So just what will organizers of the 2002 Winter Games contribute to the collection of sometimes cute, sometimes confusing creatures known as Olympic mascots?
Don't expect an answer anytime soon. Utah's Olympic organizers have scrapped plans to debut the mascot during the closing ceremonies of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan."This is a big thing. We've only got one chance to get it right, so we decided we shouldn't rush it," said Mary Gaddie, image director for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.
SLOC decided to slow down last month after focus groups in Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Phoenix - cities selected for their middle-class values - said the mascot designs being considered weren't "Olympic" enough.
Gaddie wouldn't divulge what they were looking at but promised that the final design would be both Olympic oriented and identifiable as, well, something.
But what? An animal? Mineral? Vegetable? The new logo doesn't offer many clues. The asymmetrical snowflake influenced by American Indian patterns, supposedly represents the Winter Games' contrast, culture and courage.
Whatever it is, it won't be a computer-generated concoction. That's how the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta ended up with arguably the weirdest mascot ever, a bright blue blob whose full name was, quite accurately, Whatizit.
Mascots, which are supposed to sell a community's culture, typically are animals. The 1972 Summer Games in Munich had the first official Olympic mascot, a dachshund named Waldi. Sometimes, though, one animal isn't enough.
Next year's Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, have four big-nosed, owl-like birds known as Snowlets. And the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, have a trio of native beasts including a kookaburra.
The true test of a mascot's success, of course, is at the cash register. Mascots appear on everything from T-shirts to collectible pins, as well as in the form of stuffed toys.
The designer of Cobi, the doglike mascot for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Javier Mariscal, has said the choice needs to be "something that children would want and would hug."
And it should be something they can get their parents to buy. That's how so many plush Izzy dolls were sold before and during the 1996 Summer Games even as the Olympic mascot was being mocked by adults as the "Olympic maggot" or worse.
Timing is important, too. Sales of Izzy dollars and other Olympic-related merchandise soared as soon as the Atlanta mascot was introduced during the closing ceremonies of Barcelona's Summer Games in 1992.
But it's more difficult to move merchandise during the Winter Games, coming as they do after the Christmas shopping season. SLOC is likely to wait until next fall to trot out its mascot, just in time for back-to-school shopping.
As Dave Thomas, the officer in charge of the advertising agency partnership developing the mascot, pointed out, "You don't see a lot of new toys and few merchandise launches going on in February."
A toy manufacturer recently advised organizers to take their time testing a would-be mascot's marketability. Companies like Mattel spend two to five years developing a new toy before shipping it to store shelves.
A mascot mistake could be very expensive to organizers in terms of lost sales. "Mascots are hard to develop," Gaddie said. "They're three-dimensional. They've got to have a character and a personality."
Whatever they are.