USOC keeps athletes in the workforce

After losing Home Depot last week, the US Olympic Committee is hoping to get one or more of its other sponsors to hire athletes as a way of providing additional subsidies.

For the last 16 years, the home improvement company paid full-time wages for part-time work to more than 600 elite athletes such as Olympic rowing medalist Michelle Guerette, who relied on those paychecks for the bulk of their living expenses. While the jobs still will be available, they'll be at straight-time levels. To make up the difference for the nearly 90 athletes currently in the program, the USOC will provide stipends plus health insurance.

Though Home Depot received a ton of publicity for the program (imagine Olympic speedskating champ Derek Parra selling you flooring), its recent revenues have sagged. General Motors, which had been a sponsor since 1984, also dropped out.

Still, the USOC, which yesterday named former IBM and NFL executive Lisa Baird as its chief marketing officer, is in good shape for the next quadrennium. The committee, which will be getting $225 million as its share of NBC's television rights for the 2010 and 2012 Games, has re-signed 16 sponsors and still is negotiating extensions with AT&T and Bank of America.

"Given the state of the economy," said spokesman Darryl Seibel, "we feel good about where we are."

Though the Olympic cyclists whom he upbraided for jokingly wearing pollution masks at the Beijing airport won't miss him, the departure of sports performance chief Steve Roush last week is a big blow to the USOC. Roush played a huge role in developing elite athletes by systematically linking financial support to both potential and progress and by funneling cash to the sports most likely to produce medals. It was no accident that the Americans had their best showing at an overseas Winter Games (25 medals) in Turin and their best at a non-boycotted Summer Olympics (110) in Beijing . . . The Olympic doping lab didn't close when the flame went out in Beijing last summer. The World Anti-Doping Agency is testing another 500 samples this month, primarily from cyclists, runners, swimmers, and rowers, looking for evidence of CERA, the new variation on blood-boosting EPO, and insulin, which can be used to enhance anabolic drugs. CERA was the drug du jour at last year's Tour de France, where four cyclists turned up positive for it, and 80 percent of the new tests will check for it. The WADA, meanwhile, has broadened its four-year ban to include athletes who are part of large doping schemes like BALCO, who take multiple drugs, or who use deceptive or obstructive methods to avoid detection. The agency also is requiring athletes to be far more specific as to their whereabouts ("running in the Black Forest" won't be good enough) and to provide a 60-minute daily window between 6 a.m.-11 p.m. when they can be tested.

With five-time dance titlists Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto withdrawing from next week's US Figure Skating Championships because of Agosto's back ailment, the door is open for Michigan undergrads Meryl Davis and Charlie White to inherit the crown. They've been tapped as the Next Couple ever since they jumped directly from juniors to the senior podium two years ago. Belbin and Agosto, who have won three global medals plus the Olympic silver, likely will be granted a place on the team for the March World Championships in Los Angeles, where the per-country Olympic spots will be determined . . . Barring a late-season surge, odds are that Bode Miller will be dethroned as men's World Cup skiing champ. After a bumpy first half (two podiums, seven DNFs, and a DQ in 17 starts), Miller has slumped to 11th in the standings, more than 200 points behind Austrian leader Benjamin Raich. Though she's in third place behind Germany's Maria Riesch and Finland's Tanja Poutiainen, Lindsey Vonn still has a good chance to retain her title with a bunch of speed races on the horizon. "It will be pretty hard for me to keep in touch with Lindsey," concedes Riesch, who has won four straight slaloms. If Riesch wins the next one, she will tie Sweden's Anja Paerson for most consecutive victories in a discipline . . . Great leap forward in Austria last weekend by Nick Fairall, whose 23d place in ski flying was the best US effort in five seasons. Fairall, a 19-year-old from Andover, N.H., could be the man to get the American jumpers back on the map after years of coming up short.

Uncle Sam's snowboarders have a good chance at multiple medals at this week's World Championships in South Korea, where Lindsey Jacobellis is favored to retain her women's snowboardcross crown and Olympic champ Seth Wescott and Nate Holland both could make the men's podium again. Good chance, too, for Sudbury native Michelle Gorgone in parallel giant slalom. She already has three top-five World Cup finishes this season, the best start of her career . . . South Korea's Lee Kyu Hyuk will be gunning for his third straight men's title at this weekend's World Sprint Speedskating Championships in Moscow. Nobody has managed that since Igor Zhelezovski, who won his for three different countries - Soviet Union (1991), Commonwealth of Independent States (1992), and Belarus (1993). Shani Davis, who won the bronze two years ago, and Tucker Fredricks are the US entrants. Germany's Jenny Wolf will be defending her women's crown, with former champion Jennifer Rodriguez and Heather Richardson skating for the Yanks . . . The US luge team for this month's World Cup events can fit into a compact car. With the Americans so far failing to make a podium for the second season in a row, the entrants have been reduced to Erin Hamlin, Bengt Walden, and the double of Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin. (Christian Niccum and Dan Joye opted out after Joye's wife gave birth two months early.) Since next month's World Championships will be in Lake Placid, it makes sense for the other sliders to stay and practice on home ice.

Huge World Cup victory last weekend for US bobsledder Shauna Rohbock, who knocked off Olympic and world champion Sandra Kiriasis of Germany on the Koenigssee track that Kiriasis knows by heart. The triumph, Rohbock's first in two seasons, moved her into second behind Kiriasis in the women's overall standings. Meanwhile, Todd Hays's comeback is going quite well. After taking two seasons off after the Olympics, Hays is in fourth place in the men's standings and has a shot at a medal at next month's World Championships on familiar ice at Lake Placid . . . Sluggish season so far for the US skeleton sledders. Katie Uhlaender, the defending women's World Cup champion, is fifth in the standings, hasn't won a medal, and had her worst finish in three years (11th) last weekend in Germany. Noelle Pikus-Pace, the former global champ who is coming off a year's maternity absence, is eighth overall, with just one finish better than ninth. "I didn't think it would be this hard to get back into competitive mode," she said. The women still are faring better than the US males, who have nobody in the top 10.

With the World Cup biathlon season nearing the midway point, two unexpected names - Poland's Tomasz Sikora and Russia's Svetlana Sleptsova - are leading the overall standings, with the defending champions - Norway's Ole Einar Bjoerndalen and Germany's Magdalena Neuner - both in fourth place. Quiet season so far on the American side, where Jay Hakkinen is top performer in 31st . . . Pia Sundhage's retention as US women's soccer coach for another quadrennium capped a remarkable year for the Americans that included a best-ever 33-1-2 mark and an unlikely Olympic crown. Her team plan for the next four years: "Being even more unpredictable, playing more beautiful soccer, and scoring more goals." . . . Most unwelcome news on swim coach Richard Quick, who has an inoperable brain tumor. The 65-year-old Quick, who has stepped down from his job at Auburn, was either head or assistant coach of every US Olympic team from 1984 through 2004 and won a dozen NCAA titles at Texas and Stanford.

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com; material from Olympic committees, sports federations, interviews, and wire services was used in this report.