Backstory: Time to Turin out the lights

The closing ceremonies now concluded, I share with you the unabridged rules of the 20th Winter Olympiad: • Love every athlete equally. If you go to an event to watch a particular competitor or, heaven forbid, to root for them, that athlete will invariably crash or finish 67th.

• Never trust the signs in bus windows. Always repeat the name of where you think you are going to the bus driver. If he agrees or gives some manner of response that could be taken to mean "yes," get a second opinion.

• The people in the NBC jackets are probably prettier than you.

• The phrase: "I don't know Italian," or even "Non parlo italiano," has no effect whatsoever. Whoever is speaking will continue as before, gesturing wildly.

• Today will be gray outside. Tomorrow will be gray. Next week will be gray.

They are hard-learned lessons from the vain attempt to cover an Olympics at a time before cloning is available in a take-home kit. I have been from Pragelato to the Palavela, from Sestriere to San Sicario, and the overwhelming memory I have of these Olympics is that I have no overwhelming memory. All we in the American media hear over here is that no one is watching stateside. Perhaps you feel the same. In an Olympics that has claimed "Passion lives here," there has been a notable lack of it.

Like Salt Lake and Athens, Turin was supposed to have something to prove in these Games: that the city was more than its dour reputation suggested. Indeed it is, notwithstanding the drab winter weather. No one who has walked through its piazzas, overlain by centuries of ornamentation to resemble an enormous wedding cake, could begrudge Turin its beauty. But in the end, Turin seems content with what it is, thank you. So the excitement of holding the Games never quite kindled.

That's not to say this has been a bad Olympics. The competition has, at times, been spectacular. My Olympics is a collage of more intimate images - some as ecstatic as short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno's smile as he crossed the line first in the 500 meters, some as infuriating as a Bode Miller slalom run.

It is a rule of the Games that wherever you happen to be, something terribly interesting is happening somewhere else - probably the place you decided against going that morning.

But that's the thing about the Olympics. If, for a moment, you can forget where you come from, and simply watch a race as if nations meant nothing, you can slip into the sublime anywhere. Watch the Austrians come down a hill that was designed as a torture chamber tilted to 40 degrees. Watch the Koreans flow like water through cracks in a wall of short-track skaters. Watch the Dutch skaters, mouths wide, sucking air like a jet intake. And you're never in the wrong place.

That's good, because it was often difficult to figure out where you actually were. According to every piece of literature I know, the events in the Alps were held at one of five venues: Sestriere, Pragelato, Cesana, Bardonecchia, or Sauze d'Oulx. That was hard enough to remember. Bardonecchia sounds like an omelet on the menu at the Four Seasons. Sauze d'Oulx has a "z" and an "x." What is this, Bosnia?

Then a bus turns up with a sign that says Rivet. Huh? Rivet, I have come to believe, is actually Pragelato, though no one ever told me this. Likewise, Bardonecchia for some reason becomes Melezet, and Sauze d'Oulx is Piazza del Mercato. Confused yet? Exactly.

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