Backstory: Time to Turin out the lights

The bus line numbers don't help either: OFM2, MC8, DOM7. They were apparently designed by the same person who thought up the Dewey decimal system.

Yet there is an Olympic lesson to learn from all of this: Patience. Only slumped in the seat of a bus can you snake your way along cliff railings to Sestriere amid trees frosted by fresh snow. Only along the highway of the Susa Valley do you see the broken ruins of an ancient past perched high on hillsides, lit in the night like amber jewels against the black bulk of the Alps beyond. They are views NBC cannot approximate.

The athletes know the value of patience. When we have to wait three minutes to cross the street, we scale fences to escape the cruel fate of an orderly queue. They have to wait four years.

And what of the events themselves? Don't be fooled: Speed skating doesn't just take a few minutes between curling and ice hockey. That's the miracle of television. Speed skating is an hours-long slog through dozens of racers who have a greater chance of becoming president of Burundi than winning a medal. Then at last, you arrive at the business end of the program.

For the festive Dutch fans, who made the Olympic oval the one can't-miss place to be in Turin, each skater is a celebration, every turn is a brushstroke of brilliance. "We like the beauty of the sport," says Gerald Bakker, a lawyer who came here from the Netherlands with nine colleagues to play music at every speed-skating event. "We believe in making a good atmosphere."

For American journalists, though, it can apparently take a toll. Overheard in the press tribune at the speed-skating venue: "It's the trash event of speed skating - not to be redundant."

Surely, those thoughts linger on the fringes of many American minds. Sports like biathlon and Nordic combined were dreamed up by Norwegians who doubtlessly wear horned helmets to work and have reindeer as pets, right? That puts those events on a rough par with the Greater Milwaukee Clogging Championship.

But patience can be a good thing. Only by sitting and watching all of speed skating's 10,000 meter race does it become a natural crescendo, not needing profiles or highlights to give it weight. It rises with the anticipation of the crowd. It is a race played in agonizing slow motion, where you can't fast forward to the payoff but are made to sit through the mounting fatigue of every shortening stride.

How did Chad Hedrick hold off Carl Verheijen to win silver in the race, when Verheijen was closing as if reeling him in with hook and rod? Hedrick pointed to his heart. It was a little flash from the American famous for a little too much of it. But this time was different. It was true.

This was a very different Hedrick from the one so eager to take shots at his teammate, Shani Davis, for not skating the team event. If not a contrite, this was a wiser Hedrick, at least. So dismissive of bronze a few days earlier, he embraced his silver - and his competitors.

This may be the Olympics America says it cares about - the Olympics not for the sports but for the ideal that underlies them. In short, the Olympics that dare us all to be better people. So I'll remember the day Hedrick won silver, and smiled.

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