Olympic Village

U.S. bobsledder Pavle Jovanovic has filed a lawsuit against the maker of a protein powder he blames for causing him to fail a drug test and miss the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. Jovanovic, a pusher for the U.S. sled driven by Todd Hays, is set to compete in the two- and four-man bobsled events in Turin, Italy. His lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City against Century Foods International, of Wisconsin. Jovanovic, who lives in Toms River, N.J., contends he tested positive for the banned 19-norandrostenedione steroid on Dec. 29, 2001, after consuming Century Foods' Nitro-Tech protein powder purchased at a store in Park City.

Italy's health minister and Olympic chief ruled out easing the country's strict anti-doping laws during the Winter Olympics in Turin, which begin in February. Health Minister Francesco Storace said athletes who take banned substances should simply stay home, the news agency Apcom reported during Storace's visit to Turin yesterday. Athletes can face criminal sanctions for doping violations under Italian law, raising the possibility of police raids in the Olympic village. Jimmy Shea, 37, who won the 2002 Olympic gold medal in skeleton, announced his retirement after failing to make the four-man U.S. skeleton team for the coming World Cup season.

"WHATEVER made you write an article on getting the Olympics in 2016?" It seemed like an odd question from a woman I had never met. She identified herself as Danielle Cohn from the Philadelphia Sports Congress. She called after reading my opinion piece in the Daily News on July 11. "I don't know," I said. "After New York lost out on its bid to get the 2012 Olympics, I thought a city in the United States would probably get it in 2016 and why not Philadelphia?" "So no one from the committee contacted?"

Harvey Abrams has seen the bid proposal that Philadelphia submitted to the International Olympic Committee when civic leaders such as John B. Kelly sought to bring the 1948 Summer Games here. "It was a thin little thing," Abrams, an Olympic historian based in State College, said yesterday. "There were maybe 20 pages, typewritten, with a few photos of prospective venues pasted in. " Today, with talk of trying to land the 2024 or 2028 Games beginning to flicker in the city like a nascent flame, such a proposal would cost an estimated $10 million and require a small army of professionals to assemble.

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.

Thirty years ago today, the Olympic Games lost their innocence. And terrorism showed a chilling new ski-masked face as TV cameras caught a Black September gunman surveying the Olympic Village from the balcony of an apartment, where he and five other gunmen had slain two Israeli Olympic team members and were holding nine others hostage. "The Games shut down and the tanks rolled," recalled Ted Nash of the Penn Athletic Club, a U.S. rowing coach at Munich. "Even the most hardened Olympic official was stunned and appalled.

Getting to the Olympics went really smoothly. I was met at my gate at the airport and escorted a short ways to where I got my credential, right there on the concourse. Within 25 minutes after landing, I was in the Olympic Village. The security is tight, just as I'd heard. There is a lot of military in the village. We're in some nice, new dorms at the University of Utah. Each suite has four bedrooms, two players to a bedroom, eight to a suite. Johnny LeClair is my roommate; I don't know yet who all the other guys in the suite will be. Some NHL teams had games last night, so most of the guys aren't here yet. The only thing bad about the rooms is there isn't much closet space.

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.

New York City leaders think they have found the means to build thousands of apartments, extend a major subway line, build a sports stadium and otherwise spruce up the city's aging infrastructure - and do it all in one swift shot. All it takes is luring the Olympics - and the investment dollars the games bring with them. That's the dream of New York politicians and city planners, who are competing with seven other cities to become the U.S. candidate to host the 2012 Summer games.

Two-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong broke a vertebrae in his neck when he collided with a car last month but still plans to race at the Sydney Olympics. The injury, which caused Armstrong to drop out of two races in Europe this weekend, was detected Monday after he had an MRI exam at a clinic in Monaco and was revealed yesterday. Armstrong will miss Saturday's Paris-Brussels race and Sunday's Grand Prix Fourmies, but plans to compete in the GP des Nations on Sept.