So, who's responsible for screwing up the Olympics in the first couple of days? The candidates so far are Bode Miller, Apolo Anton Ohno and Michelle Kwan's doctors.

It's really hard to jump on Kwan for her role in this whole should-she-or-shouldn't-she-have drama. Figure skating is subjectively scored and rewarded, so who can argue when being let on or off the team is decided the same way? Besides, if somehow Kwan had pulled herself together and won an elusive gold while playing hurt, they'd be telling her story at every Olympiad for the next 200 years. Stories like that are why the Games even get televised in the first place. Yet you can't help wondering whether there ever was a chance for her to compete, since she's been hurt almost non-stop since late last year. Someone should have told her to try again in four years. It might have saved her a lot of physical and emotional pain yesterday, and gotten everyone focused on the rest of the field.

Ohno gets a pass, because it's apparent, two Olympiads into it, that winning in short-track speed skating is determined almost wholly on who falls down when. That was pretty dramatic to watch, though, even on tape delay.

Same for Miller in the downhill yesterday, even though you knew early in the morning that he had missed a medal. It seems more obvious this year than usual, though, that following the Games takes a delicate balance of monitoring results online or on the likes of ESPN News, watching the prime-time package (packaging, actually) and reading the papers the next day. The news alerts during the day never mentioned the changing-skis-at-the-last-second business. Maybe NBC exaggerated its importance, but it raised eyebrows as it was unfolding on-air.

Nevertheless, Bode almost certainly has viewers rooting both for and against him, including American fans who either love him or hate him. So in a sense he didn't disappoint. He's got more races to go. So does Ohno, with a segment of the viewers again watching it like a NASCAR race, to see if anyone wipes out. Meanwhile, the figure skating goes on, with one obvious storyline now missing, but with the likelihood that another will replace it. Except there will be that "what if Michelle hadn't gotten hurt'' cloud hanging over it, which never helps, even if the emergence of another ice queen or judging scandal spices things up.

So, Kwan's doctors win. They screwed the Olympics up. At least so far.