Kwan, Miller will be leading characters in Turin drama

1) So, where's the buzz for the upcoming Olympic Games?

	The bizarre soap opera surrounding Tonya Harding (right) and Nancy Kerrigan turned the '94 Winter Olympics into must-see TV. Pascal Rondeau/SI

Olympic Buzz. I've heard that expression more in the last two months than in the previous 10 years. As in: Boy, there's not a lot of buzz leading up to the Olympics. Or, in the case of my hometown friends, The Olympics are this year?

My reaction is this: When is there ever Winter Olympic buzz? The last time I can recall big buzz was in 1994 and only because Tonya Harding hired people to whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee with a stick. (Which raises the question: Is that the kind of buzz Baron de Coubertin would like to have associated with his creation, even if it means bringing in television ratings usually reserved for Super Bowls and series finales?)

What was the buzz in 1998? Michelle Kwan gunning for her first Olympic gold medal? Not in my neighborhood. Former bricklayer Hermann Maier of Austria trying to extend his ski-racing World Cup dominance to the Games? Not in my hemisphere. NHL players in the Olympics? OK, maybe a little buzz there.

How about 2002? Apolo Anton Ohno trying to collect a bunch of golds in short track speedskating? Jim Shea trying to win skeleton gold for the memory of his grandfather? (I agree with Rick Reilly's column on this subject; skeleton sets the standard for silliness). Bode Miller trying to stay on his feet. No, no and no.

As a culture, we Americans traffic very heavily in buzz. (Insert Bode Miller skiing-while-wasted joke here). The entire celebrity worship industry is rooted in buzz. Without buzz, there is nothing. That said, I would argue that the Winter Olympics never have buzz unless athletes are putting out contracts on each other.

2) Let me get this right: Sporting events need buzz. The Olympics never have buzz. OK. What does that mean for the Olympics?

The Olympics -- the Winter Olympics, especially -- are a television show. It's true that nearly all significant sporting events are television shows. (Despite being a print journalist, I'm all for this. There's nothing like football in Hi-Def. Although I'd sign up in a second for time travel, just to spend one afternoon in the old press box at Yankee Stadium, pecking out meaningful copy on a typewriter while sitting next to Grantland Rice, knowing that my eyes were America's only conduit to the action on the field).

But the Olympics are a television show more than most. To almost any sporting event on television, viewers bring some sort of preconceived passion. They are Patriots fans or Jerome Bettis fans (aren't we all, this week?) or Red Sox fans or Kobe fans. We bring to the couch a working knowledge of the event and, usually, a vested interest in the outcome.

Not so, in most cases, with the Winter Olympics. Sure, Americans root for Americans. Put that flag up on the screen and we clap our hands like a hamster spinning that wheel. Nothing wrong with that. But coming in to the Olympic Games, most Americans don't know that Lindsay Jacobellis is American and not Italian until NBC puts the flag up next to her name on the crawl.

But he will eventually know that Jacobellis is American, and soon enough. Because NBC will inundate us with personal stories and use the six-hour time difference between Turin and New York to manufacture drama and try to draw its audience in one night at a time. To my thinking, Olympic buzz begins when the flame is lit and it dies when the flame is extinguished. Olympic heroes are famous for a fortnight and, with very few exceptions, never again. (Case in point, I walked through midtown Manhattan with Bode Miller in September. How many times do you think he was stopped? Correct. Zero.)

It doesn't help that NBC does not have the NFL yet and minimal college football (only Notre Dame) on which to promote the upcoming Games. (Of course, promotion on ABC didn't help Emily's Reasons Why Not.)