Italy, which tied for ninth on the final medals table, will remember Turin as a landmark of maturity and enhanced standing in the overall Olympic movement.

The Dutch, with their legendary speed skaters, finished behind Turin's home team. So did Finland, so cold that it's Arctic in places. Japan, too, with its boundless initiative, also lagged behind Italy, needing a shocker by Shizuka Arakawa in figure skating to medal at all.

One man, one shocking medal effort on the opening day of competition, is all it took to get a nation to burst with pride over more than the spectacular opening ceremonies. His name is Enrico Fabris and at the last Winter Games, in Salt Lake City, he was nothing special. Sixteenth in one event, 26th in another.

In Fabris' discipline of speed skating Italy never had won a medal of any kind, as a matter of fact, which is why the kid's bronze medal in the 5,000-meter race was such a kick in the consciousness of a soccer-loving nation. He did it while skating in the final pair of the day, too, which only served to lift the drama of the moment into almost more than teary-eyed men and swooning women could bear from the Italian Alps to Sicily.

American star Chad Hedrick, who won that opening 5,000-meter race way back on Feb. 11, talked of matching Eric Heiden's epic five gold medals at one Winter Olympics. Instead, he didn't even match Fabris here, settling instead for one medal of each color.

Now this is no knock on the U.S. effort, merely an acknowledgement of what adrenaline and crowd support can do for a host nation. America's boys and girls of winter won 25 medals in Turin, a U.S. record for an snowy Olympics outside the States and second only to Germany, but it was 34 medals four years ago in Salt Lake City.

In Italy's case, a rapid improvement in training and competition facilities was an added bonus for athletes. Nothing less will do. When the Winter Olympics last came to Italy in 1956 at the mountain resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo, the figure skating competition was staged outdoors.

This time around, Fabris was fabulous. When Hedrick and Shani Davis feuded at the speed skating oval, Fabris cruised through the controversy and beat them both in the 1,500. And while other Italians won medals in team competitions at the cross-country and short-track speed skating venues, Fabris won gold all by himself.

Now Fabris seems too fresh-faced and genuinely humble to take on the Olympic playboy role perfected by previous Winter Olympic heroes such as Alberto Tomba. If every Italian news and sports magazine doesn't make him the most photographed Enrico since the great Caruso himself, well, I'll pour all my olive oil down the drain and go cold turkey.

There's nothing wrong with the city, a cultural and historical jewel, but there are 900,000 people stuffed in tight and cozy here in a landscape of apartment buildings and frequent valley-bound smog. The population of Palm Beach County isn't much more. The notion of a cozy Alpine village, in other words, gives way here to one urban challenge after another.

That started to show late in the Games when hundreds of orange "Passion Lives Here" banners stretched across walls and fences began to rip and tear in spots, revealing that graffiti artists live here, too. Somebody must have let up on the social services end, too, because the homeless people who were missing in the first week of the Olympics began to appear in some small number during the last week, occasionally sleeping on the trendiest shopping avenues or panhandling on the front steps of great cathedrals and palaces.

Hockey was poorly attended and even a figure-skating session or two, but with decent tickets going for $100 and more, not to mention the fact that people have to work on weekdays, there was no great shock. The weekend shows in town, for the most part, were packed and there always are thousands more spectators lining the fences of the alpine venues than seems sensible.

Hey, I'll never rip another Olympic city for missing the mark on basics such as transportation and organization and security, not after Atlanta. Turin was more than satisfactory in all these cases, not bad for a nation that hasn't hosted an Olympics in nearly half a century, dating back to the Summer Games of 1960 in Rome.

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