Olympic Ice -- a TV experiment gone horribly right

	'Olympic Ice' gave Zhan Dan's (left) return from her crash the credit it deserved, but the show was also much more than that. Torsten Silz/Getty Images
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On my last day as a writer for Olympic Ice, the figure skating program that was a cross between Ice Capades and Wayne's World, I shared a ride in to work with one of our young and talented producers, Sarah Rinaldi.

"John," she asked, "so you work for SI?"

"Most of the time," I said.

"Have you been writing anything for them since you've been here in Torino?"

"No."

"So they only wanted to use the good writers?"

And she'd only known me two weeks.

I don't know if you had a chance to see it, but Olympic Ice, or "OI!" as our host and den mother, Mary Carillo, liked to call the show, was a TV experiment gone horribly right. For two weeks during the Turin Games it aired each night on USA at 6 p.m. EST, brokering an uneasy but ultimately successful marriage between hardcore analysis and figure skating nuttiness. And who ever thought the terms "figure skating" and "nuttiness" would appear as close together as Belbin and Agosto?

Sure, when China's Zhang Dan crashed into the boards like something out of the Nextel Cup and then got up and finished her program (along with pairs partner Zhang Hao), Carillo and our gold-medal quartet of Dick Button, Scott Hamilton and Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier gave the moment its proper amount of gravitas. But that did not mean that there was not room for a Weir Eye for the Skate Guy segment. Or Sale and Pelletier skating a program to the Gear Daddies' tune, I Wanna Drive the Zamboni. Or for the aforementioned Rinaldi to create a mockumentary about how the show came to be in the first place called Olympic Ice: Thawed.

I mean, who airs a mockumentary of a show whose shelf life is barely longer than that of Emily's Reasons Why Not?

Our producer, David Winner, liked to say that OI! was "imperfect television for an imperfect world". For two weeks Winner guided a couple dozen of us who worked and basically lived in a tented compound that looked like M*A*S*H* 4077, just 50 or so yards from the entrance of the Palavela. It almost felt as if we were doing a TV show, which in fact, we were.

But we never saw it air. And we never really knew, at least not the first week, if anyone else did, either. So Winner, generously, allowed almost any idea to fly. You want to do an opening tease where Mary reads the copy and then stops in mid-sentence and barks, "Who wrote this garbage!"? Go ahead. You want to ask one of our young Italian drivers to mug as a band leader so that we can show footage of him every time the music in the Palavela threatens to drown out a segment? And you want to turn him into a cult figure, the leader of the "Olympic Ice Band" who is known to his legion of fans as "the maestro of Milano"? You want to ask 1960 gold medalist Carol Heiss to do a promo in which she says, Olympic Ice, then takes a scoopful of cereal before continuing with, "That's cracklin' good television!"? Be my guest. You want to tell Canadian bronze medalist Jeffery Buttle's agent, who is lobbying for his client to appear on our show, that Buttle can be on the show only if he appears as himself in a segment where we tell him that he cannot be on the show because we only accept gold medalists? Go for it.