Pain? Sure, they know pain.
They spent the past four years rising at first light to wring tubs of sweat from their souls, worked nights to put gas in the car, willed their wounded bodies well past the breakdown point.
They circled Italy on a map. They tacked February 2006 to a wall. They trained into exhaustion, lived on the cheap and played hurt – one with a crumbled collarbone, one with an ankle tendon so raw it snapped free whenever she skated.
But this ache? This one runs a little deeper.
As 211 American athletes this week trade goodbye hugs for dorm rooms in a foreign land, dozens of other U.S. skaters, snowboarders, sliders and skiers are watching with a wince. They came so close in their qualifying events – just splinters of seconds, bits of inches from a dream. But they fell 5,000 miles short of Italy.
“As an Olympian, you work four years for those two weeks,” said Cammi Granato, a two-time women’s hockey medalist who was cut from the 2006 squad. “In my sport, we don’t get a full season. We don’t get playoffs. You get your little cookie every four years.
“For me, personally, it’s the biggest blow.”
Now, as America readies to soak in the Olympic moment, these U.S. athletes face some choices. Do they lock themselves in the gym and reel off fresh reps with 2010 in their heads? Or do they temporarily turn their backs and make like Hermann Maier? When a motorcycle accident mangled Maier’s leg and knocked the Austrian alpine legend out of the 2002 Winter Games, he flew to a beach in the Bahamas just so he could avoid glimpsing any TV coverage of the ski racing in Utah.
Short-track speedskater Brigid Farrell will tap that don’t- peek strategy.
“I’m definitely not going to cuddle up with popcorn and a blanket to watch the opening ceremonies,” she said. “It would be too hard.”
It’s a precious moment – the athlete parade, the national flags, the eyes of the world – that gave Farrell chills whenever it flashed in her head the past four years. The image sometimes wormed into her thoughts as she pumped weights at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, or when she stocked shelves at the nearby Home Depot.
But in mid-December, when it came time to make the U.S. short-track team, Farrell’s ankle tendon was so raw it often popped free and slid over her bone as she pushed off to start a race. She skated anyway.
In her final heat at the Olympic trials in Marquette, Mich., Farrell fell after tangling with a teammate. Her face pale and her jaw clenched, she stood and finished well behind the lead pack. She quietly returned to the locker room, sat on the floor and began grinding finer edges on her blades.
“I’m going to put my skates away for a couple of months,” she said at the time. “I want them to be sharp when I take them out.”
Then she packed her gear, left the arena and soon drove to upstate New York to enroll at Cornell University. That’s where she’ll spend the two-week Olympic stretch, studying economics, marketing and statistics. Today, she wears a soft cast on her bad ankle, waiting for the swelling to reduce, and wondering if her skating hunger will return.
“It’s going to be hard to watch the (short track) relay events because that’s where I think I could have been, where I should have been if I had a healthy season,” said Farrell, 24. “But I’ll definitely watch it.”
For other world-class athletes stranded on home soil, solace is found in the Colorado fluffy stuff. Chris Klug, who survived a 2000 liver transplant to win snowboarding bronze at Salt Lake, was bumped off the Turin-bound team after a World Cup season that included his recovery from a shattered collarbone and two finishes out of the top 10. Klug asked an arbitrator to reconsider his exclusion, but he lost that bid. Last week, he was rocketing down an Aspen mountain.
“I’m just heartbroken right now, there’s no doubt about it. So I’m out riding powder every day,” Klug said. “It’s the best therapy I know of.”
No matter how many runs he makes on his freestyle board, laughing with his Aspen friends, Klug can’t shake one irony, though. He qualified for the Salt Lake Games while competing on what would become the 2006 Olympic snowboarding hill in Bardonecchia, Italy. From that spot, he called his father with the news.
“Hey! We’re coming back here in four years!” Klug told him, before returning to Utah to win a bronze medal.
“So, yeah,” Klug said, “I’ve looked forward to that for a lot of years. But you know, I almost died while waiting for a liver transplant. Once you’ve been through that, (this is) small. But nonetheless, it’s hard.”
Klug plans to fly to Italy during the first week of the Games to lend his voice and wit to TV broadcasts of the snowboarding events.
“My dream was to compete. Now I’m going to be standing there, holding a microphone.”
It will be a full-body challenge, Klug admitted, to drench himself in the sounds and smells of the moment, but not the action – to talk about the thrill of the ride but not feel the rush. Granato, soul of the U.S. women’s hockey team for a generation, is trying that same hands-on approach to fill the void in her world. She will offer on-air analysis of her former teammates’ play from an NBC studio in Turin.
“I’m not putting any thoughts into my head about how I will feel when I’m over there,” said Granato, who helped earn gold and silver for Team USA in 1998 and 2002 before being unexpectedly cut last summer. “I’ll just try my best. There will be times when it’s not easy, I know.”
Will her NBC work include an interview with head U.S. coach Ben Smith – the man who dumped Granato from his hockey roster?
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll be covering the team.”
Besides, if she were to share an on-camera moment with Smith, it wouldn’t make for good television, Granato said.
“No,” she said with a laugh, “I don’t think anyone would want to see that.”
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
