I got a lot of e-mails during the Olympics asking me why I had to be so negative about the home team during these Games. And all I could say was that it was because there was so much to be negative about.

And, while there were plenty of "happy-happy, joy-joy" stories which are chronicled in a companion piece to this, there were far too many times when the only thing a humble scribe could do was follow the first rule of writing sports columns, to whit: The task of a sports columnist is to arrive at the scene of a catastrophe and shoot the survivors.

Much as I’d have liked to put a positive spin on the Adventures of Bode Miller, I couldn’t do it without resorting to such ploys as: "Although American medal hopeful Bode Miller failed to complete another race, Sestriere bars reported a 40-percent increase in sales, which they attributed entirely to his visits."
But Bode wasn’t the only American bummer during these Games. As a unit, Team USA fell well short of expectations in both total medals and gold medals. We’ll leave it for others to argue why.

My feeling is that it’s because of those team hats that look as if the athletes are wearing their underwear on their heads — backwards. But I’ll admit that four years ago, the Russian sailor hats were just as silly, and that team set a record for medals.

Whatever the reasons, there were plenty of disappointments in just about every nook and cranny of Turin. Here’s our list of the 10 biggest busts of the Games of the XX Winter Olympics.

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Rest of the list for "America’s 10 biggest busts of Olympics" can be found here:

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