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.

Fly Guy

He rules the World Cup, but can Adam Malysz put an end to 30 years of gold medal futility in the Winter for Poland?

Nancie Battaglia

By Franz Lidz

"Meet Adam."

The guy making the introductions outside a restaurant in Wisla, Poland, is Jan Poloczek, the town's mayor. He's standing in front of a glass case about the size of a phone booth. Inside the case, protected from the elements and the hands of hungering fans, is Adam Malysz (pronounced Mol-Wish), Poland's most polished ski jumper. The hometown hero has on gloves, boots and a flying suit emblazoned with more logos than a Formula One race car. Dangling from his neck is a ribbon; dangling from the ribbon, a medal. His features are frozen in a smile; his pale eyes and paler face are as waxy as his skis. Malysz is cast in white chocolate.

"Meet Chocolate Adam," says Poloczek. Eight confectioners took 264 hours to build the 400-pound Malysz, the jumper who melts in your heart, not on the ramps.

For Malysz, success has been sweet and soaring. In 2001 he emerged from a three-year funk to win 10 of the last 14 World Cup events, including the storied Four Hills series in Austria and Germany. At Four Hills he had the highest score and biggest margin of victory in the event's history. He then took gold (on the normal hill) and silver (large hill) at the World Nordic Championships in Finland and snared the World Cup title, the first for a Polish ski jumper. To his countrymen, Malysz's landing was as historic as the one Neil Armstrong made on the moon.

With seven victories this season, the 24-year-old Malysz came to the Olympics with the Pole position in points on the circuit. He took bronze in the K90 on Sunday and is considered one of the favorites in today's K150. "Adam's chance for gold is great, but so is the pressure on him," says Pawel Wlodarezyk, head of the Polish Ski Federation. "He wants our press not to predict he will win. Bad things can happen."

In Poland bad things often do. Malysz's homeland has a long history of being crushed, pillaged, annexed and partitioned. For more than a century it was wiped clean off the map. The nation's Winter Olympics credo could be, Expect the worst. Since the fluky victory of ski jumper Wojciech Fortuna at the 1972 Sapporo Games in Japan (his one and only international victory), Poland has not won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

The favorite to snap this drought is 5'6", maybe 120 pounds and the punch line in hundreds of Polish jokes, many of which have been compiled in a popular Polish paperback. Some call Malysz the Polish Batman; others, the Flying Pole. "I don't actually fly, I jump," he says, helpfully.

Of course ski jumping is not really skiing at all. With one swift leg snap at the top of the inrun, jumpers drop into the iced ruts of the ramp and plane into the wind. It's kind of like the standing broad jump but quicker because competitors move faster and have to time their jumps just right. "When Adam is in good shape, he has the best takeoff in the sport," says Jens Weissflog of Germany, winner of three Olympic golds in the event. "No legs are more powerful."

Here's a witticism making the rounds: At a Sunday service not far from the hometown of Pope John Paul II, a priest asks the kids in his congregation, Who's the most famous Pole in the world? In unison they scream, Adam Malysz!

At the recent World Cup meet in Zakopane, Poland, the name of Wisla's favorite son reverberated through the bleachers. "Adam! Adam! Adam!" squealed hundreds of would-be Eves. Says 15-year-old Sylvia Jonek of Krakow, "We love Adam so much! He's simple, just like us. Not bigger than his shoes."

In fact Malysz's shoes were once too big for him. At six, while leaping from the lip of a jump, his boots and skis came off in mid-flight. "It was amazing," recalls his father, Jan. "Adam fell to the ground, but his boots and skis kept going."

Malysz's career was not an unfettered ascent or, for that matter, descent. In 1996, at the maddeningly precocious age of 19, he won his first World Cup event, beating Weissflog in his final tournament. By the end of '97 Malysz had two more victories and eight podium finishes.

"Adam was sent to Earth by God to show other competitors how to jump," his former coach Pavel Mikeska once gushed. Austrian energy-drink maker Red Bull, whose slogan is Red Bull Gives You Wings, had its own divine revelation and signed Malysz to a bullish, long-term deal in '95. Trouble is, he didn't live up to the billing. The decline that began when he placed 51st and 52nd in jumps at the '98 Olympics was as steep as any ramp. Through 2000 he had three top 10 finishes, a fourth and two sevenths. At one point he considered returning to his job as a roofer to support his wife, Izabela, and their infant daughter, Karolina.

All kinds of theories were advanced for Malysz's tailspin: He was having communication problems with Mikeska, a Czech; he was having psychological problems with fame, fortune and family. "When a ski jumper gets married, he loses concentration and three meters in distance," offers Finnish team coach Mika Kojonkoski. "When he has his first child, he loses another three meters. When he becomes a father for the second time, he needs to give it up."

Weissflog blames gear. "Late in 1997 Adam changed the brands of his skis and flying suits, which was wrong," he says. "Neither product suited him. His technique changed."

Mikeska took the fall for Malysz's fall and was fired in '99. "Pavel was energetic, maybe too energetic," says Apoloniusz Tajner, the sedate Wisla sporting-goods store owner who replaced him. "Adam had to calm down."

Tajner got rid of the skis and suit in question, and to recapture Malysz's feel for flight, he hired a team psychologist. The shrink taught Malysz yogalike relaxation exercises and preached what Tajner calls the "cut-off head." The progressive program, now in its third year, involves "leaving your head at home so that at any moment you can think only of the jump." Before learning to sever his skull, Malysz was troubled by a recurring nightmare of tumbling down a ski jump. "Now, Adam does not dream at all," says Izabela.

To rebuild Malysz's muscle mass, Tajner hired a team physiotherapist. Though the particulars of his regimen remain closely guarded, one detail has slipped out: The staple of his diet is not birdseed but bananas and rolls.

More food for thought: The ski jumper with the fattest chance to upend Malysz today was once a borderline anorexic. Last month Germany's Sven Hannawald -- whose radical crash diet in 2000 reduced him to what his coach calls the "skeletonal level" -- became the first jumper in the 50-year history of Four Hills to win all four legs.

The residents of Wisla aren't worried. The town's world-class ice cream emporium, Cukiernia u Janeczki, reports brisk sales of its ciastko mistrza (champion's cake). The three-zloty (75-cent), three-layer pastry is topped by a meringue ski ramp and yet another Chocolate Adam, this one with skis propped up in a Churchillian V.

"If Adam wins gold medal, will be very nice for Wisla," says Mayor Poloczek. "We may make him gold statue people cannot eat." He mulls the ramifications of this municipal undertaking and mutters: "If gold, more people will want to steal. More problems. Better Adam stays chocolate!"