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The Winter Games Skaters Rusty Smith ... lead[s] the Orange County delegation by Tom Singer originally published on OC Metro Rolling up our sleeves and rolling out our mouse for a pre-winter Olympics overview, we were quite pessimistic about being able to do it with an Orange County, or even a Southern California, spin. After all, while we excel at most other athletic endeavors, this is hardly a cauldron of winter sports. This is where a mountain of trucked-in snow on an elementary school lawn will lead off the 6 o'clock news. Winter is what we are here to get away from. Which somewhat alienates us from all that shooshing and swooshing that'll be going on in Salt Lake City over the next two weeks. Where are all those half-naked people taking a New Year's Day dip in an icy lake? They're our ideal winter Olympians: higher, faster, bluer. And an event to which Southern Californians could relate - The 200-Meter Skid, in which drivers try to control their cars in a light drizzle - is nowhere to be found on the program. So, though we have to drive deep into the Inland Empire for the nearest winter wonderland, imagine our delight when we had to look only down the street to find the face of Orange County's winter Olympics. His name is Rusty Smith and, unless there's a Biathlete from Zaire that we don't know about, he could be the unlikeliest guy in Utah. Rusty may sound like a bronco buster, or a skateboarder who stayed out in the rain too long, but in fact is a skater. Not one of those guys who goes in circles in a tuxedo then has his performance graded by judges, but someone who streaks in a straight line and is judged by the stopwatch. Rusty isn't triple axles but speed. A speedskater from Orange County, where you'd have to drain every happy-hour cocktail to find 500 meters of ice? From Sunset Beach, where surf-and-sand provide the canvas of daily slow-paced life? Someone whose only obvious link to ice is having been named after Rusty Staub, the former outfielder who spent the bulk of his Major League career in Montreal? And he's done this before, as an 18-year- old in Nagano, where he helped set an American relay record. As a local reflection of the Utah Games, he seemed perfect. Little could we suspect HOW perfect. These are the Olympics foreshadowed by a years-long scandal of payoffs, extravagant gifts and other seductive favors to members of the International Olympic Committee (we didn't even know the Winter Olympic movement was the inspiration for "slush" fund, which of course is what you get after the snow begins to melt).In fact, it seemed rather nervy of the SLC organizers to ask visitors to their own website to "Vote for the biggest story of the pre-Olympics season." (But they did play it safe, with six athletes-related choices on the virtual ballot and no room for write-in votes.) And three weeks before the opening ceremonies, Smith himself was embroiled in scandal, as one of the principals in an alleged plot to rig the U.S. Olympic short-track speedskating finals, which were held in Cleveland in December. It was a quite convoluted case, awaiting an arbitrator's decision, in which Tommy O'Hare accused Smith and Apolo Anton Ohno of "throwing" the final race to Shani Davis. The allegations were spawned by the fact Ohno, who had finished first in every previous heat, and Smith had already qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team and were looking out for buddy Davis, who needed the first-place finish to complete the three-man short-track squad. This was all innuendoes and circumstantial suspicions, posing no real threat to Smith's second consecutive Olympics, but we didn't know skate sports were so exciting. Either Tonya Harding is mistaking Nancy Kerrigan's kneecap for a tire bolt, or a speedskater is howling "fix." Lost amid the scandal was an odd irony: To be accused of having thrown a race you had just lost, you have to be a damn good racer. Think about it. At 22, Smith is approaching that elite status, having by now competed in five World Championships and finishing fourth in the 1,000-meter at the most recent one, in 2001 in Jeonju, South Korea. He also is part of a vanishing breed which defines authentic athleticism. Speedskating isn't exactly part of the American sports culture. You won't find a short-track speedskater on a Wheaties box or in a Nike commercial. But you will probably find him alone at dawn at some rink, getting in his sprints before the crowds come. For Rusty, that rink was a historic one, "Paramount Ice Land," the birthplace of the Zamboni located within two blocks of his home. Out for a leisure spin on rental skates one day when he was 13, Rusty tried on speed skates out of curiosity, and he hasn't yet slowed down. Within a couple of years, he was on the junior national team. By 1995, while still a sophomore at Huntington Beach's Ocean View High School, he was on the senior team, and three years after that on the Olympic Team. The winter Olympics may never before have included any competitor on whose high-school diploma the word "Ocean" appeared. So there's a Quixotic feel to the quest of Smith, emerging from an unexpected place to seek glory in a neglected sport. He also is one of the few flailing at those windmills for Orange County. ... Orange County's only two other representatives in Salt Lake City won't even be representing the United States. Mighty Ducks Paul Kariya (Canada) and Oleg Tverdovsky (Russia) will play for their native countries in the hockey competition, as will Mikko Eloranta (Finland) and Mattias Norstrom (Sweden) of the Kings. Los Angeles' NHL entry, at least, is also helping out the American squad, with Adam Deadmarsh and Aaron Miller. It's nice of the NHL to put a two-week hole in its season, because the hockey guys tend to liven up an Olympics. And they don't even have to be throwing furniture off hotel balconies, as our rascals did in Nagano four years ago, to do it. The mere energy of their sport spikes the proceedings. Besides, the winter Olympics need the act. The agenda is surprisingly spare. Certainly nothing like the cornucopia of events at the summer Games, where on any given day you'll find people strewn about various venues competing on land, water and horse. A survey of the Utah fare reveals a total of only 15 events, verifying that there's only so much humans can do on snow and ice, no matter how ingenious they are. And, believe us, concocting some of the events required much ingenuity (and brandy; if delivered by St. Bernards, all the more appropriate). Take, for example, Skeleton. That isn't something in the closet of an SLC Organizing Committee member, but a sledding event being reintroduced to the Olympics for the first time since 1948. Why? Because the host U.S. appears to be good at it. In its only two Olympic incarnations (1928 and 1948), Americans won half of the total of six medals. And, Nordic Combined. Combined with what? A Scandinavian? No, with cross-country skiing, "Nordic" referring to a ski jump. Of course, for a really weird combination, look no further than the Biathlon. How would you like to have been at the meeting where this idea was pitched? "We'll have guys ski cross-country, and stop every few miles to shoot rifles at targets." This has always sounded like a classic Monty Python sketch, and it still does. If organizers of future winter Olympics find themselves seeking innovative new attractions, I'll be available to brainstorm. I might suggest a new event called Snow Drawing, which wouldn't even require any special equipment and would certainly turn many Southern Californians into fans.