No Wheaties In College
To see the entire U.S. women’s Olympic gold medal hockey team, you’ll have to look someplace other than the breakfast table.
Five of the 20 team members will not be pictured on the Wheaties box because they have college eligibility, and under NCAA rules they can’t accept commercial sponsorships if they want to continue playing.
Those excluded by the NCAA rules are Tara Mounsey, Sara DeCosta, A.J. Mleczko, Angela Ruggiero and Jenny Schmidgall.
Although they won’t necessarily make money from being on the Wheaties box, NCAA rules prohibit college athletes from allowing their photos or names to be used for financial gain by someone else.
Ruggiero, the youngest member of the team and a senior in high school, could get a full college hockey scholarship, depending on which school she chooses.
Schmidgall will attend the University of Minnesota in the fall.
“I’m kind of jealous,” Schmidgall said. “I’m a little sad. But I still know it’s my team, and I wouldn’t want to take this away from anyone else. The picture is really great. In spirit, we’re all on that box.”
Mounsey and DeCosta both have three more years of college, Mounsey at Brown and DeCosta at Providence, while Mleczko has her senior year left at Harvard.
The box will be in stores next Monday.
TV ratings plummet
Too much snow, not enough compelling stories and a less-than-stellar broadcast gave CBS the lowest-rated Winter Olympics in 30 years.
According to the preliminary final numbers released by CBS, the network got a 16.2/26 share for its prime-time coverage, 42 percent behind the 27.8/42 from Lillehammer and 13 percent off the 18.7/29 from Albertville.
Nagano finished as the lowest-rated Olympics since 1968, when ABC got a 13.5 rating from Grenoble, France.
Nagano getting back to normal
The games are over and the athletes have scattered. Still, many Nagano residents haven’t gotten over the idea that the Olympics actually came to this mountain-ringed city.
For Fumitake Takemura, the Olympics seemed to touch everyone he knows.
His daughter was one of more than 36,000 people who worked as volunteers. His employer was the games’ official bank. Virtually all his friends were involved in some way.
And now that an Olympic exodus has begun, the city is beginning to feel that postparty mix of joy, sadness and relief.
“I never imagined that a place like this out on the countryside would ever be the focus of such excitement,” he said. “We all were so caught up in it. It will be hard to see it all quiet down here again like it was before.”
Countdown begins
Only 1,446 more days.
That’s how much longer Utah will wait for the Winter Games.
But Olympic boosters did not delay their celebration; it began with the closing ceremonies in Nagano, Japan, Sunday and culminated Monday afternoon as the Olympic flag arrived by jet in Salt Lake City, host for the next Winter Olympics in 2002.
“For the first time on Utah soil, the Winter Olympic flag,” proclaimed master of ceremonies Steve Young, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback and a graduate of Brigham Young in Provo, Utah.
A motorcade carried the flag to the City and County Building, where a Salt Lake 2002 flag will be flown while the real thing goes into a vault for safekeeping until 2002.
Bergoust to be on Letterman
Olympic gold medalist freestyle skier Eric Bergoust of Missoula has accepted an invitation to appear on “Late Night With David Letterman” on Wednesday.