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.

Against All Odds

On mended knees, skier Janica Kostelic goes for more gold

She's hardly in the pink, but Kostelic has a shot at four medals. Thomas Kienzle/AP

For much of the winter, a question hounded Janica Kostelic of Croatia across the World Cup ski circuit: Will you be ready for the Olympics? She had undergone three surgeries on her left knee since winning eight consecutive slalom races and the World Cup overall title in 2001, and her rehab had left her with chronic back problems. She arrived in Salt Lake ranked 17th in the overall standings, without a single victory in her 14 races. The question became more insistent: Are you ready?

On Thursday at Snowbasin, Kostelic, 20, shocked the ski world with a daring downhill run on her scarred legs (her right knee was also reconstructed in 1999) to win the Alpine combined. She had led by more than a second after two slalom runs, but her downhill training runs had been tentative, and it was assumed that she would fall apart. Instead, she was brilliant. Now the question for her has become: How many golds can you win?

She is a dark horse in today's Super G, the shorter, turn-filled, high-speed sister to the downhill. She has scored World Cup points in just two Super G races this season but finished fourth in Cortina, Italy, on Jan. 25. A medal today would launch her into this week's giant slalom and slalom -- her best events -- with a chance to become the first female Alpine skier to win four medals in one Games.

Growing up, Kostelic and her older brother, Ivica, were coached by their father, Ante (they still are), and traipsed across Europe chasing ski races, often sleeping in their car. Janica has so tired of re-telling this story that after her combined win she said simply, "I was nine when I started skiing for serious. I was skiing and sking and skiing, then I came here and won a gold medal. That is the short story."

The sacrifice has paid off. Janica competed in five events in Nagano and her eighth-place finish in the combined was the best ever by a Croatian in the Winter Games. Three years later she became the fourth youngest woman to win the World Cup overall. Her brother, blooming later, leads the World Cup slalom standings. Janica remains battered. "I just say that my right arm is O.K., and my hair feels good," she says. That might be enough to make history.

—Tim Layden

Bringing Up Baby

Q: What do pairs skaters do that ice dancers don't? A: When you watch ice dancing, don't expect to see the man toss the woman through the air. And forget about those dizzying spins. Such pyrotechnics, the bread and butter of pairs skating, are largely forbidden in ice dancing. Dancers can't be aloft for more than one spin, lie on the ice, sit or lie on a partner's shoulders or otherwise execute what the International Skating Union calls any "feat of prowess." Nor may they sit on a partner's leg without having a foot on the ice or spin for more than three revolutions. Also, unlike skaters in singles and pairs events, which consist of a short and a long program, ice dancers compete in three sessions: compulsory dance (all the same), original dance (set to a specific theme -- this year a Spanish medley) and free dance. —Brian Cazeneuve

A few of her Olympic teammates may have been sidelined with the flu on Thursday, but Jenny Potter's concerns were for the health of a far more valuable player: her 13-month-old daughter, Madison. "She's not feeling very good right now," said Potter, her sweat-slicked brow furrowed with worry 20 minutes after the U.S. hockey team's 12-1 win over China. "I think she has a cold."

In Nagano, Potter (then Schmidgall) was a 19-year-old baby on the U.S. women's gold medal team. In Salt Lake, Potter is the player with the baby. Her world turned upside down in the summer of 2000, when she discovered she was pregnant. About to begin her junior year at Minnesota-Duluth, where she had led the nation in scoring as a sophomore, Jenny broke the news to her then boyfriend, Rob, a trainer with the team. "It was unexpected," says Jenny, "but we had talked about marriage anyway. There was no way I was going to give her up."

Unwilling to give up her sport, either, Potter continued to play through four months of pregnancy and rejoined the national team for the world championships three months after giving birth. Rob, whom she wed last July, helped her lose the weight she had gained during pregnancy with hours of skating drills, during which the Potters would place a bundled-up Madison in her bouncy seat at center ice.

"I'm going to have to drink a lot of herbal tea to calm down." —Australia's Alisa Camplin , after qualifying second in aerials

The U.S. team has been living and traveling together since last August, and Potter regrets that the pre-Olympic push has caused her to "miss out on so many little developments," but, she says, one day Maddie will understand. "My dad made her tiny hockey skates, and she's moving around a little," says Potter, who leads the Olympic tournament with four assists after three games. "I think she already loves the ice."

—Kelley King