Fans of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy may remember the scene near the end when Frodo boards ship with the elves at the Grey Havens to leave Middle-Earth forever. His friends and comrades realize he’s leaving only at the last minute. He embraces each of them in turn, his beloved Sam last, then boards the ship. And as he sails away, he looks back with an unforgettable smile, a smile that says: You were everything to me, and I will carry you in my heart forever. It is a perfectly full smile, brimming with all the bittersweetness of love and loss.

U.S. diver Laura Wilkinson smiled that smile Thursday night.

The great U.S. diver, the heart and soul of the team, a gold medalist in the 10-meter platform at Sydney, was making the final competitive dives of her 15-year career at Beijing. She was beaten up, her 30-year-old body trashed after a decade and a half of throwing herself off the equivalent of a three-story building. And she wasn’t going to medal. Unable to enter the water properly because of a triceps injury, she had badly misfired on several of her dives, including a disastrous back three and a half somersault that essentially took her out of the running. In any case, it would have taken a nearly perfect performance from Wilkinson to beat out the top divers, with China’s Chen Ruolin winning gold with a gorgeous final dive over the fierce challenge of ice-cool Canadian Emilie Heymans. Wilkinson ended up finishing ninth, and she knew long before the end of the competition that this wasn’t going to be her day.

So there Wilkinson was, standing on the platform high above the water, about to make the next-to-last dive of her long and distinguished career. Athletes usually wear their game face at such moments. But as she stood there, she looked down and smiled. It was a long, deep, loving smile, directed at her teammates and friends in the audience who were not so much cheering on their comrade as paying tribute to her. It was Frodo’s smile.

And before her last dive, as her teammates rose to give her a standing ovation, she looked down and smiled again, that long, rich, loving smile. A smile that said thank you. A smile that said I have enjoyed it all. A smile that said, win or lose, I am content.

And then, having fully savored the moment, she dove for the last time. She hit it, she went out strong, but it didn’t really matter what she did. Because that smile will stay in our memories longer than whatever score she got. It was a farewell smile, to herself as much as to her friends, and it showed us what it means to say farewell with love and without regret. It was gold.

The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics on Wednesday after failing in two previous attempts.

Pyeongchang defeated rivals Munich and Annecy, France, in the first round of a secret ballot of the International Olympic Committee.

Needing 48 votes for victory, Pyeongchang received 63 of the 95 votes cast. Munich received 25 and Annecy seven.

The Koreans had lost narrowly in previous bids for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics.

Pyeongchang will be the first city in Asia outside Japan to host the Winter Games. Japan held the games in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998.

Olympic gold-medalist Lindsey Vonn has recreated that scene from “Basic Instinct” on the cover of ESPN magazine. And by “that scene” I do mean the one in which Sharon Stone infamously flashed her naughty bits to the world. It’s the magazine’s movie issue — why ESPN has a movie issue, I do not know — and it boasts a bunch of athletes reproducing classic film scenes. The headline accompanying the saucy cover photo is, wait for it, “Back to Basics.” Funny, I thought the magazine’s Body Issue — which came out just a few months ago and features exquisitely athletic naked bodies — was a return to “basics.” But it doesn’t get any more basic, or base, than paying homage to the most famous crotch shot in cinematic history.

London Olympic organizers say a record 5,000 doping tests will be carried out at the 2012 Games.

The local organizing committee has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain’s anti-doping body and will implement the testing program under the authority of the International Olympic Committee.

London 2012 director of sport Debbie Jevans says the size of the testing program will give a “strong message that drug cheats are not welcome at the London Games.”

UK Anti-Doping will train anti-doping officials and assist them during the event to carry out a 10 percent increase on the 4,500 tests conducted at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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Canada’s women’s hockey team has scored quite the controversy by daring to celebrate their win against the U.S. on Thursday by sipping beer, guzzling champagne and smoking cigars on the ice. After the fans filtered out of the stadium, the ladies returned to the rink still in uniform with gold medals draped around their necks. They laid on the ice, poured champagne in each other’s mouths and soaked up the Olympic glory. Their revelry hardly would have garnered any attention, except for one minor detail: there was an Associated Press photographer on hand to capture it all on film.