A course worker walks past a 2002 Salt Lake Olympic sign after inclement weather forced the third consecutive cancellation of the men's World Cup downhill in Snowbasin, Utah. They threw a party downtown for World Cup skiers here this weekend, a little less than a year before they're due back for the Olympics. And there stood the rocky ridge, majestic in a deepening evening sky.
Trouble is, it was the only time in three days anyone did see it.
Sandwiched around that brief break in the weather, World Cup races were canceled three straight days because of snow or poor visibility at the top of the Olympic run called Grizzly. Today, the top 70 men's racers in the world left town without a single race under their belts, just as women's World Cup racers had done a year before. And Olympic organizers, fresh from a dispiriting string of delays and postponements at the 1998 Games in Japan, might want to prepare for more of the same in 2002. Organizers waited five days to get the first men's downhill race off in Nagano, then patched the schedule around relentless weather events until they finally got all races in. Wherein lies a ray of hope for the Olympic folks here.