Grand finale

TURIN -- The timing, deliberate or not, was perfetto. The Olympic closing ceremonies were scheduled for 8 o'clock last night. The Juventus soccer match against Lecce went off at 3, so the torinesi didn't have to choose. They could watch their striped-shirted gods perform at the Stadio delle Alpi, make their Sunday passeggiata along the Via Po, have an aperitivo and then head for the Stadio Comunale, where the organizers were staging a carnevale italiano, a Commedia dell'Arte complete with clowns, acrobats, harlequins, and masked figures. It was, said director Daniele Finzi Pasca, a spectacle of ''naive transgression, tipsiness, revelry, tomfoolery."

Ever since this old Savoy capital outbid the Swiss hamlet of Sion seven years ago for this quadrennial February diversion, the Italians weren't quite sure how excited they should be about it. It was the first time the Winter Olympics had been held in this country since 1956, when Cortina d'Ampezzo staged a cozy gathering. Since then, they've grown gargantuan.

These Games were triple the size, with 80 countries, 84 medal events and 2,500 athletes spread among three villages from here to the French border. If there was little sense of cohesion, of communality, the reason was geography. If you were in the city, amid the fog and the drizzle and the occasional sunburst, the skiing events might as well have been in Aspen. If you were in the mountains, figure skating, ice hockey, and speedskating were little more than urban rumors.

Turin's slogan was ''Passion Lives Here," yet these Olympics were notably short on passion, as well as scandal and controversy. There was no Skategate, no short-track brouhahas, and only one positive drug test (a Russian female biathlete), although the Austrian doping investigation, which provoked an unprecedented police search of the Athletes' Village, awaits resolution.

After Salt Lake City, where the dominant mood was tense, somber and, finally, relieved, the world may have been ready for a Games that were merely games. But unless you were a Canadian long-track follower (Cindy Klassen won the most overlooked five medals ever), a Korean short-track fan (Ahn Hyun Soo and Jin Sun Yu will get free kim chi for life), an Austrian ski buff (Michaela Dorfmeister and Benjamin Raich each went twin gold) or a German bobsled fanatic (Andre Lange double-pimped his ride), there was no athlete who bestrode these 17 days like an icy Colossus. The biggest story (or non-story) was Bode Miller, who went 0 for 5 with two DNFs and a DQ and had the time of his life. ''Man, I rocked here," he declared.

These were strange Games for Uncle Sam's side. His nieces and nephews won 25 medals, second to Germany's 29 and nearly double their best previous overseas effort. Yet there still was a sense that the Americans came up short, probably because their hyped hopefuls underachieved. Miller was an embarrassing bust. Michelle Kwan went home after one practice and Sasha Cohen fell down twice. The women's hockey team never got to play the Canadians. Only Apolo Anton Ohno came through, and he waited until the final night.

If you followed current form, though, the rest of the nine gold medals came from predictable places -- from long-track speedskating, from the snowboarders and from Ted Ligety and Julia Mancuso, the two hot Alpine skiers whom nobody outside of the circuit had talked about.

These were the Games of the unexpected victor, which made them a delight for the winter connoisseur who enjoys the whimsical effect that snow and ice has upon the award stand. Shizuka Arakawa was the oldest women's figure skating champion in 86 years and the first from Japan. France's Antoine Deneriaz, the men's downhill champion, hadn't won a World Cup race all season. The Swedes beat the Finns for the men's hockey title. And the Italians won both the men's 1,500 meters in speedskating (Enrico Fabris) and the 50 kilometers in cross-country (Giorgio di Centa). Nobody from Padua to Palermo expected that.

If the Italians didn't mine the usual host motherlode -- their 11 medals were their second-fewest since 1988 -- they set the gold standard for hospitality and helpfulness. No problem was so intricate that it couldn't be solved by a bit of ''arrangiarsi," the art of fixing things on the fly. ''They were Games of heart, of warmth, of smiles and generosity," concluded Jean-Claude Killy, the former Olympic ski champion who was the International Olympic Committee's overseer here. ''It was Italy at its best."

And though it took a while for the torinesi to shed their usual reserve and give the Olympics a full embrace, they had a nightly block party inside the Piazza Castello and stayed up all night on Saturday for one last celebration.

Yet to much of the country, the XXth Giochi Olimpici Invernali were a 17-day curiosity that might as well have been happening in Switzerland. Though the 900,000 tickets sold exceeded the organizers' expectations, there were hundreds of empty seats at most venues. Italy may have gorgeous resorts up north and its share of world-class skiers, skaters, and lugers, but it's not a winter sports country and that wasn't going to change just because the Lords of the Rings arrived with armfuls of skates and skis for a couple of weeks. The Sicilians aren't ever going to get down with short-track.

What endures here, besides the marvelous food and wine and the animated conversation is the soccer. The World Cup is coming up in June and the Azzurri will be putting the citizenry through its usual quadrennial psychodrama. Yesterday evening, the talk around town was of Juventus and its 3-1 trionfo over Lecce, the certainty of winning the Scudetto (the league trophy), and the genius of Alessandro Del Piero, the man with the golden foot.

But when the fireworks lit up the night sky over the Stadio Olympico and the athletes marched in to say arrivederci and di Centa was presented with his gold and the anthem was played, all of Turin gathered up these Games with both arms and threw a farewell party that nobody wanted to leave. Juve may be the Sunday obsession, but in this country, the Olympics are a festa that comes but once every 50 years.