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Thursday, February 23, 2006

If Sasha Cohen falters tonight, do the terrorists win?
Posted by Jill | 6:48 AM

And so it all comes down to this.

After the implosions of Bode Miller and Apolo Ohno and Johnny Weir; after Lindsey Jacobellis' unforgivable crime of letting exuberance get the best of her; after the mutual dislike and disrespect of Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick, and after the dismal showing of the U.S. men's and women's hockey teams and after the tearful withdrawal of Michelle Kwan, it all comes down to four and one-half minutes on Italian ice for the little Jewish girl with the Betty Boop face.

Tonight is the Super Bowl of the Olympics, the bottom of the ninth in game 7, the 2 Minute Warning. Tonight, this most metaphorical of Olympics falls on the shoulders of Sasha Cohen.

It strikes me as strangely fitting that so many of the cockiest Americans at this Olympics have fallen victim to their own hubris at a time when the U.S. occupation of Iraq is descending into utter chaos. This has been the most jingoistic Winter Olympics since the Reagan years, and as it starts to draw to a close, with the Americans rubbing their bruises and wondering what happened, the frenzy surrounding the always-hyped women's figure skating final is worse than ever.

Much of this hysteria is about marketing dollars. American business is in need of marketable heroes, and in our country, heroes are inevitably able-bodied sports heroes. I had high hopes for the hyping of the incredibly hot quad rugby players profiled in last summer's criminally underseen Murderball, but most Americans who did see it didn't leave the theatre thinking, "Once you've had a quad guy, baby, you never go back." One would also think that the images of square-jawed returning soldiers would resonate on Wheaties boxes, but with so many of them coming home missing limbs, and others, such as the iconic "Marlboro Man", suffering from PTSD, they hardly feed our sense of delusion about American prowess and muscularity in all areas:

But for Madison Avenue, the face of the United States that has emerged from these Games is an unattractive sell of bad manners and poor sports.

"It's probably the most hyped and most disappointing Olympic team we've had," Bob Williams, the president of Burns Entertainment & Sports Marketing, said Wednesday by telephone from Chicago.

The skier Bode Miller was weighed down by expectations and a few extra pounds. He did not win a medal in four events in the mountains at Sestriere — 60 miles from here — with one event remaining. After missing a gate in the combined, one of his best events, Miller said, "At least now, I don't have to go all the way to Torino" to pick up the medal.

Jacobellis won no style points turning a sure victory in the inaugural women's Olympic snowboardcross into a silver medal when she tried to show off with a trick and crashed yards from the finish line. She immediately returned to the United States, saying, "I'm excited to go back home and have a nice steak and a normal-sized bathroom."

Chad Hedrick's speedskating victory in the 5,000 meters has been overshadowed by his ungraciousness in defeat in the team pursuit, the 1,000 and the 1,500, and his open feud with teammate Shani Davis, the first black athlete to win an individual gold medal in the Winter Olympics. "I'm here to win," Hedrick said in dismissing his bronze medal in the 1,500. "It's all or nothing."

Hedrick and Davis shook hands during Wednesday night's medal ceremony for the 1,500, but that was a rare public show of civility between the skaters.

Lanktree said: "It may sound self-righteous, but there's a general hope when people watch the Olympics that sportsmanship will prevail. We're used to trash-talking and silly end-zone dances, but the Olympics are about sportsmanship."

[snip]

Salvaging positive spin has been largely left to Cohen. She is leading the competition entering the women's figure skating long program Thursday and could rise above her American teammates in marketing appeal by winning the gold medal. She replaced Michelle Kwan as the face of figure skating after Kwan withdrew with an injury shortly after arriving here.

If Cohen can protect the lead she earned in the short program and become the third consecutive American to win the Olympic women's singles, marketers agree she will be the enduring face of these Games.

"The big names have fallen by the wayside," Bob Dorfman, the executive creative director for Pickett Advertising, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from San Francisco. "Now it's Sasha Cohen's game to win or lose. If she wins a gold, she'll be golden with the marketers. If she wins silver or bronze, it will be seen as a bit of a disappointment."

[snip]

Dorfman called [half-pipe gold medalist Shaun] White a dark horse worth watching in the endorsement race. "He has great hair and a great nickname," Dorfman said of the redheaded White, who is known as the Flying Tomato. White has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. He appeared Wednesday on Martha Stewart's television show.

White already had a cult following and is a millionaire several times over, in part because of endorsement deals signed well before the Games. Cheek, however, could be one of the most unexpected beneficiaries of the Americans' me-first attitude.

The 26-year-old Cheek, who is as thin as a ray of sunshine, exuded warmth, team spirit and self-deprecating humor. Chris Witty, a five-time United States Olympian who carried the flag in the opening ceremony, wants to see Cheek get his star turn.

"I hope that's what America's looking for," she said, referring to Cheek's wholesome image. "I worry, though. We've become so much of a pop culture, in-your-face society."

In fact, when Jon Bond, co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, a marketing agency in New York, was asked about Cheek's potential in the advertising market, he responded, "Has he won anything yet?"


Joey Cheek and Shaun White are hardly what Madison Avenue had in mind before this Olympics. Back then, it was all bad boy Bode Miller, whose penchant for tippling gave him an every-guy appeal. It was Apolo Anton Ohno, he of the fabulous name, whose soul patch gave him a certain Maynard G. Krebs je ne sais quoi. And it was Michelle Kwan, who fed into the American fetishization of Asian females. But now, as these and other Great American Hopes crashed and burnt, we are left with two dorky-looking guys and a Jewish princess to carry the mantle of American pride.

The minute Sasha Cohen emerged with an 0.03 lead over Irina Slutskaya in the short program, she turned into Debi Thomas circa 1988. It is Cohen's good fortune this year that her nemesis is the cute but hardly glamorous Slutskaya rather than the vampish Iron Curtain Maiden Katarina Witt. Witt, who at 40 still has an ego the size of thbe planet Jupiter and has lost absolutely no sense of her own unparallelled fabulousness, simply had to smile at a reporter to make him turn his back on his country and embrace this Bond Girl out of central casting. So the psych-out factor doesn't come as much into play here. But Cohen has never been strong in the freeskate, and has often suffered from loss of concentration in the second half of the program. Yet she has never had as much at stake as she does tonight.

The sports press didn't want it to be this way. After Kwan withdrew, they turned their attention to the fresh-faced Emily Hughes, leaving Cohen to focus on the job she has to do tonight. Perhaps they did her a favor, buying her a few days of calm practice time before deciding that the future of American prestige rests on her small shoulders.

Cohen can be a difficult skater to like. Lacking Kwan's press-friendly demeanor and Hughes' "oh gosh" innocence, she is there to skate, not to talk. But with all the expectations resting with her tonight, the responsibility given her by the press to somehow single-handedly resurrect the United States from the bankrupt wreck it has become under the stewardship of the Bush Administration -- while dressed in spangles and resting on a 1/8" skate blade, I hope she can pull it off -- for her sake, not for ours.
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