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.

Dick Durrance    ALPINE SKIING

Olympic Highlights: In 1936, in the first Games to include Alpine skiing, he finished 10th in the combined event

Seventeen-time national champ Durrance brought world-class skiing to the U.S. Carl Yarbrough

The first great American ski racer, Durrance won so many national titles (17, between 1936 and '46) that his likeness was for several years imprinted on all medals awarded at the U.S. championships. He changed the face of the sport in the U.S. in other ways as well. A Florida native, Durrance learned to ski as a teenager when his family moved to Garmisch, Germany. After his competitive career ended, in 1947, he and his wife, Margaret, who was known as Miggs, settled in Colorado, where he was named general manager of the Aspen Skiing Corp., in what was then a fledgling ski area. In 1950 Durrance lured the International Skiing Federation (FIS) world championships, the first world-class ski race to be held in North America, to the resort. "People from all over the world heard about Aspen for the first time," he says. "It gave us the publicity we needed. The point was to show the Europeans that we had plenty of mountains in this country, that we could challenge their best skiers." Durrance left that job in 1952 to concentrate on filmmaking. Over the next four decades he produced dozens of ski movies -- including the noted documentary Aspen Album -- that fueled the sport's popularity. Though the 87-year-old will watch the Salt Lake City Games this week from his couch, Durrance says he's in good health and was a proud bearer of the Olympic torch last month when the route passed near his home in Carbondale, Colo. "I walk with a cane," Durrance says, with a laugh, "but I'm old, so that's allowed."

—Trisha Blackmar