Olympic agony
THE WINTER Olympics are over, and some callous sports commentators have labeled the games a letdown, the United States having sent its team to Turin dreaming of a bountiful harvest of gold, only to see them cast more in silver and bronze.
Give them a break! It's amazing that the American athletes were able to compete at all. Watching NBC's coverage, a TV viewer couldn't help but be moved to tears at the travails they had faced. As the network told it, demons almost beyond enumeration -- eating disorders, divorce, disappointment, despair, doubt, and dissension, to canvass the curses of a single letter -- had stalked them with the tenacity of meter maids, awaiting only the right moment to pounce. (And that's to say nothing of malfunctioning iPods, lost luggage, and sketchy cellphone reception.)
Then, of course, there was the haunting specter of previous failures, like skater Apolo Anton Ohno's spinout in Salt Lake City, that had left our competitors in a feverish four-year quest for redemption.
Just when one found himself wondering how anyone could stand the pressure, there was the inconvenient presence of someone who thought he had nothing to prove, in the person of Bode Miller, who seems to have been beset with the medieval malady of accidie. Once known as the monk's disease, that sad loss of vocation is the same sort of spiritual lassitude that overcame the Red Sox's Theo Epstein last year.
Thankfully, Theo has recovered. Bode, however, appears unlikely to get his motivational mojo back. A Gen X Achilles sulking in his RV, he found that the allure of Olympic laurels paled before the attraction of Olympian partying. No matter, for Bode is standing proudly on the podium of his own imagination.
''If things went well, I could be sitting on four medals, maybe all of them gold," he opined after his fourth failed race. Bode generally proved press averse, but fortunately,
That most un-NBC of athletes, Bode was alone in adopting solipsistic indifference as his Olympic ethic. But others seemed put off by the story line NBC pressed upon them.
When speed skater Shani Davis was asked about how he felt as the first African-American to win an individual Winter Olympics gold, his response was so unenthusiastic as to lead one to suspect he felt his triumph was noteworthy regardless of his race.
Certainly athletes from other countries, less accustomed to the tropes of America's therapeutic culture, found queries rife with themes of redemption and hardships conquered beside the point. Coaxed about the obstacles she had overcome, Croatian skier Janica Kostelic had the temerity to tell NBC she really didn't like talking about herself. And when Austrian skiing sensation Hermann Maierwas asked how it felt to win an Olympic medal so many years after his first, he replied: ''I don't know. I just love the sport."
Occasionally an unwitting American competitor seemed to want to enjoy the moment the same way. Take snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis. After opening a big lead in the women's snowboard cross, she reached down to grab her board as she soared through the second-to-last jump on the course. Alas, that hot-dogging led to a fall, which let Switzerland's Tanja Frieden zip by for the gold.
''I was caught up in the moment," Jacobellis confessed later. ''I messed up. It happens."
Rather than being crestfallen, however, Jacobellis seemed satisfied with silver.
''I was having fun," she said.
Fun? Poor, silly, deluded Lindsey. Doesn't she know that that moment is destined to haunt her every waking hour for the next four years, that she must obsess about it like Ahab until she has a chance to redeem herself in Vancouver in 2010? Well, whether she realizes it or not, if she competes again, there's no doubt NBC will make that the story -line next time around.
Now, a true sports fan might say that the Olympics are exciting enough without forever gilding the lily.
What a naive notion! As NBC showed us time and again, when it comes to network television, there's simply no drama like melodrama.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com 
