"Can we watch this?" she asked.
Yes. Let's watch. Let's watch yesterday's gutsy gold-medal run again and again. Let's watch again today when Vonn tries to add a second gold medal in the super-combined, tries to convert hype into adrenaline the way Michael Phelps did in Beijing.
Let's watch into the weekend and into next week, when she competes in three more events. Let's watch what Lindsey Vonn can do now that the avalanche of expectations, fueled as much by her beauty as her brawn, has been shoveled aside.
"I can't tell you how happy I am," she said. There was no need. From the moment she posted her time of 1 minute, 44.19 seconds, the ducts in Vonn's eyes opened as if they were the skies over Vancouver. Almost 2 hours later, after countless interviews, a flower ceremony, even drug testing . . . well, it was still raining.
"I feel like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders," she said. "There was a lot of expectations and a lot of pressure coming into these games and I stood up to that. I fought that today. I proved to everyone that I'm a good skier. That's what I came here to do."
A few things were in the way of that of course, besides the fuss over how she looks in a bikini. She nearly broke an arm in December, she bruised a shin a few weeks before these Olympics during a training crash. She couldn't practice much before getting here, and between the wet weather and a tweak of the injury during training last week, she hasn't practiced much lately either.
We've seen this happen before. Someone gets celebrity before establishing substance, and when expectations don't meet reality, they become a punch line.
Remember Dan and Dave? Bode Miller? Sasha Cohen?
