UTAH OLYMPIC PARK — Who'd have thought that the first bona fide, double gold-wearing superstar of the Salt Lake Games would be a 5-foot-8, 121-pound Harry Potter look-alike named Simon (pronounce it "See-moan") Ammann?
The answer, apparently, is nobody.
Simon, from Switzerland, won his second gold medal in as many tries Wednesday when he won the big-hill jumping competition, securing a bookend medal for the gold he won in Sunday's normal hill event. He joined Norway's Ole Einar Bjoerndalen as the first athletes to claim multiple gold medals at these Olympics, but Bjoerndalen is a biathlete, which, no offense to anyone with a rifle, is — to use a football metaphor — like being an offensive lineman. No matter how well you do, you're never going to get the big sporting goods deals.
Ski jumping. Now that's a different matter. Ski jumpers appeal to the regular public like people who climb Everest or walk across Antarctica or storm enemy strongholds in Mogadishu. No one knows exactly why they do it, or if they're completely sane, but they do have an unmistakable appeal.
Ammann's appeal is doubly compelling because coming into the Olympics he had all the notoriety of a monk. When he landed at the Salt Lake airport a week ago, this was his dossier: 20 years old . . . had never won a World Cup event . . . came from a country that had never won an Olympic ski jumping medal. Exactly nobody asked for his autograph.
His biggest claim to fame was a spectacular crash in December in Willingen, Germany, where he suffered a back injury and a concussion and couldn't jump at all before the Olympics.
He had worse odds than Rulon Gardner.
But then along came two postcard-perfect blue-sky days at Utah's sold-out Olympic Park, along with a healthy dose of Olympic magic, and, voila, Simon is suddenly in serious need of the services of a Swiss banker.
Of all the Olympic traditions, the most endearing is the one that Games after Games reaches down and plucks a never-heard-of out of the choir.
Like clockwork it happens. If it isn't an Alberto Tomba or a Sonja Henie or a Franco Nones or a Dominik Hasek it's the U.S. hockey teams of 1960 and 1980 or downhillers Bill Johnson and Tommy Moe. Some go on to long-term fame and fortune. Others fade quickly again into obscurity, as if they were struck by lightning and got over it. But whatever the case, their Olympic legacies are cemented for the ages.
Ammann's future, as they say, is now all ahead of him. Not only did he spend the week outleaping the acknowledged giants of the jumping world — namely Poland's Adam Malysz and Germany's Sven Hannawald — but he did it when both of these multiple World Cup champions were in top form. In Sunday's K90 competition he held off Malysz and Hannawald with an almost flawless final jump and in Wednesday's K120 he outdid that. Tied with the German and a nudge in front of the Pole going into the final jump, he came through with the longest jump of the competition — 133 meters or 436 feet. He was the only competitor among the top 10 to leap farther on the final jump than in the penultimate round.
So unnerved was Hannawald, who jumped last, that in his attempt to overtake Simon he soared within half-a-meter of his record distance but paid for it with a fall that relegated him out of the medals and into fourth place.
And how did this 20-year-old from Grabs, Switzerland, handle his sudden celebrity?
Exactly how you'd expect. By hugging the snow and his teammates and thrusting his skis into the air and saying, "I am trembling. It can't be. I'm the champion."
Nothing left after that but to exit to the strains of the song by Creed they've been playing over and over at Olympic Park this week.
It's called "Higher" and the lyrics are "Can you take me higher, to a place where blind men see, to a place with golden dreams?"
Simon Ammann might want to run out and buy a copy.
Lee Benson's column runs daily during the Olympics. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.