you know......i very seldom feel sorry for professional athletes. Oh sure there were some pangs of sympathy for the Packers when the Cardinals were celebrating the playoff win...you sort of had to feel for Payton Manning after the super bowl losing int, but overall you have to think they have a pretty good life, i mean have you seen MTV Cribs???? But there is one athlete out there that i absolutly feel horrible for today and that is Olympic snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis. I know what you're thinking, "An olympian? How dare you call them professionals...let me tell you the days of pure amatuers in the olympics are long long gone. If you haven't followed her story, she's the one who did a bit of a "hotdog" move in Torino four years ago and lost the Gold Medal. the ironic thing here is that she's not a "showboat" never has been. she was just trying to pay homage to the snowboarders who came before here and wren't given the respect they deserved becasue so many "pure" olympic followers considered it an inferior sport.   The thing is she is evidently a great young athelte, a role model type who spends time visiting kids in hospitals, gets her hair cut everyyear and donates it the Locks of Love program, believee me she will never pull a Bodie Miller and admit that she didn't win becasue she partied too hard at the olympic village. over the past four years she has dominated the sport. But one slip-up and  its four more years of answering the same questions of why the absolute top person in the sport can't win a gold medal. Maybe thats what's so compelling about the olympics, the agopny of defeat can't be erased in a a few days or a week. this one lasts a lot longer, just ask Dan Jansen.