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.

Fired Up

At the ancient age of 32, aerialist Eric Bergoust is freestyle skiing's hottest commodity for one reason: He's the hardest worker around

Forbidden from listening to rock music as a youngster, Bergoust diverted himself with juggling, for which he clearly has a flare. Jeffrey Lowe

By Kelli Anderson

What's the first clue that aerialist Eric Bergoust has never cracked open the handbook on world-class-athlete behavior and attitude? Is it the fact that he is so considerate of media types who want to interview him that he e-mails directions to his Park City house -- a modest three-bedroom he owns but insists he doesn't deserve -- and even suggests reasonably priced hotels nearby? Is it that he finds athletic inspiration in the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Is it that, at 32, he is the most accomplished skier in his sport yet keeps pushing himself to get better? Or is it that he is willing to fail, to look stupid, to think outside the box -- out loud?

"There's a reason we call him Weird Eric," says fellow U.S. aerialist Britt Swartley. "Once he tried to convince me that he could draw sound. That was an interesting afternoon."

Any chunk of time spent with Bergoust has the potential to be, well, singular. If he isn't on the ramps at Utah Olympic Park working on the aerial acrobatics that have earned him an Olympic gold medal, a world championship and a World Cup points title as well as the three highest aerials scores ever recorded, he's probably thinking about being there. "The only reason I do anything else is because I know it's not healthy to be obsessed by one thing," he says.

"Eric works 10 times harder than anyone else in this sport, and he is 20 times more passionate about it," says U.S. aerials team coach Matt Christensen. "He lives for aerials."

The base for that life is a handsome wooden structure in a subdivision five minutes from Utah Olympic Park. This is where Bergoust does much of his thinking about his sport and where he finds the few distractions he'll allow himself. On an October morning when the wind is too fierce for practice, Bergoust offers you a tour. He parks his 1989 Toyota Corolla in the driveway and takes his shoes off at the entry, and so do you. He shows you the pristine kitchen, the living room and the mantel, where he keeps a number of trophies. He takes you into the garage, where he keeps a stash of skis and strips of Teflon that he has cut into various shapes to glue onto the bottom of the skis in a quest for greater speed down the water jump on which he practices in the off-season. Upstairs in the house you meet his girlfriend, Sally Jo Beck, a yoga instructor who is writing at a computer. He shows you his drum machine and his technical drawings for improved ramps. No, he gives you his drawings, to keep. He asks if there is anything else you'd like to see. (Later you both will regret that he forgot to show you the black fake-fur pants he made for himself.) Before you depart, he notes your pathetic lack of cold-weather gear and offers to lend you the warmest coat in his closet. You accept.

Nancie Battagliat

"My sister always told me to be nice, and my dad always told me to be tough," says Bergoust. "That's all I've really ever wanted to be. Being nice means more than just that -- it's being humble, hopeful, faithful and content. Being tough means no whining, no complaining. Somehow those concepts have always given me confidence and made me want to improve."

Bergoust grew up in Missoula, Mont., with three older and two younger siblings and strict Christian parents. The kids were forbidden to listen to rock music, but all of them learned to juggle and sew. (In fourth grade Eric won a second-place ribbon at the Missoula County Fair for a quilt he made, and he is still facile enough with a needle and thread that Beck trusts him to repair her silkiest garments.) Even against that backdrop Bergoust stood apart as a child. Before Eric's first day of school his father, Don, tried to reassure him that kindergarten would be a pretty good gig: He'd meet new friends, get to color, play, eat cookies and take naps. "Eric was not impressed," recalls Don. "He said, 'Yuck! I want to learn how to read!' That's when I knew he was a little different."

School never did live up to Bergoust's expectations, especially after sixth grade, when his parents enrolled him in a small, private Christian school with a curriculum that included Bible classes but not French, which he wanted to learn because he liked the way it sounded. "I hated that they made you memorize things," he says. "I would much rather learn from people's mistakes than memorize what years all the presidents served."

He found challenges elsewhere. An avid Evel Knievel fan, Bergoust practiced stunts like jumping off the roof of the house and then landing and rolling like a sky diver, or flinging himself off the top of the chimney into a pile of mattresses. He did his first backflip on a neighborhood trampoline when he was about seven and soon after joined a gymnastics team for two years. When he was 15 and had been skiing for about three years, he saw a kid do a flip off a homemade jump and asked for a lesson. After landing on his head a few times, Bergoust planted himself on his feet and never looked back. "I could never get enough of that feeling of flipping through the air," he says.

Warm weather is workout weather for Bergoust, a tireless trainer who uses the water ramps at Utah Olympic Park to launch himself into space on summer and fall days. Nancie Battaglia

He began making his own jumps and driving nearly nine hours to compete in upright aerials (in which flips are not allowed) events. In 1988, the year after he graduated from high school, Bergoust drove 500 miles to the Olympics in Calgary, where aerials were a demonstration sport. Determined to be the first one inside the gates for the finals, Bergoust slept in a nearby field the night before. After the event, he says, "I ate part of the jump."

Five months later he bought a used 1985 Toyota Celica with $500 he had saved by doing odd jobs and drove cross-country to a summer training camp in Lake Placid, N.Y. With the $10 he had left, he bought cornflakes, powdered milk, peanut butter, jelly and a loaf of bread and lived off that for the first week. He worked like a fiend, setting a record for most jumps in a day (100) and toiling at three or four jobs when the ramps were closed. His efforts earned him a spot on the NorAm team, but while most of his teammates could afford to fly to competitions scattered across the continent, Bergoust and fellow aerialist Chris McQuery had to drive, dining on cold cuts they scavenged from event banquets. "At that time a lot of the people in aerials were upper-class kids with lots of money," says Canadian aerials coach Nick Bass, who got to know Bergoust in the summer of '88, before becoming his coach five years later. "It was easy for them. It wasn't easy for Eric."

That first season Bergoust mastered double flips. The second summer he progressed to triples on the water jump but couldn't pull them off on snow. "The next four or five years I spent crashing triples instead of going back to doubles," he says. Then, during a vacation in Hawaii in April 1993, Bass popped in a tape of a new technique that he had learned from a trampoline coach, the tilt-twist, in which the aerialist uses momentum from the flip, rather than from the jump, to twist his body slightly to one side. Bergoust decided to try the new maneuver, which would get his body twisting and flipping in a more efficient and controlled manner. "We figured it would take me a year and a half to break old habits and another year and a half to instill new ones," says Bergoust, who was further hobbled by a still-healing right ACL, which he had torn in '92.

Meanwhile Bass, Bergoust and Swartley, another tilt-twist advocate, were mocked within the aerials community for their radical ideas and the TILT T-shirts they wore, including one that bore a drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with the word REVOLUTION underneath. The tilt-twisters' cause wasn't helped by the fact that they rarely got near a podium during the 1994 and '95 seasons. Then Bergoust won U.S. championships in '96 and '97 using the technique and the world title in '97. And after severely bruising his ribs in practice a half hour before the 1998 Olympic finals, he landed "the best jumps of my life" -- triple backflips with four twists -- to seal the gold medal in Nagano. "Now anyone who is any good does tilt-twist," says Christensen.

Bergoust's impact on the sport goes beyond technique. Shortly after the '98 Games he wrote a letter to his national teammates and coaches explaining his theory on how jumps should be shaped. Now his higher, steeper triple-kicker design has become the standard for aerial launching pads.

"Eric's approach with everything is, Let's analyze this and see if there is a better way," says Bass. "With everything new he has tried, the first reaction from most people has been, That's the dumbest thing I ever heard -- he's crazy. My first thought is, Hey, let's try it! Anything Eric has to say, I want to hear."

So does 23-year-old aerialist Steve Omischl of Canada, who ranks 13th in the World Cup standings. "Eric not only brought a better technique to the sport of aerials, he also brought in a whole new mentality about training," says Omischl. "He's the reason people get so good so fast now. Ten years ago the best guys in the world were only spending one month on the water. Now they work a lot harder because of Eric's example."

Remarkably, Bergoust hasn't stopped working, even at an age at which most aerialists have been retired for years. He says one key to his longevity is his total disregard for what others think of him. "I know as a gold medalist that everyone's watching me," he says. "If I mess up a jump, they're going to wonder what's wrong. It's what makes those at the top afraid to do anything but what people tell them they are really good at. But the best way to improve is to work on your weaknesses and be willing to look stupid. I'm willing to try a thousand times and to fail a thousand times."

His persistence has brought about some beautiful moments in the air, more of which we can expect to see today. "We never jump as well as we think we should," says Bergoust. "That's why we all keep doing it. It's not that I need to finish on a high note. I just don't think I'll ever get sick of doing this."