Olympic Village

A man who got inside a chain-link fence near the Olympic Village in Salt Lake City was charged yesterday with unlawfully entering a national security site. Sheldon Iver Goodman, 48, was trying to take a shortcut across the University of Utah campus on Sunday when a Secret Service agent found him inside an outermost Olympic security perimeter. Goodman climbed around a fence blocking one end of a 300-foot-long pedestrian bridge by dangling 20 feet over Wasatch Drive and swinging himself back onto the bridge on the other side of the fence.

The Canadian hockey team spent Monday night in a luxury Tokyo hotel. Hope it was enjoyable. Now the king-size beds turn to cots. The steaks turn to Soba noodles. And the eyes of the world turn to the players. Most of the more than 125 National Hockey Leaguers - including seven Flyers and their general manager, Bob Clarke - who will be taking part in the radically altered and much-anticipated Olympic tournament straggled into this remote central Japanese city last night and this morning.

The U.S. men's hockey dream team finally got physical at the Olympics, but not until after it was prematurely eliminated from the tournament. The dream-teamers, who talked for a week about how much they enjoyed staying in their spartan Olympic Village rooms, vented their frustrations by breaking up a few of the rooms. "There was a mess," said Rene Fasel, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation. "I had information from the U.S. side something happened after the game.

The killer in the ski-mask, that assassin with the machine gun cradled in his left arm ... that terrorist on the balcony of the dormitory that housed the Israeli athletes and coaches ... that madman barking demands to the wide-eyed woman in the pastel jacket, armed only with a walkie-talkie ... I stood 40 yards away, on a hillside, peering through a chain-link fence, watching the 1972 Munich Olympics crumble into tragedy. The fence wasn't even child-proof. In an effort to represent joy and youth and carefree spirits and human dimensions, the Olympic security people wore sky-blue and peach-colored uniforms.

IN WHAT MAY go down as his greatest "wild-hair" moment, Mayor Nutter told the U.S. Olympic Committee - don't start laughing yet - that the city wants to host the 2024 Olympic Games. (I suspect he wants to see a bicycle race that's not on a city sidewalk.) He's found $20 billion under the cushions of his office sofa? I know we've decriminalized marijuana, but . . . Our police force will provide airtight security when it can't keep track of its own guns? We fail to collect from tax deadbeats, but will raise billions?

The U.S. Olympic Committee received confirmation from Olympic officials yesterday that there will be no restrictions on Bibles being brought into the Olympic village in Beijing next year. The USOC contacted the International Olympic Committee about the issue in response to a story posted on the Catholic News Agency Web site citing a list of prohibited items that was reported to include Bibles. That story said the Italian daily La Gazzetta dello Sport reported that organizers cited "security reasons" for prohibiting athletes from carrying any kind of religious symbol at Olympic facilities.

You could see it in their faces. You could hear it in their voices. And you could feel it from their performances. Yesterday was the busiest day of the Olympics - there were 18 events scheduled at 14 venues - and for the athletes, there was never any doubt that they would continue to compete. At dawn, some athletes were just waking up in the Olympic Village and just getting word of the bomb that exploded at the Centennial Olympic Park early yesterday morning. Others, like the members of the Dream Team, were trying to get to sleep in their hotel, which overlooks the site of the explosion.

Vuong Tong, Philadelphia born and raised, graduated in 2008 from the University of the Arts and moved to London a year ago to attend the University of the Arts there, no relation other than in name. He was swept up in the spirit of the Olympic Games and volunteered. Tong, 26, worked as a marshal at the opening ceremonies. He helped parade teams from North Korea, Micronesia, and the United States on the long walk from the Olympic Village to the Olympic Stadium for the ceremony. He got to meet and pose for photos with several stars.

Bob Knight said yesterday that the U.S. Olympic men's basketball team didn't win the gold medal in Athens last month because the players were too pampered on and off the court. The Texas Tech coach, speaking to a gathering sponsored by the San Antonio Sports Foundation, said things would have been different had he been leading the team instead of Larry Brown. For starters, the NBA stars representing the United States would not have been staying on a luxury ocean liner. "They would not have been on the Queen Mary," said Knight, who coached the U.S. men to the gold in 1984.

One of the biggest participants in London's Olympics will also be one of the most silent. Aramark Corp., the $13 billion catering company headquartered in Philadelphia, will serve 70,000 meals a day at the Olympic Village during peak times. That should give Aramark bragging rights over what must be a monumental logistical task. But it can't happen, not if Aramark, now handling its 16th Olympics, wants to retain its supplier status in the future. Lloyd Evans, a spokesman with the Olympic Committee in London explained in an e-mail: "As you may or may not [know]

IN WHAT MAY go down as his greatest "wild-hair" moment, Mayor Nutter told the U.S. Olympic Committee - don't start laughing yet - that the city wants to host the 2024 Olympic Games. (I suspect he wants to see a bicycle race that's not on a city sidewalk.) He's found $20 billion under the cushions of his office sofa? I know we've decriminalized marijuana, but . . . Our police force will provide airtight security when it can't keep track of its own guns? We fail to collect from tax deadbeats, but will raise billions?

John Carlos says that Tommie Smith wore the black leather glove to the victory stand in the 1968 Olympics because he didn't want to shake hands with Avery Brundage. Makes sense. Brundage was the International Olympic Committee chairman, ran the IOC like a fascist fiefdom. Brundage was the guy who stripped Jim Thorpe of his Olympic medals because Thorpe got two bucks for playing in a semipro baseball game. Brundage was the guy who put the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany and had no problem with all those Heil Hitler salutes and the scratching of a Jewish sprinter from the 4 x 100 relay team, so as not to perturb the brown-shirted hosts.

LONDON - It looks like a mismatch of Olympic-size proportion. The dominant U.S. women's basketball team, which has won 40 straight Olympic games, seeks its fifth consecutive gold medal Saturday against upstart France, which has never won any medal in women's hoops. "They're a team nobody really talked about heading into the tournament, but personally I knew that was going to be a team we might have to face," said U.S. point guard Sue Bird. France is undefeated in the tournament along with the United States, although the Americans have beaten teams by 34 points a game, France just eight.

I'VE BEEN in arenas where I've had to pour a drink into a cup bearing the logo of a league's official sponsor. Corporations pay big money to be the "exclusive" whatever for an event like the Olympics and they expect brand protection. So organizers of the London Games are warning athletes in the Olympic Village that if they are going to "get busy," they better use the official condom of the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Following a tradition that began at the 1992 Barcelona Games and supported by the IOC, the London committee placed 150,000 free Durex condoms in dispensers for the more than 10,000 athletes.

Vuong Tong, Philadelphia born and raised, graduated in 2008 from the University of the Arts and moved to London a year ago to attend the University of the Arts there, no relation other than in name. He was swept up in the spirit of the Olympic Games and volunteered. Tong, 26, worked as a marshal at the opening ceremonies. He helped parade teams from North Korea, Micronesia, and the United States on the long walk from the Olympic Village to the Olympic Stadium for the ceremony. He got to meet and pose for photos with several stars.

LONDON - Jordan Burroughs sat at the front of the media room with his teammates alongside him, reached for his cellphone, and flashed a smile. The reigning world champion freestyle wrestler at 74 kilograms is less than two weeks away from competing for a gold medal, and while he's savoring every moment of living among the best athletes in the world, he's willing to share some of the fame too. "I love the attention. I wish I had WiFi right now so I could go on Twitter," the Sicklerville wrestler said at Saturday's news conference.

Susan Francia once thought that making the 2008 Olympic rowing team - and winning a gold medal in the U.S. Eight in Beijing - was the hardest thing she'd ever do. Physically, making the 2012 team was harder. A herniated disk suffered last summer - "a classic rowing injury," as her coach put it - led to a fractured rib last November, not her first. But the timing made it the worst. The Abington High School and Penn graduate couldn't row, or even work out on a rowing machine, for two months.

It was late summer 1972. I had been wandering around Europe for a few weeks. Why not stop in Munich to see the final days of the Olympics? What could go wrong? That is how I found myself in Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle, in the second row of the stands behind the basket where Doug Collins was shooting the most pressure-packed free throws in basketball history. — I don't remember exactly when I planned to arrive in Munich, but I do remember wondering if I would be going at all when I read about what was going on in the Olympic Village.

One of the biggest participants in London's Olympics will also be one of the most silent. Aramark Corp., the $13 billion catering company headquartered in Philadelphia, will serve 70,000 meals a day at the Olympic Village during peak times. That should give Aramark bragging rights over what must be a monumental logistical task. But it can't happen, not if Aramark, now handling its 16th Olympics, wants to retain its supplier status in the future. Lloyd Evans, a spokesman with the Olympic Committee in London explained in an e-mail: "As you may or may not [know]

The killer in the ski-mask, that assassin with the machine gun cradled in his left arm ... that terrorist on the balcony of the dormitory that housed the Israeli athletes and coaches ... that madman barking demands to the wide-eyed woman in the pastel jacket, armed only with a walkie-talkie ... I stood 40 yards away, on a hillside, peering through a chain-link fence, watching the 1972 Munich Olympics crumble into tragedy. The fence wasn't even child-proof. In an effort to represent joy and youth and carefree spirits and human dimensions, the Olympic security people wore sky-blue and peach-colored uniforms.