Trading cover-two schemes for a five-point try

Sometimes you see something and it's such a no-brainer. Maybe that's why, you know, the smart ones really do go to those Ivy League schools.

Miles Craigwell, who will turn 25 in March, played football for Brown. He was a solid football player, a linebacker, good enough after graduation to legitimately chase the NFL dream. It didn't work out. No shame. A lot of big, fast guys don't make it.

Miles Craigwell, though, is big, fast and smart. Back home, he happened to be watching a rugby sevens match on television. Talk about -- and here's where it pays to know the kind of words they like you to know at schools like Brown -- serendipity.

This weekend, the HSBC Sevens World Series rugby tour lands in Las Vegas, its sole American stop on a global tour that already has been to Dubai, South Africa and New Zealand and will go on to Hong Kong, Australia, England and Scotland.  The U.S. team includes one Miles Craigwell.

He said, "Rugby -- it's 14 minutes straight at 100 percent. It's like doing the two-minute drill in football, no-huddle, for 14 minutes straight."

Craigwell saw that rugby broadcast last June. He picked up a rugby ball for the first time last July. Now he's on the U.S. national sevens team. It's too much to expect he'd be the featured act this weekend in Vegas, and odds are he won't be.

Even so, he may well be the most interesting guy on the American side, whether he plays big minutes or not.

Why?

Because he's a smart guy, and he's on to something that a lot of other football players doubtlessly are going to be checking out in the coming months and years.

How many football players, really, are going to make it in the NFL?

What career opportunities await those who wash out?

For all of them, which of these sounds more appealing:

Playing for the likes of the Spokane Shock, San Jose SaberCats or Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League, or traveling the world and maybe playing for your country in the Olympics? Or at least giving that second option a try?

Hmm. Rugby sevens is going to be in the Olympics come the Rio Games of 2016. That's Rio de Janeiro. The "Iowa Barnstormers" play in Des Moines.

In the United States, football is huge. But rugby could be the next big thing. And rugby is fun. The rugby scene deliberately includes party time. (Check out the background in the photo above from last weekend: "NZ Beer Pong Assoc.")

In part, that's why the tour's American stop was moved to Vegas. It's said, you know, that Vegas can be a fun place to party.

This is the weekend after the Super Bowl, of course: "Our message to Americans," said Mike Miller, secretary general of the International Rugby Board, "is if you like football you probably will like rugby. Give it a try."

Like Miles Craigwell.

"When I saw the sevens, I was like, wow, the athleticism -- that is definitely something I could do."

By the way, there's an incredibly deep pool of rugby-type talent out there that's now playing football in the United States. How is the U.S. sevens team doing this year?

A look at the Series standings heading into the Vegas weekend shows England and New Zealand tied for first; Samoa in third, Fiji in fourth, South Africa fifth, Australia sixth, Argentina and Wales tied for seventh, the United States ninth and Kenya and Scotland tied for tenth.

The standings further show England and New Zealand with 64 points. The Americans have six. Just checking: When was the last time the Americans stood behind Samoa, Fiji and Wales in anything?

Could an infusion of some bad-ass linebacking and Cover Two-type talent maybe go far in addressing that kind of thing?

Is Al Caravelli, the U.S. sevens coach, a forward-thinker?

On the official USA Rugby website, Caravelli gives his description of his ideal sevens player: "physical, big and yappy." Does that description match, say, any football players?

When the sevens tour landed in Dubai as the tour got underway in December, Caravelli told a newspaper there, referring to Craigwell, "When we talked about the future and rugby being in the Olympics, that attracted [him] immensely. He thought to himself, 'I could stay in the United States and play on a domestic stage, or maybe go and play on the world stage. That is more appealing to me right now.'

"We have thrown him into the deep end. He is very powerful and his defensive ability is scary.

"He hits so hard, he is very explosive."

One final thought: If it turns out there really is an NFL labor action in the coming months, aren't there going to be a lot of football players looking for something to do?

"I was eating at a diner, the sevens were on TV," Miles Craigwell said. " I dropped the fork and I said, 'What is this sport?' "

A whole bunch of football players may well be asking that very same question. And soon.

'Donner du sens' from a guy talking sense

ANNECY, France -- If the Olympic Games come to Annecy in 2018, the famous chef Marc Veyrat was asked here Wednesday, what will you prepare on the day of the opening ceremony? "The Olympic Games," he said, "are full of flavor and authenticity and truth. And, you know what we're going to do? We're going to have an Olympic Games with a capital A for 'amour' -- amour for love.

"Love in all its depth and all its aspects. Love for the region. Love for being able to hand down the legacy. We are proud we want the Games. We know," he said, "that this is an incredible, extraordinary region."

For two years, this Annecy bid has struggled mightily with what in idiomatic French might be called donner du sens -- what in English we would call the narrative.

In just a few seconds at a news conference here, while the International Olympic Committee's evaluation commission was elsewhere in town, studying the Annecy file, Veyrat may very well have sketched out the contours of that narrative.

Now: Does the Annecy bid team want to hear it?

And do they want to hear it from a big guy who wears a big black hat, just like his grandfather wore a big black hat, and who is unapologetically progressive and environmentally oriented?

Far be it from me, an American, to offer the French perspective about anything.

But does this sound like a guy who might have some sense:  "Just like a hamburger, the Olympic Games can become a healthy meal if you put it together properly."

Veyrat grew up in this part of France, the Haute-Savoie, around food, family and nature. They had cows and pigs. They made their own butter and cheese. They picked blueberries. "At every step," he said, "I was told, 'Look, this is nature.' "

In the mid-1930s, meanwhile, the family had opened an inn at the base of a chairlift. "People liked going to the restaurant because it smelled good there," he said.

For the young Marc Veyrat, meanwhile, "These 'strangers' [at the inn] were for my parents a wonder. They brought this openness. They fed our souls."

The grown-up Marc Veyrat became one of France's, indeed the world's, great chefs, emphasizing the use of the herbs and plants he could harvest in the French Alps. He won, for instance, six Michelin stars, three for his first two restaurants. He earned a perfect grade of 20/20 in the Gault-Millau guide.

When he talks, he talks a little bit like Jimi Hendrix used to riff on the guitar. The words just sort of rush right out.

Does it all hold together?

That depends.

Is what he has to offer a tightly coherent message? Could the Annecy 2018 committee take his comments, wrap them in a bow and present them to the IOC? Of course not.

Are the threads all there?

After the news conference, Veyrat and I talked, one on one, for 45 minutes. He has a lot  -- and I mean a lot -- to say.

For instance: "The paradox is that people say the notion of identity -- provincial life, rural life, the Alps, the Olympic Games, these can't all go together. But that's our goal. That's what we are striving for, to use these Games to reinforce this notion of identity, to better define our identity within the Alps."

And: "There's an underlying problem. I'm going to repeat myself. It's about the heart. It's about not just can we -- but do we want -- these Olympic Games? It's about do we want these Olympic Games to be about sports or about something else?

"I think the Olympic Games can be about so much more than just sport. I think they're about a way of communicating. I think they're about a way of having exchanges with others and a way of opening ourselves up with knowledge. That's why we should have the Games. That's why we should want the Games. It's about love. It's about being in love, with a capital L. It's love for your region. Do you love your region enough to defend it enough to make it into an Olympic region? And why the Olympics? Why the Haute-Savoie? This region is already a universal draw for tourists, from Lake Annecy to Mont Blanc. Skiing is what we know. Skiing is who we are. Everybody skis.

"… The reason I think we deserve these Olympic Games is because these would be  the Games that would be ruled by reason, by sanity. It's about respect for others, respect for the planet.

"… The whole point of the Olympic Games is for each [edition] to be able to tell their story, the story of where they live. The thing is, in this region we have very deep roots. The whole point is to have this trace-ability, to know where they come from. These Games are going to be devilish in a way. Because it's really important. We are going to get the youth in. We are going to put a sparkle in their eyes. As they get older, they are going to remember they once had this opportunity to see this incredible region that is near Switzerland called Haute-Savoie, where life is so good, where life was made so good by the people who live there."

If this man offered to cook for you, wouldn't you accept? If he had some advice for you along the way, might you listen?

Let's put it a different way: If you're the Annecy bid team, what do you have to lose?

140 minutes on the bus to La Plagne

ANNECY, France -- No matter how many times one travels through the Alps, it never fails. To be here is breathtaking, indeed awe-inspiring. You wind through canyons marked by vineyards and quaint villages, through mountains that seem to rise right up from rushing rivers, these huge massive blocks of rock standing sentinel against the sky.

This is ski country, indeed the world's leading destination for winter sports. Seven million people come to this region each winter, according to the French ministry that counts such things, and from all over the world.

So there's zero question the French could organize Winter Games. After all, the very first Winter Games were organized in France, and in this part of France -- in Chamonix, in 1924.

There's also zero question that the French know how to organize Winter Games: Chamonix in 1924 was followed by Grenoble in 1968, and that was followed by Albertville in 1992.

So the pertinent question now, as an International Olympic Committee commission on Wednesday undertook a three-day evaluation of the latest bid here for the Winter Games: France, again?

In Annecy, in 2018?

The IOC will pick the 2018 Winter Games site in July. Annecy is in a three-way race. The other two candidates: Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Munich.

This IOC evaluation visit is the first of three site visits. Annecy gets looked over first; Pyeongchang gets visited next week; Munich gets looked over in early March.

The preliminary question the IOC wants to know here is: what kind of Games would they be if they went to Annecy in 2018?

The focus here -- at this point -- is purportedly on what's called the "technical" merits of the bid, on matters such as transport, hotels and other such things. The politics purportedly comes later. Not really -- but there are technical issues to be reviewed.

Fair or not, everyone knows the Albertville Games in 1992 were spread-out over what seemed like far-flung swatches of French mountainside.

Fair or not, too, everyone knows as well that the IOC had to step in last June and ask the Annecy 2018 bid committee to re-think the technical merits of its plan.

So they did. They centered the plan on two main hubs, Annecy and Chamonix.

So, they were asked at a news conference here Wednesday, why do you talk about two main hubs when there are really three?  The third would be the sliding center at La Plagne, where the bobsled, luge and skeleton competitions would be held -- the assembled journalists having had the advantage of having been taken by Annecy 2018 organizers to La Plagne earlier in the day.

The answer: Because we haven't planned an athletes' village nor a medals plaza at La Plagne so that doesn't get called a hub. It's just, like, the place where they'd actually do, you know, the sports.

Another question: The Annecy bid book says everyone who comes would be housed in roughly 530 hotels (or pensions or the like). That would make for a lot of people spread out in a lot of places. But the Olympics are all about getting groups of people together. What's the solution?

Answer: We're working on it, and we anticipate a "much stronger transport infrastructure."

Maybe.

Ninety minutes is what they said it would take from Annecy to La Plagne.

Perhaps.

It took two hours and twenty minutes Wednesday on the press bus, and that was on a day with perfect weather. No snow, no ice, temperatures in the 40s, maybe even 50s. Incidentally, the road to La Plagne features a barf-inducing series of 21 hairpin turns. Thoughtfully, they passed out hard candy on the press bus with assurances that it would quell any unease.

With a few kilometers yet to go to get to La Plagne, the last of the 21 turns behind us, there were eight cars strung out in a line behind the press bus.

These are precisely the sorts of real-world things the IOC ought to know about when evaluating the "technical" criteria. It's the kind of thing that isn't in the bid books.

Does this mean Annecy has no chance?

Not a chance.

These may, in the end, be glitches.

It is undeniably the case that the Annecy team is running on undeniable energy under new bid boss Charles Beigbeder.

The leadership team includes several former Olympic athletes. Many bids, of course, include former Olympic stars. In Annecy's case, they're not there to serve as mere props. They have real leadership roles and responsibilities, and word out of the first day of meetings with the evaluation commission was that the panel was duly impressed with that leadership.

Meanwhile, this 2018 campaign is the seventh IOC bid contest I have covered, dating back to 1999, and the press tour Wednesday easily ranks among the smoothest and most well-intentioned of such events (that is, it was genuine without being gratuitous). That's remarkable in any instance, all the more so because virtually all the organizers are new to the Olympic scene, some brought on literally just two or three weeks ago.

Imagine what they could do if they had seven years to pour themselves into it for real.

Shawn Johnson's comeback

Shawn Johnson, the sweet, gosh-don't-you-just-love-her gymnast from West Des Moines, Iowa, had won the world all-around title the year before the Beijing Games. She was thus widely favored to win the Olympic all-around in 2008. That didn't happen.

Shawn's American teammate, Nastia Liukin, lithe and fluid and evocative, particularly on the uneven bars, won the Olympic all-around.

Women's gymnastics has a funny way of lending itself to storybook endings, even when they come with a twist or two along the way. Nastia's fairy tale came true in 2008. Maybe Nastia comes back for 2012; maybe not. maybe not. Shawn, meantime, is emphatically back at it -- since Beijing having both enjoyed and endured celebrity stuff, normal teen stuff and a bad, really bad, knee injury.

"I love being able to consider myself an athlete again," Shawn said the other day on the phone. "I really missed that."

If Shawn's knee holds up, talk about storybook. She is both champion athlete and popular culture fixture, winner of "Dancing With the Stars." She is cute, personable, well-spoken, at ease on camera and off -- a great spokeswoman for gymnastics, pretty much everything the sport could ask for over the next 18 months as the London Games draw near.

Again, if the knee holds up -- she'll be chasing the one thing that eluded her in Beijing, the all-around title.

To properly set the scene for this year and next, it's necessary to re-visit Beijing and 2008, and to understand why Shawn is so much more than cute. She is mentally as tough as they come. Never, ever forget that. Shawn is as tough as forged steel.

The U.S. women, gold medalists at the 2007 world championship in the team competition, took silver at the Olympics, behind the Chinese.

Shawn and Nastia were -- they still are -- friends. Even so, only one girl gets the all-around gold. Shawn won silver.

Shawn was favored by many to win the floor exercise. She got silver.

So, finally, it came down to the last individual event, the balance beam.

Shawn might well have packed it in. Who would have blamed her, really?

But no.

Shawn may be sweet. But Shawn is so mentally strong that she won gold on the beam. If you don't think that's remarkable, keep in mind that the beam is all of four inches wide.

Keep in mind, too, that as a practical matter the beam gold meant Shawn wouldn't have to do another day of gymnastics in her life. Corporate America would forever see her as "gold medalist Shawn Johnson."

After Beijing, Shawn -- understandably -- took time off. She went to L.A. for a while, where she went on, and won "Dancing." She won multiple awards and did lots of cool stuff.  Eventually, she went back home to Iowa, and did normal teen-age girl stuff, and that -- in its way -- was excellent, too.

About a year ago, Shawn went skiing. Normal enough. Until she tore up her left knee, big time.

"I had freedom, the chance to try new things, to discover who I was outside the gym," Shawn said.

"I found out I love dancing. I love going to football games. And being a normal girl. School was a lot of fun for me. Getting ready for college."

At the same time, she said, "I'm a gymnast. I miss gymnastics. Gymnastics is who I am."

So many gymnasts have to deal with major injuries. Nastia, for instance, battled a succession of injuries and then peaked, healthy, in Beijing.

This is Shawn's first major injury. The plan is to bring her along cautiously yet aggressively.

Already there are signs of significant progress. Last week, the U.S. national team for 2011 was named. Shawn is on it.

"She would not be the first gymnast in the country or in the world who has a great return after an injury," the U.S. women's team national coordinator, Martha Karolyi, said.

"With her discipline and her dedication and her desire to be the best [that] she can be, she could return and deal with the nagging little things coming from the injury. Also, we can't forget that she always has a great guidance from her coach, [Liang] Chow."

Chow and Shawn have worked together since she was a little girl. She is not, however, a little girl anymore. Each, in separate interviews, emphasized that.

Each also stressed that it's okay -- it's to be expected.

"I am up to the challenge," Chow said. "But I have to be realistic. And I have to be smart, to give her the best possibilities."

He added, "She is working hard every day."

Shawn said, "I'm not the same person. I'm older. I'm more mature. I have a different mindset. I'm basically starting from scratch. Getting back in shape at 19 years old is much harder than 16 years old."

She said a moment later, "When I was 16, if there was a birthday party, let's say I would go eat a giant cheeseburger and a sundae; Chow would see me the next day and maybe I would gain a pound or two and he would make it so I would work it off. Now it's up to me. I'm the one who decides how hard I work. Everything inside and outside the gym is up to me.

"The relationship is definitely different. He respects the fact that I am older and have my own opinions. He can't treat me as a little girl anymore. We have to work together."

On the one hand, she said, it's terrifying. On the other, it's profoundly liberating. What a story -- a teen-age girl grows into a young woman, and chases her dream, and it's her own dream, not someone else's.

It's her very own, and she's doing it for one reason, and one reason only. She wants it.

"I'm terrified because I have no idea where I'm going or where this is going to end up," Shawn said. "But it's liberating because I'm enjoying it and learning so much."

Norm Bellingham on his USOC big push

If you know the story of the 1500 meters at the 1936 Berlin Games, you know how it was one of those races that carried with it great expectations. If most such events never live up to such expectations, this was one for all time. Among the starters were six of the top seven finishers from the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, including the defending champion, Luigi Beccali of Italy. Also in the field: the American Glenn Cunningham, whose leg had been badly burned when he was a boy, and Jack Lovelock of New Zealand, a former Rhodes Scholar who was now a medical student.

Lovelock had meticulously trained for a killer final sprint and that, ultimately, is what won him the race, in world-record time, after a race marked by fantastic strategy and tactics, one that pushed the standards of human excellence of all who were in it to a higher level, four minutes in time to celebrate then and forever after.

Hanging now outside the fifth-floor executive offices of the U.S. Olympic Committee's new headquarters building is an oversize black-and-white photo from that race.

That's Norm's doing.

Around the USOC offices in Colorado Springs, Colo, in fact, there are hundreds of photos from the last 100 years of the modern Olympic Games. There's a fascinating quality to the pictures. They show winning, of course. But not in any of those moments of triumph can you find anyone else's despair.

Not even in the photo depicting the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team famous semifinal-round victory. Here, instead, the shot is of the Americans shaking hands with the Soviets.

That's Norm's doing, too.

"To have a chance to have been part of something that has a big impact and that brings the world together -- it has been great," Norm Bellingham was saying the other day on the phone.

Norm's last day as the USOC's chief operating officer is this coming Friday. They announced his resignation last Friday -- the USOC playing it smart, announcing it essentially right before Super Bowl Sunday, knowing it would essentially get little play in the mainstream media.

And that's pretty much what happened.

The USOC played it that way for three reasons:

One, Norm made a lot of money. It's all public information, right there in the Form 990s the USOC puts out every summer.

Two, Norm was at the center of the aborted launch in the summer of 2009 of the USOC television network.

Three, Norm was a candidate to be the USOC boss and didn't get the job.

As for the money, Norm never negotiated his salary. Former USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth told him, here's your package.

The aborted network launch remains, in many regards, a mystery. But this much is certain: There will, at some point, be an Olympic channel. It's inevitable.

And though Norm didn't get the CEO job -- the fact that he stayed on for more than a year, and helped Scott Blackmun, who did get the job, speaks to Norm's character.

Norm came to the USOC in the first instance because he wanted to give back to a movement that has made a difference in his own life.

Norm is an Olympic gold medalist, in kayaking in 1988. "Chariots of Fire" is without a doubt his favorite movie; he has an original poster from the movie in his office.

Norm has a remarkable background. He grew up in India and Nepal. His personal hero is Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mt. Everest. Norm has an MBA from Harvard. And on and on.

A big part of Norm's job over the past four-plus years was to make business decisions. Some of those decisions didn't sit well with certain constituents within the so-called U.S. Olympic "family" (these decisions came in the ordinary course of USOC business and for purposes of this point stand apart from the 2009 drama  over the TV network).

So what? None of that has anything to do with the big picture: Doesn't any entity want its senior officers to get it? To understand the mission?

In Norm's case, it can be said that he not only understood the mission -- he has a genuine soulfulness for it.

That's why that picture of the 1936 1500 hangs outside the executive offices.

It's why Norm was rapt when Lou Zamperini came through Colorado Springs recently, the World War II hero telling Norm what it was like to compete at those 1936 Games. Norm, meanwhile, played Zamperini an audio tape of the race and when the call to the line went out over the loudspeaker went out -- in German, of course -- Zamperini, all these years later, froze for a brief moment.

Like being there all over again, he whispered to Norm. (Among Zamperini's incredible accomplishments: eighth place in the 1936 5000 meters.)

"You can look in their eyes," Norm said, referring to that black-and-white photo of those great runners from that classic 1500 from Berlin, "and it transports you back to a different time. And yet the striving for excellence in 1936 is the same as now; the young people pursuing excellence now is the same; we're all the same.

"That, I think is one of the ultimate lessons of the Olympic Games. They reveal the fact that were all the same, and they celebrate our humanity."

He said a moment or two later, "I"m really grateful I had this opportunity," meaning at the USOC." As for what's next: "There are only so many big pushes in life. You have to select them wisely. This one was worth it."

Biathlon: a Maine event

The World Cup biathlon tour that makes the first of its two American stops Friday in northern Maine shines the spotlight on the sport that -- with its combination of skiing and shooting -- is huge in Europe.  They'll be way more interested in Germany in biathlon in Presque Isle and Fort Kent, Maine, than in that Super Bowl thing in Dallas. Meanwhile, for those of us here in the States, if you can tear yourselves away long enough from the Packers and Steelers to think about life beyond football -- biathlon and Maine make for an amazing story.

Well, to be precise -- winter sports, in this instance meaning biathlon and cross-country skiing, and Maine.

Did you know, for instance, that northern Maine and southern Maine might as well be separate states -- in something of the way that northern and southern California are the same state but different states of mind?

Portland is a real city. It's in southern Maine.

Northern Maine is rural. Very. All of 73,000 people live in Maine's northernmost county, Aroostook, spread out over 6,672 square miles. That's 11 people per square mile. They grow broccoli, potatoes and hay there.

If that sounds charming, there's this: The shoe factories and the woolen mills are almost all gone now, and the paper mills have fallen on hard times. That has meant high unemployment. At the same time, Maine ranks near the top of the charts nationally in the incidence of childhood smoking, obesity, type II diabetes and asthma.

What to do?

"I remember," Russell Currier was saying the other day on the telephone, "in fifth or sixth grade, when one of the coaches showed up at our school and handed out skis to us. At the time, I thought they were the best skis available. They practically were compared to what we were using."

This was the Stockholm Elementary School in Stockholm, Maine. There were 32 kids in the school, kindergarten through eighth grade, he said.

"To be able to rent a decent pair of skis for $20 a season was what we needed," Russell, who is now 23, said. "Basically, it was the cool thing to go ski during recess and gym class, and even before school. That was where I started to realize I enjoyed cross-country skiing."

In a nutshell, that is the vision of the Maine Winter Sports Center.

The center's mission is to develop a sustainable model for Maine's rural communities -- through skiing. That means economic development in places like Aroostook County. That means the development, physical and academic, of the young people there.

"It's about trying to create a new identity -- getting to see themselves as healthy risk-takers," Andy Shepard, president and chief executive officer of the Maine Winter Sports Center, said.

"What we want to do is get to these kids before they challenge their parents on the clothes they wear," Shepard, who used to work at L.L. Bean and who knows about these things, said. "As soon as a child starts asserting his or her own sartorial view of things, we've lost them. They stop listening.

"But if we get them when they're younger -- when they're 8, 9, 10 years old -- we can help them. We can create this healthy, active, outdoor lifestyle."

The center was founded in 1999, backed from the start by what's called the LIbra Foundation, a Portland-based organization that aims to promote projects in and for Maine.

"We're not going to get a Ford Motor Co. plant in [northern] Maine," Owen Wells, the foundation's president and CEO said. "We ought to forget about that.

"But we think we can do something about health and obesity and our children."

The attributes central to success as an élite athlete -- commitment, discipline, responsibility -- are at the core of the center's mission as well. Thus the center has built two world-class venues -- one in Presque Isle, the other in Fort Kent.

Several members of the U.S. national team in recent years have trained in Maine.

Among them: Russell Currier.

Russell's mom, Deborah, works in the office of a local oil company. His dad, Christopher, does lawn care in the summers and snow removal in the winters. His older sister, Lauren, is a nurse.

Russell won't be competing at the Maine World Cup stops before the locals. He has made World Cup starts before and while his skiing is solid, his shooting -- as he admits -- still needs work.

"A setback," he said. But it's okay. And here's why.

"Sometimes you make the team and sometimes you don't," he said. "Those are the rules," and that's uncommon maturity for 23.

Then again, that's precisely the kind of thing Andy Shepard was hoping for when this whole thing got started.

"We see sports as a means to an end," Shepard said. "Responsibility, accountability, discipline, the pursuit of excellence -- all these attributes of success in sports are also critical to success in life.

"When [Russell] first saw himself excelling as a biathlete, as a cross-country skier, he also started seeing himself as someone who could excel in anything. For me that is what it is all about," Shepard said.

That began to happen, he said, when Currier was a teen-ager: "In Russell's freshman year of high school," at Caribou High, 15 or so minutes north of Presque Isle, "he made the honor roll. He underlined his name and cut it out of the newspaper," the Aroostook Republican," and mailed it to me.

"That," he said, "is powerful stuff."

Tristan Gale Geisler gets her medal back

Police called Tristan Gale Geisler Tuesday with good news.

The gold medal that she had won in skeleton at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games? That had been stolen just a few days ago from her house in Oceanside, Calif.?

They had found it.

Oceanside police, in executing two search warrants Tuesday, recovered the medal and other stolen property, including two assault rifles.

Police also said they took three men into custody. Police declined to provide further details.

The medal, along with computers and other things, were stolen last Wednesday from the house that Geisler shares with her U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot husband, Jon.

Also originally believed stolen was her engagement ring. The Geislers now believe thieves dropped the ring while hurrying to make a get-away; it turned up inside the house, she said late Tuesday night.

When police found the medal on Tuesday, she said, they discovered that the ribbon originally attached to it had been cut. No problem, she said -- she has a back-up.

Tristan and Jon Geisler were effusive in their praise of the lead detective on their case, Doug Baxter.

"He was so happy on the phone to tell me this," she said, adding, "That made me so much more excited."

It's why, she said, she has no choice but to comply with the detective's directive. After keeping the medal for so long in a sock in a junk drawer, it's now going to a safety-deposit box.

She said, "I promised him I wouldn't make him go through this again."

The Hannah Kearney plan

When you can do it on Race Day consistently, then you're in the zone that, heading into the freestyle skiing world championships -- which start Wednesday in Deer Valley, Utah -- American moguls standout Hannah Kearney is locked into right now. She has won her last five World Cup starts.

Five in a row in anything is special. Five in a row in a judged sport is extraordinary. Five in a row in a sport as capricious as moguls skiing -- that's historic domination.

It's all part of the Hannah Kearney plan.

Off the hill, you can be as soft-spoken and well-spoken, thoughtful and reflective as can be, talking about cooking, baking, cleaning, organizing and mending. For real -- mending. That's the kind of thing you do when you're from Vermont.

On the hill, you're there to win. On the hill, you don't win with false modesty. You set goals. And the mission for 2011, coming off nothing less than the gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics, was elemental.

"My goal this season was quite simple," she said in a telephone interview from Deer Valley. "World domination."

Maybe Hannah wins Wednesday, maybe she doesn't. It's one day. Jennifer Heil of Canada, the silver medalist in Vancouver and gold medalist from Torino in 2006, is an exceedingly good skier, too, as are any number of other women on the tour, and moguls skiing by definition is unpredictable.

Which makes the five-in-a-row streak all the more remarkable. It's even more so when you factor in the December World Cup in China, which took 50 hours of travel time just to get there. "It became a mental game that appealed to me. It all worked out in my favor," she later said in a U.S. Ski Team release about the experience.

Just one more reason why what Hannah has done on the World Cup tour this year ought to serve as a blueprint for a lot of other athletes in a lot of other sports.

You make the plan, and then you execute the plan.

It takes talent, time, commitment and -- and enormous mental toughness.

In his latest best-seller, "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell returns repeatedly to what he calls the "10,000-hour rule," suggesting that you have to do something -- that is, practice it -- roughly 10,000 hours to get good at it.

Hannah Kearney will turn 25 at the end of February. She has been on skis since she was 2.

"It's impossible to say how many hours I have put in," she said. "I would like to emphasize that I still have room for improvement. But it would not surprise me if they said I was at 10,000."

It would have completely understandable if in this post-Olympic year Hannah had opted to take it a little bit easier.

That's not, though, what great champions do.

Yes, she had won gold in Vancouver.

Yes, she won the U.S. championships six weeks later, too.

But what was in the back of her mind -- what stuck with her over the summer?

This:

How, she wondered, could she improve?

Here is how:

She had won the 2009 World Cup season-long title. But despite winning the 2010 Olympic gold medal -- she didn't win the 2010 World Cup title. Heil did.

"My goal this year was to be incredibly consistent, to dominate the season like I had never done," she said. So even though she was now the Olympic gold medalist -- she worked and worked and worked some more.

When you're consistent, you're confident. When you're confident, the odds are that much higher you win, and win consistently.

If it were that easy to win, everyone could do it, right? But it's not, of course.

"It's basically confidence, and the knowing, and the feeling, and that all comes from doing the work and the training, and then you're standing at the top of the course," Hannah Kearney said, "to be the best you can."

"I myself": Tatyana McFadden's amazing journey

When Tatyana McFadden arrived in the United States, she was 6. Until then, she had spent her life in Russia, and most of that in an orphanage, a place so poor they didn't even have crayons for the children to color with, much less a wheelchair for Tatyana to get around in. Tatyana was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a hole in her spine, a condition known as spina bifida. The operation that should have been done immediately on her wasn't done for three weeks. It is a miracle, a genuine miracle, that she even lived.

Tatyana spent her first six years using her arms as legs, her hands as feet. When she was six, Deborah McFadden, then an American government official, visited the orphanage. The American woman felt a connection with this little Russian girl. To make a long story short, she brought the little girl to the United States.

When the little girl got to America, of course she spoke only Russian.

"Ya sama," she said in that language, her first and most memorable words as an American, the words that describe Tatyana McFadden's extraordinary will, strength and spirit then, and now, so especially apt on a day like Saturday in New Zealand, capping a week in which she won five medals, four gold, at the International Paralympic Committee's track and field world championships.

"I myself," is what 6-year-old Tatyana literally said.

Here was destiny, and she had every intention of fulfilling it. Because what she meant in her 6-year-old way, what she and Deborah and everyone who would from then on come to meet Tatyana would now understand, was profoundly clear:  "I can and will do anything and everything."

If you don't think these kinds of things happen in our world, you don't know Tatyana and Deborah McFadden. Or Tatyana's two younger sisters, Hannah, 15, and Ruthi, 11, the younger two adopted from Albania.

Deborah McFadden, now 54, spent four and a half years in a wheelchair, from ages 23 to 27. A freak virus shut her system down. Intensive therapy helped her to walk again.

"I remember being introduced -- when people said, 'This is my handicapped friend, Debbie.'

"No," she said. " 'I'm Debbie.' "

After leaving government service, Deborah ran a highly respected adoption agency. She helped longtime friends of mine, Steve and Jackie Woodward, adopt their beautiful daughter, Layne -- who is now 14, who rides horses and hits golf balls 180 yards off the tee and who is the light of her parents' life --  from Russia.

"She sees beauty in every single human being on the planet," Jackie Woodward said Friday of Deborah McFadden.

Hannah McFadden is an above-the-knee amputee and a budding track and field and swim star.

Ruthi McFadden is the artistic one in the house -- a singer and dancer.

Tatyana has been making headlines since she was a teenager.

She has been an activist arguing for equal access to school athletics for young people with disabilities; her work resulted in landmark legislation in Maryland.

At 15, the youngest member of the U.S. track and field team, she won silver in the category T54 100-meters and bronze in the 200 at the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens.

At the 2006 world championships, she won the 100 in world-record time; she also won silver in the 200 and 400.

In 2008, at the Beijing Paralympics, she won three silvers and a bronze.

As if all that wasn't remarkable enough, she won the 2009 Chicago Marathon's women's wheelchair race. Last November: the New York Marathon women's wheelchair division in a time that was six minutes faster than what she had done the year before.

Let's pause here for a moment. She is both sprint and marathon champion.

Let that sink in.

This week in New Zealand, she won gold in the 200, 400, 800 and 1500, and bronze in the 100.

Her last race, Saturday, was the 400, after which she thanked her coach, and her teammates at the University of Illinois, some of whom are in New Zealand with her, and "my family, who has been supporting me since Day One."

She said, "It is an honor to win five medals, four golds and a bronze, and represent my country."

She said, "It has been an amazing journey. I am just very blessed."

Tatyana McFadden is only 21 years old. So much of her destiny doubtlessly still awaits. Amazing, indeed.

Stolen Olympic medals

Tristan Gale won her gold medal in Salt Lake City in skeleton racing in 2002. Merrrill Moses won his silver medal in water polo at Beijing in 2008.

Both have had their Olympic medals stolen, Tristan's just Wednesday, Merrill's late last month.

What are the odds?

Beyond which -- Tristan Gale Geisler, as she is now known, and Merrill Moses are two of the most upstanding and fundamentally decent people you would ever meet.

You know that saying -- when bad things happen to good people?

Hopefully this story produces a follow-up -- when good things happen to good people because the cops catch the morons and then the morons go to prison for a good long time.

It's certainly one thing to steal. It's another to be so stupid that you steal an Olympic medal. Like, where are you going to fence that?

In the case of Tristan's medal, just to make the situation that much more galling:

The fool, or fools, stole from the house of an Olympic medalist and her U.S. Marine helicopter pilot husband, Capt. Jon Geisler, recently back from deployment in Afghanistan.

They live in Oceanside, Calif., just north of San Diego.

They went out for a noon stroll with their dog, a chocolate lab, Cody. It was while they were out with the dog -- for all of 40 minutes -- that their house, near the beach, was hit.

Tristan, as anyone who knows her can attest, is not the sort to keep her medal locked up in a safe-deposit box. When she raced in Salt Lake, she had dyed her hair red, white and blue. She loves to study art. She gets all gooey when she tells the story of how she and Jon met. She works in a beachfront coffee shop. She just liked to share the medal with anyone and everyone -- kids, friends, groups, whoever.

That's why she typically kept it in a sock in the junk drawer in their kitchen. "Where it had been just fine," she said.

They were getting ready to move to a different house, though, and he had put it in a nice case for packing. And there it sat. You couldn't miss it.

Stolen, along with the medal, were her Olympic ring, diamond engagement ring, computers and some other stuff. The Wii got taken but not the Wii Fit. Go figure.

"I was in Afghanistan all summer long," Jon Geisler said. "It was a busy summer. I watched our young Americans fighting hard for our country and sacrificing for our country. And now I believe you have young individuals of about the same age doing this -- it's very frustrating."

He said a moment later,  "My wife's work -- her medal. It breaks my heart," adding, "It breaks my heart for the people of Utah," where both he and she grew up.

"I hope that the [Oceanside] police have some kind of leads better than what our detectives have," Merrill said late Thursday by phone from Italy, where he's playing water polo.

"Unfortunately, our detectives," in Manteca, Calif., about 75 miles east of San Francisco, where his parents now live, "believe they know who it is. But they have no proof."

The Moses home in Manteca was virtually cleaned out on Dec. 28. Merrill had just proposed two days before to his girlfriend, Laura Bailey. He had flown his parents, and her parents, to Jamaica for the celebration. It was glorious. Everyone was happy.

Then again, the Moses home back in California was empty. Which, apparently, someone knew. Because the house was virtually cleaned out of everything of value.

"My parents are devastated," he said. "I'm devastated."

The story of the American team that won that medal in 2008 is nothing short of incredible. In 2007, they were what new coach Terry Schroeder called a "dysfunctional family."  They came together in 2008 to upset Serbia in the Olympic semifinals and, with Moses in goal, win -- not settle for -- silver. Moses was named to the 2008 all-tournament team.

Moses, meanwhile, is a former college walk-on. He didn't make the 2004 Olympic team; he was that team's final cut. That silver 2008 medal came to symbolize, well, everything about his Olympic journey, and -- much like Tristan -- he loved to take it out and show it around, in particular to kids and to school groups.

Indeed, that's how he met Laura, at a clinic at Capistrano Valley High School, in California's Orange County. Her brother, Andrew, was among those there that day. He saw Laura and, ever polite, asked Laura's mother, Debbie -- who was also in the audience -- if he could ask Laura out on a date.

"That's our country's medal," he said. "It's not these people's medal," meaning the thieves', or whoever might have it now.

"The sad part is, as my mom said, I shared it with so many kids. I tried," he said, "to get them to have their dreams."