Welcome to Vancouver: Let the Games begin

Now for tourist season to the typical American sports viewer. Not the everyday baseball/football/basketball fare, the Winter Olympics is an excursion through contests

rarely followed - and almost never played - by most U.S. citizens. Bobsled. Curling.

Biathlon. Speedskating. Luge. Aerial skiing.

The dichotomy is that the Winter Olympics, so often dismissed by the hard-core, talk-radio jock culture for not entailing "real" sports, in fact demands an athletic risk management and outright sporting brinkmanship that would scare the pants off most mainstream stars.

Winter Olympic athletes have themselves figuratively shot out of cannons that are ski start houses, bobsled runs, luge and skeleton runs; they careen down mountainsides at more than 80 miles per hour, bound for glory or possibly major injury. They ski to exhaustion through bitter cold white forests, attempt gymnastics above snowy landings or on unforgivingly slippery ice.

Figure skating not a sport? "What's so frustrating?" U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski once grumbled during the 1994 Lillehammer Games, "is that some people say this isn't a sport because we wear fancy outfits. I'd like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eighth-inch blade, and then tell me it's not a sport."

Shauna Rohbock, who had been a soccer star at Brigham Young but turned to the bobsled and will be competing in her second Olympics, described her endeavor this way: "I would think you're OK sending your kid off to a soccer camp, but not a bobsled track. You don't know if they'll come back in one piece."

In Vancouver the next 17 days - as they have been doing since the first Winter Olympics in 1924 - athletes from around the world will take the dare against gravity and the stability of frozen surfaces, providing NBC with a NASCAR element and personal back stories that can be nicely packaged into a soap-opera format.

Most likely to steal the spotlight are a handful of American stars - Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, as 2010's fresh new face, plus familiar names Apolo Ohno in short track speedskating, Shaun White in snowboarding, Shani Davis in long track speedskating, Bode Miller in skiing. Yet they will be topics of conversation only, Jay Leno fill-ins before spring training begins.

Of course, the United States is not a winter-sports nation on the order of Norway or Finland, Austria or Germany. And, over the course of Winter Olympics history, the U.S. has won the medal race only once - when the 1932 Games were held in Lake Placid during the depths of the Depression and only 14 countries participated.

This year, furthermore, Canada has poured enormous resources - including $100 million - into an "Own The Podium" program, confident it finally can wipe out the embarrassment of failing to win a single gold medal in either of its two previously hosted Olympics - the 1976 Montreal Summer Games and 1988 Calgary Winter Games. (Ice hockey success, particularly men's ice hockey, is of momentous importance to Our Neighbors to the North.)

Still, the Yanks are developing a goodly share of daredevils, especially in relatively new disciplines of freestyle skiing and snowboarding. And Vonn has been a revelation in skiing, the most successful American woman the sport ever has seen.

She may have to assume the central television role regularly played by female U.S. figure skaters from the United States, who have not failed to win a medal of some color in 46 years. But this time, neither Racheal Flatt nor Mirai Nagasu is expected to ascend the medals podium.

No matter what, though, high drama and low feelings are sure to be on display.