A Toast to a Host With the Most

While waiting for duplicate gold medals to be minted for the 1972 U.S. basketball team (victimized by non-objective timekeepers in Munich) and the 1980 Soviet hockey team (victimized by non-objective American hockey players in Lake Placid), we raise a crumpled McFlurry cup filled with 3.2% beer to toast the people and things that made the Salt Lake Winter Olympics what they were--the only place to be if you wanted to wait six hours in line to buy an overpriced blue beret:

Chris Klug: The living, breathing rebuttal to the “X Games are way more rad than the Olympics” line you often hear from the kids. As part of his preparation for winning a snowboarding bronze medal here, Klug received a liver transplant 18 months ago. It doesn’t get any more extreme than that.

Ross Powers: The Olympic king of big air. Got so high on his winning halfpipe run, flight attendants instructed the audience to return to their seats and stay there 30 minutes before he landed.

Pandora’s Box: Not the name of a Greek bobsled. As we were all unlucky to learn once Olympic officials decided the best way to resolve a figure skating controversy was to treat it like a unruly pub crowd: Gold medals all around!

Apolo Anton Ohno: The Sports Illustrated pre-Games cover boy made fake soul patches the second biggest must-have souvenirs of the Salt Lake Olympics. But if you want to see him cross the finish line first at the Olympics, you’ll have to go to Turin in 2006.

Sarah Hughes: Time magazine put her on its cover before the Games even though conventional wisdom held that if Michelle Kwan or Irina Slutskaya didn’t win the gold medal, Sasha Cohen would. Next time they come calling, I tell you, I’m taking the Time cover over the SI cover.

Michelle Kwan: Remember how dominant she was in 1996, rolling through the sport of women’s figure skating the same way Martina Navratilova terrorized women’s tennis in the ‘80s? Who back then would have dared to make this prediction: Kwan will skate in two Olympics and two other Americans will win the gold medals.

Figure skating coaches: Judging from the evidence at the women’s competition, apparently you need them.

Jamie Sale and David Pelletier: Went from silver to gold faster than Kwan went from gold to bronze. Pioneers of the quad gold-medal ceremony in pairs figure skating. Yet I ask you: Which pair of skaters had the most significant performance for Canada--Sale and Pelletier, or Bezic and Hamilton?

The Olympic Medals Plaza: Where else can you see winning Olympians receive their medals for a second time, followed by international pop music stars jumping hysterically around the stage in order to keep warm? “Who’s that guy bundled up in the parka, mittens, ski mask, scarf and earmuffs up there?” “She’s the lead singer of your favorite band.”

Steven Bradbury: A mastermind in the sport of short-track speedskating, he was well-positioned in the men’s 1,000 final, way behind the pack, waiting patiently for the other four competitors to wipe out so he could cruise home for the gold. My kind of Olympic champion. The wily Aussie is now forever a part of the sporting lexicon: Whenever an athlete succeeds through nothing more than dumb luck, it’s now called “pulling a Bradbury.”

Olympic hockey: If Gary Bettman really wanted to save his league, he’d schedule six months of Olympic hockey every season, then hold a 12-day break every fourth year for NHL hockey. Gary, the choice is yours: USA versus Russia, or the Columbus Blue Jackets against the Nashville Predators.

Herb Brooks: Amazing to report, the old disciplinarian got a little lax here. Won it all with much lesser players the last time around.

Wayne Gretzky: He snubbed Patrick Roy, he left Joe Thornton off the roster, he acted like a crazy man during Team Canada news conferences, he wound up winning the gold medal. He pulled a Bradbury.

Belarus over Sweden in hockey: It shouldn’t happen, here or anywhere, but that’s why they play the games. A nice moment for Mighty Duck Ruslan Salei, the lone NHL player on the Belarus roster, but far too fleeting. For Ruslan, it’s now back to the Arrowhead Gulag of Anaheim.

Skeleton: Competitors say it’s not nearly as dangerous as it looks. Right. They say the same thing about Jell-O salad here.

Ottavio Cinquanta: The Big O, as figure skating reporters called him here. Had the perpetual look of someone in desperate need of something a whole lot stronger than 3.2% beer. But the next Winter Olympics are on his turf, in Turin, Italy. As another embattled ice sport official named Gretzky warned us, there’s payback in this game. And it isn’t going to be pretty.

Picabo Street, Todd Eldredge, Elvis Stojko: Competed here in the Ex-Games.

Apolo, Creed: Two acts who headlined the second week at the Medals Plaza.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann takes up curling.

Sarah! Sarah! Sarah! Kwan’s new nightmare. Replacing her old one: Tara! Tara! Tara!

Downtown proselytizing: On every other corner, you’d find red-cheeked volunteers handing out political or religious pamphlets of some kind. On the others, you’d find Bill Plaschke asking sportswriters for money.

American medal count: An all-time record 34. And it will keep growing as long as they keep adding winter sports Americans dominate. Up for approval in 2006: parallel giant slalom Play Station, men’s 4x5k relay fast-food drive-thru, moguls freestyle corporate downsizing and the Nordic combined couch potato.

Salt Lake City: It wasn’t Sydney, Nagano, Lillehammer, Barcelona, Albertville, Seoul or Los Angeles. But it wasn’t Atlanta, either. In other words, better than any of us arriving here three weeks ago ever could have hoped.