Bridie Farrell tells WUWM, a public radio station in Milwaukee, that she had sexual contact with Gabel repeatedly over several months in 1997 and 1998 while both were training in New York and Michigan. At the time, she was 15 and Gabel was 33.

Gabel competed in short track at three Winter Games and won a silver medal in the relay at Lillehammer in 1994. He also served as president of U.S. Speedskating and is currently chairman of the short track committee for the International Skating Union.

U.S. Speedskating says it will "look into this matter immediately to determine what action should be taken." There's been no comment from Gabel and an attempt to reach him by phone was unsuccessful.

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When contacted by The Associated Press, however, the spokesman said only "that information is not confirmed," before hanging up. He did not deny making the statements to the Russian media or say the information was incorrect.

Leonid Tyagachev, a former sports minister, took over as head of the Russian Olympic Committee in 2001. In the wake of the Vancouver Games, President Dmitry Medvedev has warned that sports officials would be fired if they failed to resign voluntarily.

The news agencies Interfax and ITAR-Tass cited Gennady Shvets as saying that Tyagachev had tendered his resignation. "This obviously concerns the Russian athletes' performance at the Vancouver Olympic Games," Interfax quoted the spokesman as saying.

Russia won just 15 medals in Vancouver -- and only three golds -- two fewer than its previous low in Salt Lake City in 2002. Officials said before the Olympics that 30 medals and a top-three finish in the medal standings were the targets.

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Now, the International Olympic Committee has reportedly written a letter to the Canadian National Olympic Committee "to find out a few more details," and the team has issued a public apology. What's the big deal, you might ask? For one, 18-year-old team member Marie-Philip Poulin was snapped holding a beer, and she's just under the legal drinking age in British Columbia. OK, so that's inappropriate, I guess -- only, in her home of Quebec, the drinking age is 18. Are people really that scandalized that someone just weeks away from her 19th birthday was caught imbibing in Vancouver after winning an Olympic gold medal?

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"For sure" is nothing new, of course. It's been around since the 1580s, arriving after the expression "sure enough" and before "sure-footed," which, sadly, never really caught on. Today it is associated with groovy Californian optimism ("Fer shurr, dude!"), and tends to pepper the speech of Gen Y'ers, the demographic most represented at the Vancouver Games. But the frequency with which Olympic competitors, coaches and officials have been saying "for sure" lately suggests it is more than a meaningless verbal tic.

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And we loved it all! Here's a look at some of the contest's craziest looks.

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There is something deeply satisfying about seeing a pregnant athlete at the Olympics. For one, it doesn't happen all that often: Only two pregnant Olympians (that we know of, at least) have come before Moore -- a German woman won fourth place in the skeleton in 2006 and a Swedish figure skater won gold some 90 years ago. More than that, though, she offers up an awesome embodiment of both nurturer and competitor, mother and warrior. I could start slinging the Women's Studies jargon about feminine archetypes and the medicalization of motherhood -- and yadda, yadda, yadda -- but it's really much simpler than all that. The dangers of doing, well, anything while pregnant are often greatly exaggerated, and Moore offers a healthy contrast.

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A few media outlets have published inaccurate information regarding those machines, associating the Zamboni brand name with the malfunctioning ice resurfacers.

While it is unfortunate that there was an interruption to the Winter Olympic events, please note: the resurfacers which were on the ice during those events were not Zamboni brand ice resurfacers and should not be referred to as "Zamboni machines".

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"Can I ask you a question about Canada?" he asked.

Sure, I replied, expecting something about healthcare or Anne Murray. Nope.

"Why are all you Canadians so terribly boring?"

Canadian national identity has always been a curious mixture of American populism and British propriety, a fact that, along with our climate, geographical size and complicated relationship with our neighbor to the south, has led us to be suspicious of acting too impulsively or dramatically. Some people might call that boring; we call that prudent. We’re the only country in the Americas to have gained our independence from Europe without violence -- choosing, instead, to pursue it through a series of incremental accords. As Pierre Berton, Canada’s best-known historian, put it, "If this lack of revolutionary passion has given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt, contributed to our well-known lack of daring."

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Watch the following routine, which world champion ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, from Russia, performed at today's European figure skating championships in Estonia. It's a tribute to Australian Aboriginals, set to Aboriginal-inspired music, with the pair dressed in brown skin-colored body suits covered in tribal markings and fake leaves. Oh, and also a little something that appears to be "brown-face."

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Not in 2002.

2002 was all about the gray areas. It was a year of ties, disputed finishes, moral relativism and endless debate. It was the year of the Tuck Rule and the double figure-skating gold, the speed-skating flap and the disputed Indy 500, the All-Star Game tie and the imminent lifting of Pete Rose's "permanent" ban. A former National League Most Valuable Player said he was on steroids when he won the award, then said he wasn't, which led to baseball promising to get tough on steroids, which it won't. A former NBA player named Bison Dele, né Brian Williams, disappeared mysteriously at sea and is presumed dead.

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Alimzan: The grapevine says you get subpoena.

Victor: Yeah, from the U.S. Justice Department, eh.

Alimzan: You don't be cheese-eater, now.

Victor: Cheese? Huh?

Alimzan: Look, we have nice job for you, you keep your mouth shut like good skater. We get you job as ice dancing instructor at summer camp on Black Sea. Is easy job, you see, because nobody ice skates in the summertime. You don't do nothing and you don't say nothing. Understand?

Victor: There's more to this than I thought, Alimzan.

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And I think I've done that. So I feel confident in pronouncing that the signature event of the Salt Lake City Olympics to date came on Thursday, Valentine's Day, when those star-crossed lovers, those scorned Canadian skaters, those darlings in defeat -- Jamie Sale and David Pelletier -- cloned a cat.

Wait, let me check my notes.

Let's see. The day started with women's hockey. The United States beat China 12-1, a final score that didn't reflect how one-sided the game was. The U.S. outshot the Chinese 71-10. Try to imagine a baseball team getting 35 hits in a game and you'll have an idea of how ridiculous that stat is.

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They've given it a name and a graphic over at MSNBC. It's "The Ice Storm." Scott Hamilton, NBC's figure skating commentator and himself a former gold medalist, hasn't slept yet, so full of turmoil has he been over the events of Monday night.

Christine Brennan of USA Today wrote that Monday's decision was the worst she'd seen in 14 years covering figure skating and, calling for a full investigation, all but said that the judging was rigged. The International Skating Union, the sport's governing body, said it would launch an "internal assessment" of the judging, whatever that means.

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Mostly, it's spent in the Sidelines sports bar, where Harding has staked a claim on the fourth bar stool in front of the video poker machines.

"Three, four, five days a week," says the bartender.

Harding feeds fives, tens and twenties into the video poker machine for hours, often playing alone, sometimes accompanied by a middle-aged woman Harding has unofficially adopted as her mother. Burning through money that comes from Lord-knows-where, she puffs Marlboro Lights, drinks Baileys mixed with a chocolate liqueur and tries to ignore patrons who consider her the antichrist of American sports, Olympic integrity and clean-cut Oregon pride.

There is a poignancy in watching a brilliantly talented individual -- the two-time Olympic contender and 1991 U.S. national and world champion could definitely skate -- repeatedly slide back into to the seedy, lonely life from which world-class skating once promised to deliver her. Even in her tough-girl pose, Harding has a sweetness, and a vulnerable, I've-been-abused face. She makes people want to help her, and for years, many have tried.

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In a major blow to the boarding world, Terje Haakonsen, the three-time half-pipe world champion, won't be going to Nagano next month to compete in the first-ever Olympic snowboarding event. And without Haakonsen, known to many simply as "The Legend," the snowboarding competition has about as much allure as women's figure skating would have without Michelle Kwan.

Haakonsen and many of his Scandinavian snowboarding colleagues are already deeply suspicious of the commercial motives behind turning his sport into an Olympic event. Haakonsen also has nothing but disdain for the Games' governing body, the International Olympic Committee, which he likens to organized crime.

"When I say Mafia," he explained to Sweden's TV4 recently, "I mean what most people see in the word: people who take over control but never let anyone have an inside look at what they are doing."

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