Our Olympic Beauties

Has anyone else noticed how attractive the 2010 Winter Olympic athletes are? Skiers Julia Mancuso and Lindsey Vonn, along with speedskaters Katherine Reutter and Chad Hedrick, are just a few of the best-looking Olympians I’ve ever seen. And Apolo Anton Ohno and Shaun White are about as cute as it gets. When the US team entered the arena during the opening ceremony in Vancouver, I couldn’t help but say right out loud, “Look at them! They’re beautiful!

Hopefully these young people will behave as beautifully as they appear physically. Let’s have no more Mike Modano’s. You may recall after the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, he verbally trashed his US hockey team and the USA Hockey organization. And worse—in the 1998 Nagano, Japan Winter Olympics, he and some of his teammates trashed their rooms in the Olympic Village. They embarrassed our entire nation in front of the whole world. Modano was already a highly-paid professional hockey player in 1998 when he behaved like an out-of-control teenager.

Athletes work their tails off to get on a US Olympic team, and no doubt their successes and disappointments are greater than any I ever experienced in one of my high school girls’ basketball tournaments. So I can understand a downhill racer pounding the snow with her ski poles after landing in a heap at the bottom of the mountain. And I can understand an athlete blowing off a little steam at a bar or party.

Well, 2010 Team USA has had at least one embarrassing moment. US snowboarder and Olympic bronze medalist, 22 year-old Scotty Lago left Vancouver early after “suggestive” photos of a young woman kissing his medal surfaced. So what’s wrong with kissing a medal, you ask? In at least one photo, the lady was kissing the medal as it hung over his groin. Scotty? What were you thinking?

We all can guess what he was probably thinking: “This medal is babe bait!” I’m not saying what he did was OK; timing-wise, it was pretty foolish. No one would care about those “suggestive” photos if Lago hadn’t just won that bronze medal in the winter Olympics. That’s the old “price of glory” pickle. But compared to Mike Modano’s behavior, Lago’s falls more into the “boys will be boys” category.

Since 1984, the US Olympic Committee has paid prize money to its winning Olympians. Gold medal winners receive $25,000, silver medalists receive $15,000, and winners take home $10,000 for a bronze. A few very lucky individuals receive large bonuses from sponsors and have big endorsement contracts. The prize money from the USOC probably doesn’t begin to cover the cost of getting there because nobody gets to the Olympics without great sacrifice. And that sacrifice is shared by whole families: wives, husbands, kids, moms, and dads.

I love the whole, “thanks, Mom” theme of this year’s Olympic advertisers, and I can’t help but wonder how Scotty Lago’s mom feels. But then I tend to think like a mom.

Donna