Olympic Hero ... Or Zero

It is an indisputable fact that a whole lot of people pay more attention to certain sports — well, pretty much all of them — at the Olympics than they do at any other time.

Okay, let's be brutally honest. Without the world 'Olympics' in front of it, the vast majority of North American sports fans don't give a crap about things like luge and bobsled and skiing and speed skating. A cynic might suggest it's as simple as this: if you can't bet on it, who cares?

Point being, there are a lot of folks caring about such winter sports right now that ordinarily don't. And more than just a few of them happen to be media types who, for two weeks, have to be 'experts' on things they know little about. And there's a not-so-significant audience that counts on them to feel informed about it.
(those that actually realize the Winter Olympics are about more than just hockey, but that's a story for another day).

All of which means that reputations are often forged in a large way by what goes on underneath the five rings and not so much by when the spotlight is turned off. And depending on how you handle the crucible of the Olympics, some become instant celebrities. Others, eternal goats.

Yes, it's hardly fair, but it is what it is. Which brings me to the subject of Jeremy Wotherpoon, the Canadian speed skater who finished ninth in the men's 500 metres tonight at the Vancouver 2010 Games. That means, at age 33, the Red Deer, Alta., will walk away from the five-ring circus with an oh-fer on his resume after four cracks at the Olympics. One silver in 1998 in Nagano and zero golds.

All of that has led to Wotherpoon being branded as a massive underachiever in far too many eyes. But that doesn't begin to tell the tale of an athlete widely regarded as one of the greatest sprint speed skaters of all-time. Nobody has won more World Cup races in the sport's history than Wotherspoon, a 12-time World Cup overall champion. He's also an eight-time world champion who broke a raft of world records.

But cruelly, he'll be seen as much less by a public that only sees such athletes every four years. And, it says here, that's just plain wrong.

Ask anyone in figure skating and they'll tell you Kurt Browning, a four-time world champion, is one of his sport's all-time greats. Does the fact he came up empty at two Winter Olympics change that?

It's a thought that former U.S. sprint speed skating star Dan Jansen — who found himself in the same boat as Wotherspoon until he broke through for 1,000-metre gold in Lillehammer in 1994 — related during a CTV interview earlier today.

Jansen, who's working for NBC at these Games, said pretty much everybody in speed skating regards Wotherspoon as one of the all-time greats, perhaps the best ever in the sprints. And a huge number of them were not-so-quietly hoping that Wotherspoon would get that elusive gold in his final 500 at the Olympics. Alas, it wasn't to be.

Not that it mattered to those in the know. In their minds, Wotherspoon's place in history is more than secure. Much as they wanted to see it, they knew an Olympic gold wasn't needed to justify it.

Too bad everyone who's watched him four times at the Olympics — and not anywhere else — can't say or see the same. History just might judge Wotherspoon a whole lot differently if they had.
Sadly, that simply isn't the case.