Winter Olympics - Salt Lake City Olympics 2002

The winter 2002 Olympics took place between February 8th and February 24th in Salt Lake City, USA. For many people, the winter Olympics take a back seat to the more publicized summer Olympic Games. In fact many admit to knowing very little about the winter Games and what takes place there.

Before we review the events of the 2002 Games, test your knowledge of the winter Olympics including some of the highlights from this year.

The first Winter Olympics was held in Charmonix, France. There were 16 events, 258 athletes and 16 nations took part. Since then there have been 18 winter Olympics growing in size each year. Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics is officially the largest winter Olympics ever.

What have been the highlights and talking points of these Olympics?

One of the early events of the Olympics was the halfpipe snowboarding competition. In the women's event, the Olympic hosts USA started off on the right foot with Kelly Clark winning the gold. The following day spurred on by their team-mates achievements, the men's halfpipe team went on to clean sweep the medals winning gold, silver and bronze with an impressive day's snowboarding.

In womens ice hockey, Canada beat the USA 3-2 to win gold. It was Canada's first gold medal in ice hockey for either men or women in fifty years.

In mens ice hockey the Salt Lake City Olympics arguably brought together the most talented array of players ever and so the competition promised to be an outstanding display of ice hockey. Fans were not disappointed, with Sweden and the USA in particular putting in strong performances in the early rounds. As the quarter-finals loomed speculation grew as to who would claim the ultimate prize. Russia the defending champions had not been playing well, whilst the USA, Sweden, Czech Republic and Canada were all showing why they were in the top 8 countries for ice hockey.

However, the quarter-finals elimination round was to offer some astonishing surprises, biggest of all being the results of the first quarter final when Belarus beat the highly favoured Sweden 4-3. Sweden had previously shown superb form beating Canada and the Czech Republic to lead their group. Russia also, despite speculation, came out on top over Czech Republic in a close-fought game 1-0. Both the USA and Canada won against their respective opponents Germany & Finland. The semi-finals saw Canada come through against Finland and the USA hold off a valiant fight back from Russia to win 3-2. The final thus was to be a North American affair

After a strong start by the USA, Canada put in a stunning team performance to come back to win 5 - 2. Thus Canada for the first time ever clean sweeped the golds in the mens and womens ice hockey.

Figure skating provided perhaps the most controversy of the games in what was hailed the 'skategate' scandal. The pairs skating brought together stiff competition with Canada & Russia fighting out for the gold medal. Despite a seemingly flawless performance by the Canadians, the Russians were awarded the gold. Following protests and investigation, corruption was discovered amongst the judges, notably the pressure placed on the French judge to vote in favour of Russia. This led to re-awarding of the medals so that both Canada & Russia received gold medals. From this serious debates ensued into how subsequent figure skating competitions should be judged in order to alleviate any future inappropriate decisions. A completely new system developed by the International Skating Union for judging skaters is now likely.

In skiing, Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen took the limelight winning 4 gold medals in the biathlon. Only 2 other athletes have ever achieved this phenomenon in the winter games. Bjoerndalen won the 10km, 12.5km, 20km and the relay biathlons.

In the first ever women's bobsleigh event at the Winter Olympics, the USA team 2 of Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers were unexpectedly victorious. They outcompeted both the German 1 & 2 teams and the US number 1 team to take a much deserved underdog win.

In the Alpine Skiing event, Croat Janica Kostelic stood out amongst the rest, turning on the sparkle to win an outstanding 3 gold medals in the slalom, giant slalom and the combined event and a silver in the super-G. This was some achievement following Kostelic's injury-struck season.

Australia won their first ever gold through Stephen Bradbury in the 1000m speed skating. He was the only man to stay on his skates after Chinese skater Li Jiajun triggered a mass tumble on the last turn. Prior to the race Bradbury was not expected to feature in the medal placings and had reached the finals through a similar stroke of fate in his semi-final event.

Russia were again involved in controversy this time regarding their overall treatment at the Olympics with the threat of all Russian teams withdrawing from the Games. Official complaints were made to the IOC regarding inappropriate & unfair treatment of their teams, including biased referring in the Russia vs Czech Republic Ice Hockey game, the judging scandal of the pairs figure skating, a decision to disqualify cross-country skier Lazutina without giving Russia subsequent time to enter a replacement, and biased judging in the women's aerial freestyle events.

Great Britain won a surprise gold in the womens curling, GB's first gold medal at the Winter Olympics since 1984 when Torvill & Dean won in the figure skating pairs. The team hailing from Scotland demonstrated some outstanding curling and steel nerves with their captain Rhona Martin winning the gold on the final stone.

In the women's luge, Germany show their dominance winning gold, silver and bronze in the individual event. They also finished as overall champions in the Olympics winning 35 medals including 12 golds, 16 silvers and 7 bronze medals. Finishing in second place were Norway with a total of 24 medals , including 11 golds, and in third were the USA with 34 medals, 10 of which were gold.

More problems arose in the skating, this time in the speed skating where South Korea filed a lawsuit to overturn the decision to disqualify Kim Dong-Sung for impeding a US skater in the 1,500m short track speed skating final. Since having their initial appeal against the decision rejected by the IOC and the Court of Arbitration, South Korea turned to a US district court to appeal. The United States Olympic Committee received over 16,000 emails in response to the decision.

The last day of the Games included an unfortunate reminder of the abuse of drugs by athletes to improve their performance. Three cross country skiers including Russia's Larissa Lazutina were stripped of their medals after testing positive on a drugs test. The others, Spaniard gold medallist Johann Muehlegg and Russian Olga Danilova were also disqualified after testing positive to Darbepoetin. Darbepoetin is a new drug not yet officially listed but has similar effects to EPO through increasing the numbers of red blood cells produced and thus improves the ability of the athlete to uptake oxygen.

And, finally the cost of the Olympic games remains a serious talking point. Considering the size differential between the summer and winter Olympics and hence the number of tourists and revenue it generates, the $1.9 billion estimated cost of hosting the Games at Salt Lake city is an astonishing figure.

With triple the number of events, the Sydney games was only estimated to cost $1.97 billion. Where did the money come from? According to sources, 18 cents out of every dollar spent came from American taxpayers, there was a federal contribution of $380 million, $442 million was generated from TV broadcasts, and $553 million from sponsorship, the rest of the expenditure was made up from ticket sales and state and local government contributions. According to organizers Salt Lake was expected to break even with its costs.

Sources/Further Information

Salt Lake City Olympics 2002
MSNBC News
Olympic Organization

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