Where Are the Winter Olympic Athletes in '06?

Last nite while getting a very late-nite snack, I sat down to view our early-morning Winter Olympic events in Torino and was horrified when I saw something that should be every athlete's nightmare.

In a quick dash to the finish line and a very solid gold medal, world-class snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis decides to showboat, crashes ass-ver-teakettle and ends up with the silver medal in the only Winter Olympics to be held this year. While you might think that this is the most horrifying part of the incident, you're wrong.

The truly horrifying event?

Fellow snowboard Olympian, gold medal winner Seth Wescott insisting that "Jacobellis did nothing wrong. By nature, snowboarders are show-offs. It is what they do."

I am stunned - can we, just for two weeks while they travel overseas to a foreign country, put aside the show-off dunderheadedness as they represent our country in games where there is one chance for 1st place?

Where are the Winter Olympic athletes that had previously heralded greatness in the past? Scott Hamilton, Eric Heiden, Kristi Yamagucci, Tara Lipinski, Mike Eruzione -- All have more heart and true olympic spirit in their little fingers than any of the people at this years' games and I simply don't get it, folks. For many of them, this is it - this is the one chance they'll get and it just gets put into a bucket to collect the entrails spilled while showboating, recovering from "a hard nite's drinking" and in-fighting with teammates.

Horrifying.