In Love With an Old Flame

In Chicago, the Olympic people are bickering.

Here, they are shivering.

It is dark, freezing, no place to sit, yet thousands are pressed together in a park behind Rice-Eccles Stadium.

In front of them, the Olympic caldron is being lit in honor of the one-year anniversary of Salt Lake City’s hosting of the Winter Games.

Around them, finger-sized flashlights wave tiny beams through the blackness.

Above them, the sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir echo with the Olympic theme.

Among them, a neighbor cries.

“To think about what this all means, it’s still amazing,” said Cathy Jones, a nurse from the suburbs. “To hear that song and think of how it felt around here last year, it still tears my heart out.”

In Chicago, and everywhere else the U.S. Olympic Committee has been embarrassing itself in recent months, the people have no clue.

Here, they understand perfectly.

The Olympics are not about a blazer, or a budget, or USOC blowhards who routinely abuse both.

The Olympics are about what a woman described Friday night as she stood on a sidewalk after a parade commemorating an event that ended nearly a year ago.

“You know what it is?” asked Sandi Aloia, patting her parka-covered chest with her glove. “It’s about what’s in here. It’s about remembering the feeling.”

That spirit is the true Olympic legacy, even if you can’t wear it like a medal or touch it like a monument.

That spirit drew the locals together this weekend, around sidewalk fire pits and in front of hot chocolate stands, talking and remembering and understanding.

They were brought together Saturday night for an anniversary ceremony that was nearly as emotional as the real thing, adults hugging and dancing and bouncing their children on their shoulders in the sub-freezing weather.

“I know we don’t look much different,” said Laura Moore, a volunteer. “But inside, in little ways, we are different.”

On the surface, indeed, the Olympics changed this city as much as a skier changes a mountain.

The athlete-adorned banners majestically draped across the sides of buildings have been replaced by signs reading, “For Lease.”

“Those buildings look undressed,” said Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the former Salt Lake City Olympic boss who dropped in town for a visit. “They’re now just buildings.”

The downtown medals plaza that used to be Olympic paradise is again a parking lot, five bucks a day.

Where Sarah Hughes made folks cry, now Karl Malone makes folks wince.

The opening ceremony venue is once again a college football field.

The curling sheet is still used for curling -- but only twice a week, having long since been overtaken by ice skaters.

Even the lights for the five rings that blazed on the side of the Wasatch mountains have been dismantled and given to a smaller Utah city whose Christmas lights were stolen.

“One of the problems we had all summer, people would come to our visitors’ centers and ask, ‘Where can I see the Olympics?’ ” said Spence Kinard, assistant director of the Utah Travel Council. “There was this mild frustration at not being able to touch anything.”

Even when you can touch, the feel is uncertain, the setting unreal.

As part of this weekend’s anniversary celebration, organizers unveiled a granite wall containing the names of 28,000 Olympic volunteers.

Smack in the middle of a shopping plaza.

The workers will forever be remembered between the ampersand twins of Barnes & Noble and Ben & Jerry’s.

It was as if the Olympics, after scorching this city for 17 days last year, had simply peeled away like a bad sunburn.

(Of course, this meant Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic had finally shut up, and David Pelletier and Jamie Sale had finally disappeared, so it wasn’t all bad.)

“The first time I went downtown after the games ended, everything was so flat,” recalled speedskater Becky Sundstrom, one of several Olympic athletes who live near here. “It was like going downstairs the morning after a party -- everything looked so different, you realized it was over.”

But is it over?

At the Soldier Hollow cross-country ski venue about a hour outside of town, there was Tyler Harvey, a 14-year-old boy whose hero is not Michael Jordan but Bjorn Daehlie, a Norwegian cross-country skier.

Harvey is one of dozens of kids who began cross-country skiing because of the Olympics. They filled the lodge on this Saturday with the sort of chatter usually heard at skate parks.

“Now that the Olympics are gone, they’re no longer just for the best athletes, but for all of us,” said Howard Peterson, executive director of Soldier Hollow.

Down the road at the Utah Olympic Park, dozens of kids are being taught by resident Jim Shea Jr. at skeleton school -- skeleton school? -- while more than 100 kids are studying ski jumping.

Across the parking lot, about a dozen adults were riding sleds and howling.

What else? Luge fantasy camp.

“All during the Olympics, when the luge came on, I would lie on the carpet and move around like they did,” said Valerie Custer, a Washington lawyer. “This is awesome.”

So in a city where people complain that you can’t touch the Olympics, maybe you can.

You could certainly embrace them Saturday night, where 62-year-old Annette Duke Reid climbed on a fence to take a picture of the flaming caldron. She was several hundred yards away. The camera was focused on the back of someone’s head. She slipped and nearly fell off the fence.

“I don’t care, I had to be here, the Olympics will be in us forever,” she said, hopefully in a voice loud enough to be heard in Chicago.

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