1-2 again: "Amazing" runs from Vonn, Cook

Even when Lindsey Vonn is not at her best, she's still too good. Vonn skidded hard Saturday on the downhill course at the World Cup stop in Lake Louise, Canada. Anyone else probably would have crashed and gone flying into the nets.

Not Lindsey.

She recovered and not only went on to finish but to win, and by a whopping 52-hundredths of a second.

For the second straight day, American Stacey Cook finished second, another terrific performance. Before this weekend, Cook's best World Cup finish had been a fourth, in 2006, in Lake Louise.

Cook, 28, had been building toward these sorts of results.

She was a member of the 2006 and 2006 Olympic teams, 10th in last-season's downhill standings, fourth in this week's final Lake Louise training run. She said after Friday's second-place run, "I really shut my brain off today -- I know I can ski with these girls. I have been so close for so long, so today I decided it was time. I let my ability take over."

Vonn, after Friday's racing, said of Cook, "I'm so proud of Stacey. She has had the ability to be a podium skier for so long. She really deserved to be there today."

And Saturday, too.

"I hope this is the tip of the iceberg for me," Cook said. "My coaches have told me like for a long time that I'm like fine wine -- that I get better with age.

"This has been a long time coming and I'm just now starting to believe that this is actually happening."

For her part, Vonn was behind Saturday at the first two checkpoints, by 18-hundredths at the first, by 21-hundredths at the second.

By the third, she had worked her way into the lead, up by eight-hundredths.

Then, though -- disaster.

Or what for anyone else would be disaster.

Vonn slipped and got herself turned virtually sideways on the hill.

For an instant, she was on one ski, tottering.

Of course, her momentum and speed were at a standstill.

Cook said, "There was a second there that I actually thought I might win this thing, but Lindsey is amazing. When she made that mistake my heart actually stopped for a second. She’s amazing -- she’s the only athlete that could stop on-course and then still win."

Indeed, Vonn somehow righted herself and aimed straight down the mountain again.

Later, Vonn would say, "I felt like I just hit a few bumps and caught my inside ski and almost went into the fence, then somehow kept going. It was definitely interesting, but I didn't give up. I haven't won with that big of a mistake before."

There were two turns remaining before the flats. Those she turned into flat-out speed.

Numbers don't lie.

At the fourth checkpoint, Vonn was 52-hundredths of a second behind.

By the fifth, she was ahead by a tenth of a second.

In between, there's a radar gun that measures how fast each skier goes. Vonn was clocked at 135.6 kilometers per hour, or 84.2 mph.

At the finish, Vonn was 52-hundredths ahead of Cook.

So -- from the fourth checkpoint to the finish, she made back a full second (and four extra hundredths).

After she crossed the finish line, Vonn shook her head and stuck out her tongue in apparent disbelief.

She said, "Over the last few years I’ve really worked on getting stronger and that helps recover from mistakes like that one. It’s not the way you want to ski, but it helps my confidence to know that I can recover from them."

Vonn has accomplished some outlandish things in Lake Louise both this season, and last. She won Friday's downhill by 1.73 seconds. She won both last season's downhills as well, the first by 1.95 seconds, the second by 1.68.

But to win, when all seemed lost, and by .52-hundredths -- it's yet another chapter in the annals of America's greatest alpine ski racer.

Remember, too: just a little over two weeks ago, Vonn was in a Vail, Colo., hospital, being treated for stomach pains. When she was released, she could barely walk.

The victory Saturday marked Vonn's 55th career World Cup win, tying her with Swiss star Vreni Schneider for second on the women's all-time wins list. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll leads with 62.

It was her 13th Lake Louise victory -- 11th downhill, two super-G -- and sixth straight win on the mountain.

Slovenia's Tina Maze leads the still-young 2012-13 World Cup overall standings with 347 points. Vonn stands fourth, with 210.

The third leg of the three-race Lake Louise series goes off Sunday, a super-G.

Lindsey Vonn makes a statement

After yet another spectacular performance by Lindsey Vonn Friday in Lake Louise, Canada, one seriously has to wonder: why can't she ski against the guys? Vonn won the first of three World Cup races over the weekend in Lake Louise, a downhill, by an absurd 1.73 seconds.

American Stacey Cook took second -- her first World Cup podium, and the first 1-2 finish for U.S. women in a World Cup downhill since 2006. Germany's Maria Höfl-Riesch and Liechtenstein's Tina Weirather tied for third, one-hundredth of a second behind Cook.

Vonn had petitioned skiing's international governing authority, FIS, for permission to race here last week against the men. FIS turned her down, essentially saying  men race against men and that's that.

Since then, Max Gartner, the president of Alpine Canada, has said he's in talks with Red Bull, which sponsors Vonn, to put together a race, and to hold it at Lake Louise.

Such a race would be a marketing and publicity boon for a sport that needs it, especially here in the United States.

Alpine skiing is great stuff. Lindsey Vonn is a great champion. FIS should put her front and center, someway, somehow. What's so difficult about that?

Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time overall men's World Cup champion from Norway, gets it, and told the Canadian Press: "I've trained with her. My experience is if you are on a hill that she likes and you don't ski good, she can beat you. It's realistic that she would be in the race."

Vonn said after flying down the course Friday, "Well, I kind of felt like I had to win today. I mean, like you say you want to race with the men -- you can't really not win the women's races. I knew that. I was trying to prove a point, mostly to myself but to everyone else who doesn't think I should race with the men. I don't know. I just do my best."

Lindsey Vonn's best, especially at Lake Louise, is so good one struggles to keep finding words to describe just how good.

The first victory of her career -- ever -- came in Lake Louise, in 2004.

Friday's victory marked her 54th. She now stands one behind Vreni Schneider on the all-time women's list.

It was her 12th in Lake Louise -- 10 in the downhill, two in super-G.

It was her fifth straight victory there and first of the still-young 2012-13 World Cup season.

Last year, she won the first of the two Lake Louise downhills in 1:53.19. Her winning margin in that race was an absurd 1.95 seconds.

She followed that up by winning the Saturday downhill by "only" 1.68 seconds, and then winning Sunday's super-G.

This year, her winning time Friday: 1:52.61. At the second speed check, she was flying along at 84 mph.

Making all this even more outlandish: Vonn was in a Vail, Colo., hospital just a little over two weeks ago with stomach pains. In a column she writes in the Denver Post, she said that after she was released it made her tired just walking down the hall of her condo: 'I felt like I was 100 years old, and I couldn't even think about skiing."

At the end of last Saturday's race in Aspen, she collapsed in exhaustion.

This, however, has always been the Lindsey Vonn way.

She has faced a succession of extraordinary challenges: a crash in the downhill in Torino in 2006, a gashed thumb at the world championships in Val d'Isere in 2009, a banged-up shin before the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.

Invariably, she rises to the occasion.

After the race Friday, Vonn was asked -- naturally -- how she felt, and if you were the other women on the tour, maybe you would be giving some thought to the notion of whether she ought to race the guys at Lake Louise, because this is what she had to say: "It just gives me confidence."

A fresh look at the Lake Placid model

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. -- The Olympic spirit is at once real and yet tremendously difficult to define or quantify. If there is ever a place that has that spirit, however, it is here, in this little town of not even 3,000 people.

Here, the bronze medal that Andrew Weibrecht won in the super-G at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics hangs in a frame behind the check-in desk at the Mirror Lake Inn, run by his parents, Ed and Lisa. Just steps off Main Street -- literally, just a couple steps -- sits the oval where Eric Heiden won all five speed-skating races in 1980; every winter that oval is frozen over and used by kids and, well, anyone with a pair of skates.

A short drive away is the bobsled track. Even closer, standing sentinel over town, is the ski jump. It looks out, over among other things, Whiteface Mountain and and the ski runs and of course, straight down below, the simple cauldron that was used at those 1980 Winter Games, a reminder of how no-frills the Olympics used to be.

Thirty-two years after those Games, all these facilities are in working order. Everything is here, everything works and everything is a short drive -- or a walk -- from everything else. And, of course, everyone, it seems, wants to play hockey in the arena that Mike Eruzione and the U.S. team made famous.

But that's no miracle. That's testament to vision and public policy and the notion that the Olympic spirit matters -- indeed, that legacy matters.

The International Olympic Committee now stresses the notion of legacy -- that a Games shouldn't just come to a particular town and then leave so-called white elephants, a bunch of facilities and venues idling away, or worse, torn down after being built at a cost of millions.

Lake Placid, host to the Winter Games in 1932 and 1980, was way ahead of its time.

Maybe it's time to take a fresh look at the Lake Placid model.

The last editions of the Winter Olympics have gone to big cities -- Vancouver, Torino, Salt Lake, Nagano.

Before that came Lillehammer, and the small-town feel of Lillehammer is what the organizers of the Pyeongchang Games say they aim, in part, to deliver in 2018. Even so, those Korean Games will involve considerable infrastructure costs.

The capital costs of the Sochi 2014 project absolutely will run to the billions. It's unclear if the true costs will ever be known, since accounting will be at the discretion of the Russian government.

The bobsled run used for the 2006 Torino Winter Games cost $100 million to build, $2 million to operate annually. It was announced last month that it is due to be dismantled.

Contrast: the 20-curve, 4,773-foot bobsled track in Lake Placid, re-built for the February, 2000, Goodwill Games, is now a mainstay on the World Cup circuit, the tour making its usual stop here recently.

The track cost about $30 million, according to Ted Blazer, the president and chief executive officer of the New York state Olympic Regional Development Authority.

ORDA's annual budget now runs to about $32 million.

Each fiscal year since 1982-83, the state has kicked in millions of dollars to ORDA, recognizing the value in the Olympic brand in Lake Placid.

Again, and for overseas critics of the American style of Olympic budgeting: every year for 30 years that has been a line item in the state budget, proposed by the governor, reviewed by the legislature; each year, it has been approved, and in some years with significant capital outlays or debt-service obligations.

Since the 1982-83 fiscal year, the state's contribution totals just under $228.3 million.

That is more than just legacy. That is building for the present, and the future.

That commitment has put Lake Placid in position to bid for, say, the 2020 or 2024 Youth Winter Olympic Games. There would be issues, perhaps significant -- where to house that many athletes, for instance, because any new development would have to contend with the fundamental issue that Lake Placid is surrounded by state parkland. Nonetheless, such a bid would seem to be on the radar.

"Having the athletes rub elbows with all the tourists in town, we're doing it in this beautiful pristine environment -- it's who we are," Blazer said. "When you think of Lake Placid -- it's the whole game, it's one neat package right here. It's not the big city where it gets lost. It gives us identity."

Added Jeff Potter, ORDA's director of corporate development, "We have hosted the two Olympic Games. It's just in our DNA to continue that legacy."

The U.S. Olympic Committee opened its current training facility in town in 1989.

Steve Holcomb, the current world and Olympic four-man bobsled champion, said, "Lake Placid is such a small town -- so far out of the way -- but it's so Olympic and so big. They have done a great job. The 'Miracle on Ice' -- they took that and ran with it. They have the Olympic Training Center there and they work really, really hard to make sure they maximize what they have there."

The culture in Lake Placid -- families and volunteers committed to winter sports -- also stands as a key part of why this little town so far out of the way remains hugely relevant in Olympic circles.

Simply put, you grow up here with the Olympic Games in mind. Billy Demong, a gold and silver medalist at the Vancouver Games in the Nordic combined, made his first Olympic team at the Nagano 1998 Games, when he was just 17.

Lowell Bailey and Tim Burke have both been to the 2006 and 2010 Games in biathlon, and are aiming for Sochi in 2014; Bailey is from Lake Placid, Burke from Paul Smiths, a hamlet a few miles to the northwest.

"Growing up in Lake Placid," Bailey said, "you are surrounded by people at every step of the Olympic journey, the Olympic path. There are gold medalists who live in town. There are people who have gotten an Olympic medal and come back to town. You have the Olympics from the organizational standpoint. There is everything in between. There were athletes ahead of us. Billy Demong was the first of us … that was something we saw. You saw what was possible, and that made it so much more motivating."

Echoed Burke, "Growing up around Lake Placid, it seems so much more attainable. In other towns, it's something you might see on TV every four years. For us -- it's something we live every day."

Like "barely moving" ... at 90 mph

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. -- At the first turn, my head cracked against the right side of the bobsled. Then the sled swung the other way, and my head slammed against the left side of the sled.

Good thing I was wearing a helmet. But for 46 seconds, I pretty much felt like a bobble-head doll as we rocketed down the bobsled course, the same one they were running a World Cup event on that weekend.

I was the No. 2 guy in a four-man sled that late afternoon and, frankly, they were being nice to me -- Bryan Berghorn, the driver; Michael Burke, the No. 3 guy; and Shane Hook, the brakeman. We didn't start at the top of the course. We put in a few turns down. We only reached about 70 mph. Not 80 or more, like they do when they really mean it.

"I'd do rides all night if I could," Berghorn, a Lake Placid guy, said, and now having done it once, experienced the wild roller-coaster ride, it begs the question -- how in the world do you learn to maneuver these things? (By the way, not to brag -- OK, I'm bragging: I did not get woozy or worse.)

With the Sochi 2014 Games approaching, bobsled is increasingly soaking up the spotlight. The U.S. team features standouts such as Steve Holcomb, the reigning four-man Olympic and world champion, and his powerhouse pushman Steve Langton; moreover, track and field stars such as Tianna Madison and Lolo Jones are making a bid to join the 2014 winter team.

Victory in a bobsled race typically comes by fractions of a second.

Control matters.

So how do you achieve that control?

Because, just to be obvious, ice is really slippery.

Well, to be equally obvious, you don't achieve that control overnight.

It takes a lot of practice. With that practice comes experience. And with that experience comes feel.

And then, finally, comes confidence.

Jazmine Fenlator started on the bobsled in 2007 after running track in college. Her first ride, she said, "was not comfortable -- in all honesty, it let like someone stuffed me in a garbage can and someone rolled me down the hill." But, she said, "I definitely enjoyed the thrill."

That was in the back of a sled, of course. Someone else drove.

After a few trips in Park City, Utah, in the front in 2008, she finally went to formal driving school in 2009 in Lake Placid. "What takes getting used to," she said, "is staying calm and staying relaxed. You don't feel the G forces as much but you do feel the pressure."

She said, "I definitely relate it to being a teen-age driver with your permit to being a driver five years later," adding, "Over time you become more aware and more comfortable."

With corresponding results.

After working her way up to several World Cup starts last year, Fenlator and Jones took silver at the World Cup event here in Lake Placid; teammates Elana Meyers and Madison took the bronze.

For his part, Holcomb said, "It's just like anything else. You don't start at the top your first time. You start where you did. And then you go down a few times. Your first couple runs -- you're absolutely terrible, you're bouncing off walls. It's a learning curve. And then you get to the point where you understand what you're doing."

Think about what it's like, even as an experienced driver, when you first merge onto an interstate highway, he said. You look to your left and all the cars are going 70 or 75 miles per hour. Everything seems to be going so fast.

Now give it 10 minutes.

You're cruising down the highway at 75. The speed is relative. You're so in control that you can fiddle with the radio, or eat an apple, or whatever, all the while keeping your eye on the road -- and, again, you're doing 75. More, if the highway patrol isn't around, right?

That's what it's like when you have experience on the track. Doing 75, or even 80, doesn't seem at all perilous.

In fact, it's just like what football players say. The game slows down.

Holcomb won the two-man race in Lake Placid, and then again at the next tour stop, in Park City, and would go on to win the two-man for a third straight race, in Whistler, B.C.

Before that third race, on a track widely considered the fastest in the world, he said, "We're going 85 to 90 miles per hour here in Whistler. It's fast. But I can see everything in front of me. I'm in control. I know exactly what is going on.

"It feels," he said, "like we are barely moving."

U.S. cross-country ski relay makes history

The United States of America put on a man on the moon 43 summers ago. You wouldn't think, really, that it would take until Sunday to put four American women on the podium in a World Cup cross-country relay ski race for the very first time.

Jessie Diggins, the American anchor, outsprinted Marthe Kristoffersen of Norway II as the U.S. women's 4 x 5k relay team claimed third place Sunday at the World Cup relay in Gallivare, Sweden.

It just goes to show you two things:

One, nothing is impossible. Americans genuinely can excel at cross-country skiing.

Two, when Americans make something a priority, they are as good at it as anybody in the world. This is the lesson of the U.S. Nordic combined team at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, and this is what the U.S. cross-country team is aiming to show the world in Sochi in 2014.

"We skied our hearts out and I am so proud to be a part of something this big," Diggins said.

Norway I won, in a time of 45.32.2; Sweden took second, in 45.51.6.

The Americans: 46.00.4.

Norway II: 46.00.9, just five-tenths of a second behind.

All the signs were there for this on Saturday, when Kikkan Randall finished third in the 10k and Holly Brooks fifth. Liz Stephen had been among the race leaders but broke a pole and ended up 21st.

Randall was last year's World Cup sprint champion.

She and Brooks, in an interview late Saturday, had talked about how so much was changing.

You can see it, they said, in attitudes, and not just within the U.S. team -- where there is the absolute, unconditional belief that they can win -- but from others, and in particular the Scandinavians, who long had dismissed the Americans.

Now, both said, other teams wanted to know whether the Americans would be interested in training with them.

That never used to happen, they said.

That, they said, is a sure sign of emerging respect.

You can see it, too, in resource -- with, for instance, the physical therapist now traveling with the U.S. team. That never used to happen, either.

The previous U.S. women's relay best had been a fifth -- last winter at Nove Mesto, Czech Republic. But that was without Randall, who was out for that race.

Even so, the Americans started Sunday in bib 3, on the front line, with Norway I and Sweden. "Some people at the race today were skeptical that we could put together the four world-class relay legs that it takes to reach the podium in this women's field," the U.S. head coach, Chris Grover, said. "But the women handled the pressure, and did it."

Brooks went first, skiing the first of the two classic legs. She skied solidly, 11.2 seconds out, in eight place.

Randall then skied the fastest classic leg of the day. She moved the Americans up into second, 8.2 seconds back of Norway I.

As the race moved to freestyle, Stephen got the Americans to within 4.2 seconds of Norway I.

Diggins went out knowing that Sweden's anchor, Charlotte Kalla, the Vancouver 2010 10k gold medalist, would probably overtake her. Which Kalla did.

The idea was to hold on to third place.

Kristoffersen actually caught Diggins. Together, they climbed the final hill into the stadium.

Diggins would later tell fasterskier.com, which specializes in coverage of cross-country and biathlon: "At the end I could really feel it. I thought, I do no want to lose us a medal here, the girls and the team, the whole team worked so hard this year. I'm not going to screw this up right now. I was able to get just enough energy to get to the end. And then I thought I was going to die. I think I might have been crying."

After Diggins collapsed onto the snow, the other Americans spent maybe 10 minutes in the finish area. There were hugs. There were tears. The TV cameras couldn't get enough.

Later, Stephen told FIScrosscountry.com, "I have always looked at the TV and seen people crying after big races. I didn't understand that feeling until today."

Marco Sullivan's "awesome" podium finish

Alpine racing is a hard game. The snow is really ice, and it's often ferociously cold and treacherous out there. The potential for injury is significant. There's enormous pressure to produce, and if you don't, you run the risk of having your sponsors tell you thanks but, you know, we're moving on. Marco Sullivan has been there and done that.

All of that.

It's why finishing third, like he did Saturday in the World Cup downhill in Lake Louise, Canada, is all the sweeter.

"When I saw third place," he said, "it was kind of surreal," adding, "I don't remember the next couple of minutes."

Norway's Aksel Lund Svindal won the race, in 1:48.31. It was his 17th World Cup victory.

Austria's Max Franz, who had crossed first in Wednesday's training run, took second, 64-hundredths behind, for his first World Cup podium finish.

Sullivan and Austria's Klaus Kroell tied for third, just two-hundredths behind Franz.

Even the U.S. coach, Sasha Rearick, was, well, surprised.

"He's got the right direction," Rearick said of Sullivan, adding, "A bigger step than I expected today. But he has been doing the right things."

Sullivan, who is from the Lake Tahoe area, is one of a number of good guys on the U.S. team. He skied in the 2002 and 2010 Olympics.

That said, he's now 31 and has been one of the guys for 13 years now.

It was no lock he was going to make this season lucky 13.

Sullivan acknowledges now that his place on the team had seemed in "a little bit of jeopardy."

He had, he said, been battling herniated discs in his back from a 2009 crash.

Two seasons ago, there was a nasty concussion.

This past spring -- after two seasons with not even one finish in single digits -- he got dropped by his sponsors.

The ski maker Atomic, though, saw enough to pick him up. That was step one in the comeback.

Step two was time off, and getting as healthy as possible: "It's still there," he said of his back troubles. "I have learned to deal with it a lot better. A lot of stretching. A lot of core exercises. Just, I guess, a little maturity as well."

The summer brought a six-week block on skis in Chile. This fall: more training at the U.S. team's Copper Mountain speed center.

Sullivan said he never really gave in to concern he might lose his spot on the team.

"If I was healthy and I was on the right equipment," he said, "I still had the resolve and the drive to still be back on top. It was just a matter of working out the details."

Before this weekend, Sullivan had three times over his career notched top-three tour finishes, all downhills. He won in Chamonix, France, in 2008. In Wengen, Switzerland, in 2009, he took third. And in Lake Louise, in 2007, he got second -- his first World Cup podium.

This, then, was a course he knew well.

Running all week here from starting spot No. 42, he was 25th in training on Wednesday. Then 15th in the second training run, on Thursday.

Then, when it counted, third.

Just before it was Sullivan's turn to ski Saturday, proceedings were put on hold for about 20 minutes; Italian racer Mattia Casse slid into the nets on the side of the course. He was taken to a local hospital with what was initially described as a shoulder injury.

"Marco did an unbelievable job of executing what he has been working on in his skiing, and the game plan, at the right time," Rearick said.

"I came up to Lake Louise knowing I could do something good," Sullivan said. "My goal today was top 10. And to exceed that -- it's awesome."

U.S. cross-country skiing breakthrough

It's only one race. And most of America won't pay it much notice -- not on a day when USC and Notre Dame were playing football.

But for Kikkan Randall to finish third, and fellow American Holly Brooks fifth, in the women's 10-kilometer freestyle event on Saturday in Gallivare, Sweden, 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the opening cross-country World Cup meet of the season -- that is big stuff looking toward the Sochi Olympics, now just a little bit over 14 months away.

The Norwegians, as usual, dominated both the women's and men's events. Marit Bjoergen captured her 56th individual victory, winning in 22:31.8. Another Norwegian, Therese Johaug, took second, 12.6 seconds behind. Randall crossed 25.9 seconds behind, with Charlotte Kalla of Sweden fourth, 15.92 back.

Bjoergen has seven Olympic medals, three gold. Johaug won gold in Vancouver in 2010 in the women's 4 x 5k relay. Kalla is the Vancouver 10k gold medalist.

Martin Johnsrud Sundby won the men's 15k -- his first World Cup win and just second individual win overall -- in 30.37. Alexey Poltoranin of Kazakhstan took second, 8.9 seconds behind; Sweden's Marcus Hellner took third.

The United States has not earned an Olympic medal in cross-country skiing since Bill Koch's silver in Innsbruck in 1976 in the 30k.

But like the U.S. Nordic combined team, which broke through to win four medals in Vancouver in 2010, the trajectory of the U.S. cross-country team -- as Sochi draws into view -- would seem to be pointing in the right direction .

Randall, already a three-time Olympian, is last season's World Cup sprint champion.

Brooks skied on the Vancouver Olympic team.

Both are based in Alaska.

Brooks turned 30 earlier this year. Randall will turn 30 at the end of December.

"I like to say cross-country skiers are like fine wine," Randall said Saturday after the race, adding, "We get better with age. It just takes a lot of years to train the systems for endurance sports. You see it in triathlon, you see it in marathon … it takes maturity and experience."

It takes mental strength.

Brooks said she has with her now a "vivid memory" of a blog post written by Kris Freeman, a top U.S. male cross-country skier, in which he said, paraphrasing, enough with the hero worship. Freeman was the top U.S.men's finisher Saturday, in 32nd, in the 15k.

For far too long, she explained, "American skiers have looked at Scandinavians and automatically put them on a pedestal. We have thought they are better than we are. That they are superstars. That they grow up on skis, have skiers on cereal boxes and we are just not as good."

Um, why?

Since it was football rivalry weekend back home in the States, why not break out a variation on the football cliché -- everybody puts their skis on one at a time, right?

Out of 77 racers -- one more did not start -- Brooks drew the number six start slot Saturday.  She posted sweet splits but thought little about it, knowing the seeded group of racers, those expected to break through to the podium, were coming much later in the day. She crossed in 23:00.3.

When she finished, as the race leader, Brooks was led to the reindeer-skin leader's chair. And there she sat -- for a very long time.

Through the racers who drew start slots in the teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, even into the 50s.

"They kept telling me, 'You can get up and do something. I was not to get up and leave. As far as I was concerned, that was the best seat in the house.' "

Randall drew start slot 56. She had intended for the race Saturday to be nothing more than a hard workout. Still recovering from a stress fracture in her right foot at the end of the summer, she spent September -- when she typically is ramping up for the season ahead -- on a doctor's-orders 50-percent reduction in her training that included running not on dry land but in a pool.

Upon arrival in Europe, last week, she still had not done any demanding intervals. Then, on Friday, the U.S. team did a workout and, she said, it felt "surprisingly good."

The real surprise, though, was Saturday's third-place. It marked Randall's first-ever non-sprint podium finish.

"The joke on the World Cup circuit now is that everyone needs to do intervals in a swimming pool," Brooks said, laughing.

Seriously, though -- two Americans in the top five. This is how Olympic medals -- plural -- become real possibilities. Another American with experience in the Vancouver Olympics, Liz Stephen of East Montpelier, Vt., who turns 25 in about a month, was skiing in the top five before crashing and breaking a pole; she finished 21st.

The U.S. women are expected to be contenders in Sunday's 4 x 5k team event.

"It's breaking down the barriers and doing this once and making sure you don't underestimate yourself," Brooks said. "If I can do this once, I can do it again. If I can do it. my teammates can do it."

Before Saturday, the refrain had always been, as Brooks noted, "Oh, you're just an American and an American has never been on a distance podium before." She paused. "There's no way. Having these results," she said, "is contagious."

USA Swimming's night to celebrate

NEW YORK -- Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps' coach, came first. At a filled-to-the-max ballroom here at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, Bowman won USA Swimming's "coach of the year" award at its annual gala, called the "Golden Goggles," and when he took to the stage he had this to say: "Michael, it has been a privilege to be your coach. It has been even better to be your friend."

A few moments later came Phelps, introduced by the strange-but-awesome pairing of Donald Trump and Gary Hall Jr., the former sprint champion -- on a night when the invite said, "Black Tie" -- wearing, indeed, a funky black-and-white tie draped over a black T-shirt that blared out in pink letters, "Barbie," the ensemble dressed up with a black jacket.

Phelps, Trump allowed, was "a friend of mine." He riffed a little bit more, "You think he's going to win?

Of course he was going to win for "male athlete of the year," and when Phelps got to the stage, he said, referring to London 2012, his fourth Games, "This Olympics was the best Olympics I have ever been a part of."

No one in the American Olympic scene -- arguably not even the U.S. Olympic Committee -- puts on a show like USA Swimming. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also among the celebrity presenters. The comic Jim Gaffigan came out for a 20-minute riff that only marginally touched on swimming but did include references to Phelps and Subway sandwiches as well as Gaffigan's much-applauded routine on Hot Pockets, the microwaveable turnover.

Out in the hall there was a silent auction with all manner of stuff for sale -- including a framed picture, signed by both Phelps and Serbia's Milorad Cavic, of the 2008 Beijing 100-meter butterfly, which Phelps famously won by one-hundredth of a second.

It's not simply that American swimmers are so good.

It's that the culture of the U.S. swim team creates success.

That is what was fully and richly on display Monday night at the Marriott Marquis ballroom: a program that dares to dream big and that celebrates the role everyone plays in achieving those dreams, from support staff to coaches to athletes.

Indeed, when the night began with introductions across the stage, it wasn't the athletes or the coaches who came first. It was the support staff. And they got just as loud a round of applause from those on hand.

There are other well-run national governing bodies -- the ski and snowboard team, for instance, which claimed 21 of the world-best 37 medals the U.S. team won in Vancouver in 2010.

That said, virtually every other U.S. Olympic federation could learn a little something, or maybe a lot, from how the swim team gets things done. In London, the swim team won 31 medals -- 16 gold, nine silver, six bronze.

As good as the U.S. track team was -- it won 29 medals -- the numbers don't lie. The No. 1 performance in London came in the water.

It was observed by NBC's Bob Costas, the night's emcee, that if the American swim team had been a stand-alone country it would have finished ninth in the overall medals table -- and fifth in the gold-medal count.

When the 49 athletes on the London 2012 team were introduced, two by two, they showed just how much they genuinely liked each other -- the fun that was so vividly on display in the "Call Me Maybe" video they had produced before the Games, which became a viral internet sensation.

Ricky Berens and Elizabeth Beisel didn't just shake hands when they met at center stage; they executed a chest-bump. Missy Franklin did a twirl, courtesy of Jimmy Feigin. Cullen Jones and Kara Lynn Joyce struck "007" poses.

Time and again, the winners Monday took time to say thank you to their families, coaches, staff and teammates.

"It's just -- just amazing to be here," said Katie Ledecky, the Maryland high school sensation who took home two awards, "breakout performer" and "female race of the year," for her dominating 800 freestyle victory in London. She said of the London Games, "I just had a blast … I got to be inspired by all of you."

Nathan Adrian, the "male race of the year winner" for his one-hundredth of a second victory in the 100-meter freestyle, said, "One last note. Thank you to my mom. I know you're watching online. I love you."

"I've never been on a team that was a close as this one," Dana Vollmer, the 100 fly winner who swam in the world record-breaking, gold medal-winning 4 x 100 women's medley relay, along with Franklin, Rebecca Soni and Allison Schmitt, said.

Of the relay team, she said, "We were called the 'Smiley Club.' "

Echoed Franklin, "My teammates are the best people you would ever meet in your entire life." She also said, "With Thanksgiving coming up, I realized I don't have a single thing in my life not to be thankful for."

Phelps provided the valedictory. He was up for "male athlete of the year" against Ryan Lochte (five medals, two gold), Adrian (three medals, two gold) and Matt Grevers (three medals, two gold).

Phelps followed up his eight-for-eight in Beijing with six medals in London, four gold. He became the first male swimmer to execute the Olympic three-peat, and he did it in not just one event but two, the 200 IM and the 100 fly. His 22 Olympic medals stand as the most-ever. Eighteen of those 22 are gold.

Trump, ever the sage, opined, "No athlete has ever come close," a reference to the arc of Phelps' dominating career, adding, "I don't think they ever will."

All of that is why Phelps, who has repeatedly announced that London marked his last Games as a competitive swimmer, had to be the slam-dunk winner. And if it felt Monday like USA Swimming was maybe -- if reluctantly -- turning the page from the Phelps years, there was that, too.

In London, Phelps embraced his role as veteran team leader. He showed anew Monday how much that meant to him.

The others in the "male athlete" category? "We were all in the same apartment in the [Olympic] village," Phelps said, making it clear that while they might sometimes be rivals in the pool, they were, beyond that, teammates, now and forever.

And, he said, as for that "Call Me Maybe" video: "At first I didn't want to do it. And now I'm really glad I did it because," like the swim team's Olympic year and the celebration Monday of that season, "it turned out to be something really special."

Slow, steady and big-picture right-on

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. -- On the calendar of big happenings, the International Olympic Committee's sixth Athlete Career Program is not strike-up-the-band sort of stuff. And yet -- that it got underway here Thursday is, in its way, noteworthy indeed.

For it's the big picture that counts.

It marked the first time this forum had ever been held outside the IOC's Lausanne, Switzerland, base. And in concert with other recent conferences, it underscored the U.S. Olympic Committee's slow but steady effort at relationship building -- the strategy its senior leadership has for nearly three years now not just talked but walked to make plain that the USOC is, indeed and in deed, a good partner for the IOC and, beyond, the wider Olympic movement.

Ultimately, of course, the USOC would intend to leverage that goodwill in bidding again for the Games -- most probably for the 2024 Summer Games. It has appointed a committee to study whether to bid for the 2024 or 2026 Winter Games; an initial report is forthcoming next month.

A bid, though, and all it entails, is yet a long way off. The IOC would not select the 2024 Summer Games, for instance, until 2017.

For now, the work is in lower-key efforts such as the program here -- a forum aimed at answering the question that seems obvious but too often isn't until it abruptly dawns on an athlete at the end of his or her competitive career: now what am I going to do?

If, the IOC reasons, a structure is in place so that athletes can be thinking about that question in advance, and HR officers at major employers have it in mind that athletes are way more than dumb jocks and can bring something extra to the corporate arena, then that's worth promoting -- which it has been doing through Adecco, the Zurich-based concern, since 2005.

Through the end of 2011, according to the IOC and Adecco, the program had reached out to 8,000 athletes on five continents with training opportunities and job placements.

On hand in Lake Placid were some two dozen Adecco managers from around the world. The conference coincided with the first World Cup stop of the bobsled, skeleton and luge season --  a potential recruit base, of course.

"We can learn, we can share and we can also feel the Olympic spirit in what we are doing," said Patrick Glennon, Adecco's senior vice president for the IOC program.

Also on hand: at least five members of the IOC's athlete commission, including Claudia Bokel of Germany, considered by many a rising IOC star.

"It's the first time we have gone outside Lausanne," she said, a reference to the five prior career programs. "If we want to do outreach activities, we want to see different places in the world."

That sort of outreach has been a USOC hallmark since the start of 2010 -- when Larry Probst, the USOC chairman, and Scott Blackmun, the chief executive, started up as a team.

Three months before, Chicago had gotten thumped in the race for the 2016 Summer Games, Rio de Janeiro winning big. Thereupon the Americans realized they had to reframe their approach, concentrating first on relationship-building and then on resolving a longstanding revenue dispute with the IOC.

The revenue dispute -- which, understandably, drew big headlines -- got solved earlier this year.

In the meantime, quietly, the USOC has also been trying to play host to IOC and related conferences in a way that almost never happened in the years before.

Even before the 2010 change, the IOC came to Denver for an executive board meeting -- albeit in conjunction with the 2009 SportAccord conference, which was highlighted by politicking aimed at the 2016 Summer Games vote then just seven months away.

Since then, meanwhile, in October, 2011, the IOC's fifth "International Athletes' Forum" came to Colorado Springs. This past February, Los Angeles was the site of the IOC's "Women and Sport" conference.

Now this Lake Placid session.

Later this month, in Miami, there will be a best practices symposium for north and south American national Olympic Committees, along with a Pan-American Sports Organization executive committee meeting. Some 125 people are expected to attend.

In the same way that the USOC is not running the meeting here, it's not going to run the meeting in Miami. When you're genuinely part of a community -- in this case, the so-called "Olympic family" -- sometimes you simply open the door to the house and have a meeting, even if someone else is running it at your dining-room table. It's that elemental.

"It's just a mindset that we are one of 205 NOCs," Chris Sullivan, a senior USOC official, said here. "We are here to do our part."

Ted Ligety's "once-in-a-career" giant slalom victory

Alpine ski race wins usually come by the hundredths of a second. Ted Ligety won the opening World Cup race of the 2012-13 season Sunday on the famous Rettenbach Glacier in Sölden, Austria, by a crazy 2.75 seconds.

It was, as he put it afterward, a "once-in-a-career margin."

It was also a demonstration of, as U.S. head coach Sasha Rearick put it, Ligety's "complete ability and confidence in himself."

Even on the best days, there is nothing inherently fair about alpine racing. And conditions Sunday were, in a word, godawful. "It was a tough day for everybody," Ligety said, adding, "I just fought and maybe took more risk than it was worth - than was maybe smart."

That's just modesty talking -- the guy from Park City, Utah, who posed for photos after the race with his parents.

Ligety is the 2006 Olympic gold medalist in the combined. He is a three-time World Cup season giant slalom champion.

He won in Sölden last year. Indeed, his most recent finishes there had read like this: 2-3-2-1.

But this was not only a new season. Everyone had to ski on new -- different -- skis. Rules changes mandated skis that were, to reduce a complex situation to its basics, a little bit longer but narrower skis designed to slow racers down.

Ligety was originally one of the most vocal opponents of the rules change.

Indeed, a blog he wrote last November decrying the change was entitled "Tyranny of FIS," the acronym a reference to skiing's international governing body. He remains a vocal proponent of athlete input into rules changes.

FIS officials have said many times they believe the rules changes will make the skiing safer.

By last February, meanwhile, after testing the new skis, Ligety discovered he was actually faster on them than the old ones. He called a blog he wrote then, in a reference to the new skis' minimum radius, "35 meters of irony."

Shortly before racing got underway at Sölden, in a video blog posted by American teammate Warner Nickerson, Ligety confirmed that, yes, he was in fact faster on the new skis in most GS conditions.

No one, however, counted on a set of variables like what race day Sunday brought: soft snow, variable light and a blizzard.

The GS consists of two runs. The winner is the guy with the day's lowest combined time.

Ligety ran his first run in near-darkness. He crossed four-hundredths of a second behind France's Thomas Fanara.

That, Ligety said afterward, "just fired me up," adding, "I knew I should have been in the lead."

He skied his second run in a virtual whiteout, the blizzard raging. He said, "I was just taking a ton of risk," adding, "It really paid out," the biggest margin of victory in a World Cup GS in 34 years. Manfred Moelgg of Italy took second; Austria's Marcel Hirscher, last season's overall and GS tour champion, third. Fanara came in fourth.

FIS records show that the time difference between the winner and second place in a World Cup GS has only been bigger six times before -- and all those in the 1970s. The biggest margin: 4.06 seconds, set by Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark in the 1978-79 season.

"I'm psyched," Ligety said after the second run. "I didn't want to leave anything out there. I was hammering!"

It's only one race in a long season.

But it went a long way toward re-establishing Ligety as the best GS skier in the world. Because it's not just that Ligety won, and by such a commanding margin. It's that he did it in such absurd conditions, and that he created that margin almost entirely in a single run.

"Ted's arguments he had on the skis were his own opinions but a lot of people agreed," Rearick said. "He's a vocal person and that showed in his arguments against the skis. But once he figured out this is what it is, he put all that energy, all that focus into making sure he was going to be the fastest and that he wasn't going to lose."

Hirscher asked rhetorically, "What can I say about the incredible Ted Ligety?

"Right now," Hirscher -- a local hero in Sölden -- said in quotes posted on the fisalpine.com website, "he is far away from me … he is in outer space. He skied awesome. He skied every gate perfect."