Vonn doesn’t live up to the hype, but she does leave Vancouver with a gold medal

Vonn leaves the hype with only 1 gold

WHISTLER, British Columbia — Lindsey Vonn could have quit, probably should have quit.

She wasn’t going to win the Olympic slalom even if she somehow managed to drag her battered body across the finish line. There wasn’t much sense in even trying, but, hey, this is the Olympics and the show must go on.

Her best friend in skiing, Maria Riesch, would be the fastest on this day. Vonn, meanwhile, was done so quick she had plenty of time to grab a bite to eat and freshen her makeup before giving Riesch a heartfelt hug of congratulations.

When they get together for the holidays at the end of the year as they usually do at Riesch’s home in Germany, they can swap Olympic stories. Perhaps Riesch will pull out her two gold medals just for old times’ sake.

And maybe by then, Vonn will be able to really smile about her Olympic experience.

This wasn’t how it was all supposed to unfold in the mountains outside Vancouver. Vonn was supposed to be the one carrying NBC to record ratings as the face of the Olympics, the one leaving the games with a fistfull of gold.

But her Olympics were all but over even before she stepped into the starting gate Friday. And her medals — one gold and one bronze — didn’t measure up to the hype.

They almost couldn’t. Expectations had been set way too high, especially by NBC and the sponsors who were only too eager to sign up for the golden girl’s ride.

No one remembered the lesson that was Bode Miller four years ago in Turin. Once again the gold standard was five medals in five races, and once again America’s best skier didn’t come close.

“Nothing goes the way you want it to,” Vonn said. “Nothing’s ever perfect.”

Vonn found that out before she ever took the slopes in these games. She suffered a badly bruised shin a week before the Olympics and, though she won her speciality, the downhill, she picked up only one other medal and didn’t finish in her other three races.

It was enough to keep her spot on the Jay Leno show when he returns Monday to late night television, and more than enough to add to her list of sponsors for everything from makeup to energy drinks. Men across America will also surely keep the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that features Vonn in a bikini.

Vonn herself insisted she was happy, and she had a smile and a positive message for everyone who asked a question as she made the rounds of media in the snow near the finish line.

“I got the gold medal that I came here for, and even though I didn’t get all the medals that everyone else expected me to get, I accomplished all of my dreams,” she said. “You have to keep it in perspective.”

Had Vonn followed her own advice, it might have been easier for others to keep her Olympics in perspective. Two medals — one of them gold — is usually enough to get on a Wheaties box, but because Vonn expected more, everyone else did, too. Could easily have been more, too. She was the first-run leader in the super-combined before crashing out, and she was leading the super-G before playing it too safe at the bottom.

Now Riesch is the skiing star of these games, not Vonn.

“She’s the champion now. Her (Vonn’s) best friend is the champion,” said Austria ski federation president Peter Schroecksnadel. “That’s how it is at the Olympics.”

There was no real reason for Vonn to even ski Friday in the slalom because she was physically banged up, and mentally beaten down.

But she stood in the falling snow, in the starting gate for one last time. A mitten covered the plastic brace on her right hand to protect the pinkie she broke in the giant slalom two days before, but there wasn’t much that could be done about the sore back or the shin she bruised badly before the games began.

She was, as her publicity-happy husband Thomas put it a day before, “a ball of hurt.”

It was destined not to end well, and it didn’t. Slow at the top, Vonn straddled a gate in the first half of her run as she tried to make up time.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she wondered plaintively back in the finish area.

Just like that, her Olympics were over.

“I was contemplating stopping after my crash in the GS, after I broke my finger,” she said. “But that’s just not who I am. The Olympics are something special — they only come once every four years — and I wanted to go out there and try. I knew that I wasn’t probably going to win a medal, but at least I gave it everything I have.’

The message was relentlessly positive, because that’s who Vonn is. If she was disappointed, she wasn’t going to show it and, besides, there’s always the appearance on Leno to look forward to.

She’s leaving with Olympic gold, but the what-ifs may nag her all the way to the 2014 Games in Russia.

Maybe then she’ll leave the hype machine behind.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org