N.Y., the beauty of her jumps and spins matched only by her uncanny poise, makes an unfathomable fourth-to-first leap in Olympic women’s figure skating.

An Australian short-track speedskater, the last one standing, slaloms past fallen opponents near the finish line to bolt from last to first to win his country’s first Winter Olympic gold medal.

An American speedskater, unsure she can compete at all with her training ruined by an untimely bout of mononucleosis, wins a gold medal and sets a world record.

And with one day to go in these Winter Olympics, despite bickering over judging and the threat of protests, organizers of these Games can say they have nearly completed their own comeback.

Rebounding from a bid scandal that threatened its ability to be host, the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee has put on an immaculately organized Winter Games, renewing hopes the Olympics will soon return to the United States.

Four U.S. cities are vying for the 2012 Summer Games: New York, San Francisco, Houston and Washington. Success here, U.S. Olympic Committee President Sandra Baldwin said, “greatly improves the opportunity for the United States to win the bid in 2012.”

Barring an incident today, these Games--played amid unprecedented security--are already being seen in influential Olympic circles as having redeemed the U.S. as hosts after the problem-plagued Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996.

Privately, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge has told colleagues that Salt Lake produced the best-ever Winter Olympics.

Rogge said Saturday that the Games had been “absolutely fantastic,” adding: “Transport worked. Technology worked. Security was not too heavy. There were warm crowds. . . . Tonight I am a happy man.”

The U.S. Olympic Committee is happy too, thanks to its own impressive comeback.

U.S. athletes hit bottom 14 years ago by fielding a team that won only six medals during the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. But after an all-out effort to become a winter sports superpower, the USOC is making headway in its central mission: training and supporting athletes.

Heading into the final day of competition, U.S. athletes have won a record 33 medals, including 10 gold; the U.S. team’s previous high medal count was 13, in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 and in Nagano, Japan, in 1998.

The U.S. resurgence can be traced to Calgary, where a special commission headed by New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner was appointed. Its obvious conclusion: It takes money and commitment to win medals.

In the last four years alone, the USOC has poured $40 million into its “Podium Program.” Among the investments: heart-rate monitors for the top speedskaters, a sports psychologist for the women’s hockey team, premiums for athletes’ health insurance and stipends.

USOC officials were confident of a record medal count, predicting months before the Games that the U.S. would win at least 20.

“After 25 years of struggling to find the best way to fund our sports, we’ve found a method that really works,” Baldwin said.

For the first time, U.S. Winter Games medalists came from all corners of the nation--and diverse ethnic backgrounds. There was speedskater Jennifer Rodriguez, the daughter of Cuban refugees, twice winning bronze. Speedskater Derek Parra and bobsledder Vonetta Flowers both became firsts to win Winter Games gold: Parra the first Mexican American, Flowers the first African American.

As expected, crowds cheered wildly for American winners, launching into the familiar roar of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” for the likes of Jim Shea Jr., a third-generation Olympian, who won the skeleton race Wednesday by careening down the icy bobsled course at speeds approaching 80 mph.

But the crowds also enthusiastically greeted athletes from all over the world. Their appreciation showed through with loud applause for the stunning victory in the quarterfinal round of men’s hockey by underdog Belarus over Sweden. Athletes from Iran, one of the three nations identified by President Bush last month in his State of the Union speech as an “axis of evil,” were warmly received.

Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said, “I hoped we would have really good Games, but in some respects, they were great Games in that the Games brought the Olympic spirit to the front.

“The way the spectators cheered the athletes of the world--that was very touching.”

Of course, not everyone was as impressed with the North American hospitality. The Cold War--another comeback?--was revived, at least in the world of sports.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, a sports fan who was watching closely from Moscow, called the Games “a flop.” He charged that North American athletes had a “clear” advantage at the Games and protested what he viewed as “excessive commercialization of the Olympic movement,” U.S. media bias and the use of referees from the National Hockey League--as opposed to Europeans--at hockey matches.

The Russian rhetoric was sharp. Various sporting and political officials used words such as “sick,” “witch hunt” and “disgusting” to describe refereeing at the Games, and the threat was made that Russia might pull out of the final few events of the Games.

It remained unclear whether the Russians were sincere in their threat to leave, whether they were trying to influence judges in other events or simply trying to deflect criticism of a subpar performance.

Russia later announced it wouldn’t boycott, but only after Rogge, a Belgian elected last July to an eight-year term as IOC president, indicated Thursday that there was no concerted campaign against Russian interests. Still, he sent an explanatory letter to Putin.

Russian athletes, who as recently as 1994 won 23 medals, have only 15 heading into today.

“Yes, we had controversies,” Rogge said. “The Games carry so many emotions, they’re almost unavoidable. And they’re part of the charm of the Games.”

Overall, the Salt Lake City Games received high marks.

Bob Barney, director emeritus of the Center for Olympic Studies at Canada’s University of Western Ontario, said the Games have “graphically shown how the Olympic movement, the Olympic Games, when successfully executed, remain a celebration of achievement.”

Perhaps most important, according to Barney and other experts, these Games also offered an affirmation of the Olympic ideal--a reminder of how, when the spotlight does turn to the athletes, the Games still retain the power to eclipse impressions of scandal or corruption and supersede reports of the billions of dollars it takes from government or business interests to stage the Games.

Consider the unrestrained glee of the medal winners in the men’s skeleton sledding race--America’s Shea, Austria’s Martin Rettl and Switzerland’s Gregor Staehli, longtime friends who embraced repeatedly and said they were “family.”

Shea said a few minutes after the race, “Everybody puts all this emphasis on winning gold medals and the medal count, beating other countries. That’s not what the Olympics is all about. It’s about competing and bringing the world together in a peaceful, friendly competition.”

The Salt Lake Games were the first large-scale gathering of nations since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here to compete were about 2,500 athletes from 77 nations.

About 72 million viewers in the United States watched the Feb. 8 opening ceremony on NBC; an incredible silence and stillness descended that night on Rice-Eccles Stadium as the tattered flag recovered from the World Trade Center site was carried in. According to NBC, 79 million viewers--one-quarter of the U.S. population--tuned in to the women’s figure skating finale Thursday night.

Barney said that such numbers are an indication of “the power of the Games,” particularly “in terms of turning people’s minds to a much more optimistic mode than they were when they emerged from Sept. 11.

The security arrangement--including F-16s routinely patrolling the skies and armed National Guard troopers standing outside the Olympic venues--were a combined federal, state and local effort overseen by the U.S. Secret Service. Security was intensified after Sept. 11, buttressed by an added $55 million in federal funding. Total security costs amounted to $310 million, $240 million from the U.S. government.

There have been no major incidents.

“Everything we planned, before and after Sept. 11, worked,” said David Tubbs, director of the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command.

Potential problems with traffic and technology also failed to materialize.

Things worked so well that a daily “coordination meeting,” a 5 p.m. meeting of senior IOC and SLOC officials to hash out what was going wrong, increasingly saw the agenda dwindling. One session lasted only 14 minutes. Then, for most of last week, the meetings were simply canceled.

For many, the Olympic spirit in this country was best presented in Los Angeles and now.

Rich Perelman of Los Angeles, press chief for the 1984 L.A. Games who served here as venue chief at Utah Olympic Park, site of the bobsled track, said, “I came here trying to make these Games as good as possible in our home country, to impart the thought that when we organize Games in this country, we do it like they were done in Los Angeles and Salt Lake, not like Atlanta.”

Carrard, the IOC’s director general, observed: “Perfect success of the Olympic Games is of course a perfect organization, perfect people, volunteers, wonderful athletes, luck with weather and many medals for the home team.

“But you have to be good and be lucky for that.”

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Times staff writer Julie Cart contributed to this report.