The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Two Cool

Irrepressible Werner Hoeger, the Games' oldest male luger, and son Chris, the Games' youngest, are from -- where else? -- Venezuela

Once Venezuela's finest gymnast, Werner (left) flipped over luge, bringing Chris along for the ride. Bob Martin

As he watched the nagano olympics on television from his home in Boise, Idaho, four years ago, Werner Hoeger, professor of kinesiology and pursuer of perpetual youth, was unaware of the icy turns his life was about to take, clueless as to the downward slides his future held. There, before his eyes, was an athlete carrying the flag of Venezuela in the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. "Venezuela is not a winter sports country," said Hoeger of his native country. "Who was this athlete, and how many like her could be practicing winter sports?" As Hoeger's thoughts turned to snow, his mind started getting flaky. "I started getting crazy ideas about the Olympics in about five seconds," he recalls. This month Hoeger, 48, and his 17-year-old son, Chris, the oldest and youngest male competitors in Olympic luge, are among hundreds of gloriously flawed also-rans whose names are destined for the lower reaches of the agate type. Yet their dedication defines the Games as compellingly as do the brilliant performances of elite athletes.

Hoeger's crazy ideas were born of missed opportunities. He was the most decorated gymnast in Venezuela's history, the national all-around champion from 1970 through 1975, a span during which he won 34 of the 36 individual event titles as well. He might have fulfilled his dream to be an Olympian, too, but for a twist of fate in 1970. Competing at the South American regional championships in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Hoeger so impressed LaVon Johnson, the head gymnastics coach at Brigham Young, that he offered Hoeger a scholarship. Hoeger accepted but arrived in Provo a 16-year-old who could speak no English. "The one word I remember understanding in the first day of class was basketball," he says. Hoeger had grown up in the city of Merida, one of five brothers born to an Austrian mother and a German father, both of whom remarried and had children with other spouses. In all he was one of 13 siblings from three marriages. Hoeger grew up speaking Spanish in school and German at home. "In Venezuela we were always treated like foreigners," he says. "We were still German to them, with greenish-blue eyes and blond hair."

With the aid of German and Spanish tutors Hoeger soon became fluent in English, earned a master's degree by age 20 and a doctorate by 24. Though he was good enough to have qualified for both the 1972 Munich and '76 Montreal Olympics as an individual, he never got the chance because the Venezuelan squad wasn't good enough to get to the Games as a team. "They never took any gymnasts to those Games," Hoeger said. "I trained in the States, which was sort of rebellious. I can't lie: It was heartbreaking. I always had a lump in my stomach when I thought of the Olympics."

Winter Wonders These not-so-magnificent seven competitors represent some of the most unlikely corners of the globe Anne Abernathy, U.S. Virgin Islands  Luge  Known as Grandma Luge, the Florida native will be making her fifth appearance in the Games, at age 49.  Shiva Keshavan, India  Luge  Placed 28th in Nagano as a 16-year-old; this son of an Italian mother is enrolled at the University of Florence.  Philip Boit, Kenya  Cross-country skiing  In Nagano the 30-year-old Nike-sponsored Boit became the first Kenyan to compete in the Winter Games when he finished 92nd and last in the 10-kilometer classical event.  Liz Couch, New Zealand  Skeleton  The physical education teacher and former sprinter took up skeleton in 1999 after replying to a want ad asking for "fit young women with attitude." She trains on old metal sleds.   Laurence Thoms, Fiji  Alpine skiing  Thoms, 21, qualified for the national team in 1999 after having been in training for only two months.   Gregory Sun, Trinidad and Tobago  Bobsled  The 37-year-old University of Idaho Ph.D. candidate (physical education), competing in his third consecutive Winter Games, was introduced to the sport by Chris Stokes, one of the original Jamaican bobsledders and a former Idaho track athlete.   Isaac Menyoli, Cameroon  Cross-country skiing  The 29-year-old Milwaukee architect is her country's first Winter Olympian; skis to raise AIDS awareness because the disease afflicted her hometown of Buea.

In 1977 Hoeger, having given up his Olympic dream, married Sharon Barthule, a gymnast at BYU with whom he has gone on to have five children, and moved back home to become athletic director at the University of the Andes in Merida. Frustrated with the bureaucracy in Venezuela, however, he returned to the States four years later and went to work as a corporate fitness counselor in suburban Chicago. In '86 he accepted a job at Boise State. Now the director of the Human Performance Laboratory there, he has written six books on fitness that are used by 400 universities worldwide. With Sharon as co-author on four of his books, Werner has preached the ethic of exercise, healthy eating and stress-reducing activities, which never included flying down icy tracks.

Then came the corner-of-his-eye flag sighting that changed his life. "I had to get on the Internet to find out who the athlete was," he says. "It was a frantic search." The woman, he discovered, was Iginia Boccalandro, Venezuela's first Winter Olympian. Her sport was luge, as indigenous to Caracas as cactus is to Anchorage, and Hoeger had more of a connection to her than he realized. Once he learned her name, Hoeger contacted the newly appointed president of Venezuela's winter sports federation, Iginia's twin sister, Maria, a former gymnast who once competed with and idolized Hoeger. "He was our big star, our chance for the Olympics," Maria recalls. "I was excited to hear from him." She explained that when she and her sister were seven, their family had moved to Boston, where their father was studying at MIT. Their mother saw Gregory Peck skiing in Spellbound and insisted the girls learn the sport. Iginia, who had competed in cross-country skiing in the early 1990s before switching to luge, finally made it to the Olympics at age 37. What's more, she lived in Utah, not far from the Hoegers.

"I want to get my children involved in luge," Hoeger explained to Iginia, secretly harboring his own Walter Mitty fantasy. When the Boccalandros suggested that he try it too, in August 1998 Werner happily joined sons Chris, 13, and Jonathan, 16, and daughter Julianne, 11, at a street luge clinic near his home. Former Olympian Jon Owen, a coach who ran the clinic, saw that the family had an uncanny knack for steering sleds around pylons placed on the course's winding roads. On Owen's recommendation, three months later Werner and Chris took to the ice in Calgary, where the International Luge Federation (FIL) had arranged ice time for athletes from countries without an established history in the sport. There they took their first runs a third of the way up the course and gradually moved back their starting points, each time negotiating more turns and increasing their speed. Werner was a Ping-Pong ball on one of his first runs from the top. "The coaches told me to steer outside the curve," he says. "I misunderstood, steered inside the curve and drove into a wall. I don't remember it because I suffered some memory loss, but they tell me I bounced around, flipped twice and took a long time to come to a stop." The spill gave Hoeger a broken ankle and a concussion and whetted his appetite for more. "I was hooked," he says. "Does that seem wacky?"

Hoeger doesn't exactly exude wackiness. He feels his decision to join the Mormon Church 20 years ago has shaped his personality: reserved, polite, analytical. He realized that his first of what he estimates have been 10 crashes reinforced suspicions of some sliders that he was not only upside down but also in over his head. "Most people your age are staying home," Eugene Radu, a Romanian slider, told him, "making sure they don't die." Instead, Hoeger began working to get better. "The thing is, I could slowly feel myself learning how to make corrections, steering harder, then softer, not overcompensating," he says. "At first it was like putting a pickup truck in reverse and going 50 miles an hour. By the time I knew where to go, I was past it. When you slide, you really don't feel the speed like you feel it on the side of the track. On the side I'm thinking, You're crazy. On the track I'm thinking, This is making sense."

That was about 500 rides ago, before the sabbatical Werner took from work last year, before the days Chris began e-mailing his assignments in to teachers from Internet shops in quaint Tyrolean villages, before prequalification runs for World Cups and race finishes in the 50s and long before Sharon's assent went from tacit blessing to fervent support. "As long as Chris does his homework," she says three times in the course of a morning -- and we're talking five hours a night for a senior course load of advanced placement chemistry, advanced placement history, honors English, honors precalculus, German 5-6 and a debate-team elective. He has earned mostly A's as a student at Centennial High in Boise. "When I first started missing school, people there thought of me as that crazy luge kid," he says. "Now they probably think it's cooler than I do. I don't want to overplay it."

Though Chris has slowly emerged as the more talented of the two sliders, he remembers thinking of luge, before getting on a sled, as "the psycho sport you only saw during the Olympics." Though he only earned his driver's license in January, Chris was breaking the speed limit as a 13-year-old. "The fun thing is, he'll go 80 miles an hour on the track and never get a speeding ticket," says Werner.

Although they are wearing the yellow, blue and red of Venezuela in Salt Lake City, the Hoegers have not been back to the country for 14 years. Werner worries about the escalating crime rate back home in Merida, where his brother Peter had his car taken at gunpoint last year. Chris, who was born in Texas, speaks halting Spanish and has only vague recollections of an early birthday party during his first trip to Venezuela. The Hoegers plan to return this year, mindful of a need for closer ties to the country they are representing at the Olympics. Both sliders say they've been welcomed warmly by their more accomplished contemporaries. Austria's Markus Prock, a two-time Olympic silver medalist who will compete at his sixth Games in Salt Lake City, recalls the holes in the knees and elbows of Werner's sliding attire as a road map of where he had scraped the track. "At first he was making maybe too close a relationship with the wall," Prock says, "but it is not so easy to start the sport when you are more than 10. He is soon 50. It's incredible. Big nations have coaches, secretaries. They do everything themselves."

Neither Werner nor Chris receives money from the Venezuelan Olympic Committee. The FIL sometimes arranges housing for them overseas and provides them each with 50 sliding vouchers a year to use on accredited luge tracks. Olympians-to-be or not, the Hoegers, who took more than 150 runs apiece in 2001, still had to fork over the $18 for each additional run on their home track in Park City and comparable fees overseas. Werner is on half-pay while on leave from his $58,000-a-year job. Against those odds they achieved their Olympic qualifying standards by competing in three World Cup races in the past year. Werner's best finish was 37th in Calgary three years ago; Chris's best was a 40th in Calgary this season. "We're putting everything we can into being better at something that is a dream," Werner says. "The Olympics won't make us richer." No, but the Olympics will be richer for them.