From Park City to Vancouver: Warming Up for the Winter Games

While the top U.S. Olympians have all touched down in Vancouver, their preparation for the Winter Olympic Games took place in Park City, Utah this past week. The following takes a look at some of their final warmups at Park City and the expectations to come.

Marco Sullivan, right, and Will Brandenburg, left, looked at a row of skis lying in the snow, thinking. Which pair should they try next? They, and the rest of the U.S. men's Olympic alpine team -- Bode Miller, Ted Ligety, Steve Nyman and more -- were testing skis and training on the Olympic giant slalom run. A few miles to the west, three U.S. Olympic teams -- bobsled, skeleton and luge -- were training on the icy sled track, testing runners, amping up their technique. Some 20 miles east of the track, the Nordic combined team practiced on the Olympic cross-country trails.

The Olympic ski run was closed to the public. But word spread. Little kids waited in lines for their heroes, like Bode Miller, to come down to the lift and sign their helmets.

In Vancouver, it was raining and warm; no one was training. But in Utah, site of the 2002 Olympics, American teams got in a last-minute warmup. The reason it was better to train here? The 2010 venues are not in the same good shape as Park City. The altitude in Vancouver is much lower, so the snow is heavier. Weather in the Olympic city is unseasonably warm. Bobsled ice is soft. Any moisture falling is liquid; it's rain, not snow.

Vancouver organizers don't want anyone skiing on the thick wet snow that coats the Olympic ski courses and spraying it away. They want every flake of snow to stay on the hill. They hope it will freeze into something worth racing on. Athletes get limited training runs. But on Wednesday, the first day of the scheduled mandatory training for the downhill race, moisture in the air turned to white-out fog. The training run was canceled after 42 racers, less than half the field, have run.

Just days ago at Park City Mountain Resort, men's alpine head coach Sasha Rearick looked up the hill as his racers zoomed around the gates, testing dozens of pairs of skis to see which ones are the fastest. He praised the resort for working the snow to try and make Utah's fluffy stuff like Vancouver's mashed potatoes.

"Park City Mountain Resort has done a fantastic job of getting the hill prepared as best we can at this altitude," Rearick said. "We're going to compete at the Olympics on different snow, and to make [Utah's] dry snow similar to the snow at Whistler took tremendous effort. We wanted to slow it down, to take the aggressiveness [sharp snow crystals] out of the snow, it was machined and machined."

The new snow in Utah was fast, but the crystals made it kind of grabby. The snow crews watered the snow and rolled it to wear out the sharp edges of the crystals, to make it like the kind of snow the athletes will ski in Vancouver.

The runs were being timed, so the racers could test things as minute as their hand positions or boots buckled one notch tighter. At the top, Ted Ligety snapped down his buckles in an empty start tent before edging up to the start wand.

This was nothing like it will be in Vancouver. There, the goggle rep will be ready to hand Ligety the perfect lens for the way the sun is at the time of his start. Olympic officials will crowd the tent. Racers waiting for their start will be stretching and warming up by swinging their legs. And Ligety's boot tech will fasten his buckles.

Ligety, who grew up on this hill, likes to turn. He says, "If the course is kind of turny, that will help me out. I'm first in the world in giant slalom right now, so I would be disappointed if I didn't win a medal at Whistler [the Vancouver ski and snowboard mountain]."

The downhill is Saturday, and it will be a wild ride for the racers. The ground is still warm, so even with an expected storm and temperature drop, the new snow will be soft. Racers will be running at speeds that would get them busted behind the wheel of a car. Sticky snow may catch at their skis. Soft snow may cause the skis to sink in. There will be a lot of crashes, maybe more than at any other Olympics.

At Park City, over at the bobsled/skeleton/luge track, there was also a casual atmosphere. The U.S. luge Olympians, trying to get a feel for a different track, used the bobsled start instead of their own steeper start.

The chipped practice handles were removed and the bobsleds were brought to the start. Time for runners to be tested. A bobsled has four runners, each about a yard long, which allows the sled to bend around a turn. Different runners are used for different ice conditions. America will have three men's sleds in the Vancouver Games. Mike Kohn, center, did well enough in the final race before the Games to earn a third Olympic slot for the U.S. His push crew, Jamie Moriarty, left and Bill Schuffenhauer, right, are hoping to hit the podium, because this is the last Olympics for each of them.

Meanwhile, skeleton athletes arrived at the track, waiting for their turn to practice. Skeleton pilot Noelle Pikus-Pace grinned and flaunted her red, white and blue-streaked hair.

Noelle has something to prove in Vancouver. She was one of the top skeleton athletes in the world going into the 2006 Turin Games, a medal favorite. But after a training run in Calgary, she was standing at the end of the 1988 Olympic bobsled track. A bobsled driver who really didn't know how to drive a sled -- or stop one -- crashed through the end barrier, smashing more than 800 pounds of metal into Pikus-Pace's leg, severely breaking it.

She tried to compete in a cast, sucking up the pain of running hard on fractured bones. It was no use. No one can run fast with a broken leg, and running the start is the key to the sport. Noelle sat out the 2006 Games. Now she wants the medal she couldn't compete for then.

Zach Lund also has something to prove. He was the top skeleton pilot in the world in 2006 before a doping controversy struck.

At the time, Zach's hair had started to thin. Because he was the top guy in the world in skeleton, photographers were taking lots of pics of him. He hated his receding hairline, and began using a hair restorer. But the hair product contained a substance called finasteride that was on the Olympic banned list; a substance that was not a drug, but a masking agent sometimes used to cover up drug use. It shouldn't have been a big deal, especially since Lund had declared the substance on the form required from all Olympic athletes by drug control.

In other cases like Lund's, the athlete would be warned to stop taking the suspicious product and that would be the end of it. But Lund still believes there was an ulterior motive that led to his suspension.

The head of Olympic doping control in 2006 was Canadian-born Dick Pound, a man who's been called "extreme" in his desire to have Canada win Olympic medals. The only other athlete who could come close to Lund -- and not very close at that -- was a Canadian contender. And with Lund gone, it would clear the way for Canada to win the gold medal in skeleton.

So, after practice, Lund returned to the Olympic Village only to find all his belongings in a heap outside the gate, and learned that his Olympic credential had been voided. He had been kicked out. He wasn't even allowed back inside the village to say goodbye to his teammates and friends.

But now, Zach is back.