Just hours before the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony last Friday, American skeleton gold medal hopeful Zach Lund was kicked out of the games in Turin, Italy for testing positive for a steroid masking agent. Lund blamed the positive test on a hair-growth stimulation drug he had been taking. The World Anti-Doping Agency’s Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said, “Step back, Zach. We don’t want you in our Olympics.”

She’s a snowball and he’s an ice cube. Despite those differences, they’re trying to make it work as a couple at the Winter Olympics.

And thus the controversy begins.

Every four years sports lovers are treated a worldwide fiasco called the Winter Olympics. While the outcome of most of the competitions may be up for grabs, other aspects of this quadrennial cluster-fest are certainties. First, there will be questionable decisions by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regarding at least one prominent athlete and the stuff that he or she puts in his or her body.

Four years ago a gold medal-winning snowboarder was kicked off the medal stand for testing positive for marijuana. With that decision the IOC showed its apparent ignorance of snowboarding culture and of what constitutes a “performance enhancing” drug.

In the current controversy about skeleton competitor Zach Lund, it is important to realize that he is in a small one-man sled hurling down a bobsled run with his chin about an inch from the ice. For that, you need a flask of Jagermeister, not an injection of steroids. No amount of steroids will allow you to bend the laws of gravity and descend the course any faster. So, yeah, I believe him when he says he was just trying to keep his hairline from receding faster than your average speed skater.

The second certainty of the Olympics is that there will be some controversy regarding the judging during the figure skating events. During the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City it was discovered that some vote-swapping among judges had resulted in a gold medal for the Russian pairs skaters over a presumably better duo from Canada. The fallout from the scandal included a gold medal being awarded to both the Russians and the Canadians (an Olympic first), the French judge being sent home in shame, and millions of Canadians in Quebec refusing to speak French for the next few months.

So how has the IOC fixed the judging process for the 2006 Olympics? By making the whole thing anonymous. Now when a score comes up for a particular performance, no one will have any idea which judge awarded it. Brilliant. This ingenious lack of accountability will surely halt the judicial hanky panky in its tracks. Actually, the IOC stated it was more concerned with judges getting the raspberry from the fans in the stands who know a little something about figure skating.

I personally have never cared for sporting events that are decided by the judges’ scorecards. Give me a sport that is decided by a field goal, home run, three-pointer or slap shot and I’m happy. But when you have Olympic judges taking points off of a beautiful ten-meter high dive performance because the diver made a little splash…that’s just wrong. It makes me want to push those judges off that ten-meter platform and see what kind of splash they would make.

The third certainty of the Winter Olympics is that NBC will pound you over the head with up close and personal background stories about members of the US team. The network realizes that we football-loving Americans watch giant slalom ski races exactly once each four years. So they rapidly deploy camera crews to come up with touching stories of boys and girls who grew up on the poor side of the slopes yet beat all the odds and made the Olympic team. Then they slap some string music on it and a somber sounding Bob Costas introduction and call it a sports profile piece. It’s really just an attempt to yank our Yankee chains and make us root for the Americans. It’s jingo journalism at its worst and really does nothing to enhance the games.

In fact, I find the ultimate irony of the Olympics (winter and summer) is that they claim to promote international friendship while continually updating the country-versus-country medal scoreboard every hour on the hour. It’s a bitter nationalistic grudge match disguised as a touchy-feely international love fest. I, for one, ain’t buying it. I’ll watch some Olympic hockey action but I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that it will lead to world peace.

Neve & Gliz

No Olympics is complete without the introduction of an insipid unimaginative mascot. The Winter Olympics in Turin has two of them who will run around the Olympic compound yelling “ciao!” to all of the tourists. The female mascot is a kind and gentle snowball named “Neve” while the male is a playful ice cube named “Gliz.”

I swear I’m not making this up.

Neve and Gliz join such memorable Olympic mascots as Amik the Beaver (Montreal, 1976), Misha the Bear (Moscow, 1980), Sam the Eagle (Los Angeles, 1984), Sodori the Tiger (Seoul, 1988), Cobi the Dog (Barcelona, 1992) and Izzy (Atlanta, 1996). The Australians are to blame for the multiple mascot trend, as they trotted out three for the 2000 Olympics. That unlikely trio included Ollie the Kookaburra, Syd the Platypus and Millie the Echidna. Athens followed suit with brother and sister blobs named Athena and Phevos in 2004.

Sources close to the IOC reveal that the official mascots for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will be a panda and an underage textile worker earning 90 cents a day.