For Bloom, This Is the First Half

To Jeremy Bloom, pressure means playing football in a sold-out stadium, dropping back to field a punt.

Pressure means heading for the NFL combine in Indianapolis later this month in hopes of impressing league scouts enough to get selected in the draft.

So where does that leave Bloom’s other sport? What about the Winter Olympics and today’s final in the men’s moguls?

“There’s not much like returning a punt,” he said. “No one’s running to take my head off.”

If he sounds homesick for football, it might be because the former star receiver and returner at the University of Colorado has spent the last two years devoted solely to freestyle skiing, winning a 2005 World Cup championship and pointing toward a second try at the Olympics.

His story is well known -- he had to choose between sports when the NCAA refused to let him take endorsement money to fund his skiing. Now comes the moment when two years of focus could pay off, though Bloom is nowhere close to an odds-on favorite.

Dale Begg-Smith, a Canadian who switched allegiances to Australia five years ago, has a very good shot at winning. Defending gold medalist Janne Lahtela of Finland and Toby Dawson, Bloom’s teammate, should also be in the running.

Begg-Smith won three consecutive World Cup events last month and is second in the standings.

“I’m feeling no pressure,” he said upon his arrival in Italy. “I’m relaxed and feeling good.”

Today’s race will be run at Sauze d’Oulx, in the mountains about an hour outside Turin, at a site known to be challenging.

On the first night of the Games, the American women were shut out of the medals and said the snow was firm and fast.

The moguls competition consists of a bumpy hill divided by two “kickers” -- short ramps off which racers launch themselves into twisting, flipping aerial maneuvers.

Fifty percent of the scoring is based on how gracefully they negotiate the moguls. The aerials account for 25%, and overall time from top to bottom determines the remaining 25%.

It is a daring, bone-jarring event and the racers have only one run in the final, so Bloom finds reason to draw at least one parallel to football.

“The pressure that goes along with playing college football is helpful in preparing for this,” he said.

A bronze medalist at the 2000 Junior World Championships while still a teenager, the Colorado native was simultaneously starring as an all-state receiver at Loveland High.

Colorado offered him a football scholarship, which he put on hold for a year to prepare for the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. The interruption did not slow him on the field. He returned a punt 75 yards for a touchdown in his first game and made freshman All-American for the 2002 season.

But his college career lasted only two seasons. In 2004, Bloom took sponsor money to defray the cost of training and competing as a skier. The NCAA declared him ineligible and he lost a legal effort to overturn the decision.

If nothing else, the situation forced him to concentrate on moguls, and he won a record six consecutive World Cup events and finished as the overall champion in 2005.

At the same time, he was modeling for Abercrombie & Fitch and GQ magazine, appearing in a Warren Miller ski film and giving countless interviews.

“Someone has to do it,” Olympic teammate Travis Cabral said. “I’m glad it’s him.”

Which now lands Bloom in Turin as a very public figure.

A victory would avenge a disappointing ninth-place finish at Salt Lake City. But if football is his first love -- “Putting my heart and passion into something that, in my opinion, was taken away from me,” he said -- then coming to Turin could be costly.

Competing in the Games puts him on a tight schedule with the football combine looming Feb. 22. That doesn’t allow much time to return to the United States and get back into receiver shape.

It seems the chance to march in another opening ceremony and try for a medal was incentive enough to put up with a hassle of trans-Atlantic proportions.

Besides, he said, “two-time Olympian sounds cool next to my name.”

Maybe even as cool as NFL receiver.