Filip Bondy

TURIN, Italy - The final medal standings here say the U.S. fared reasonably well at Turin 2006. The Americans were second overall in gold (9) and total medals (25), a drop off of just 27 percent after a home Olympics at Salt Lake City, instead of the standard 41 percent.

It doesn’t feel that way, though, because the numbers don’t tell several other stories — the general failure of the marquee names, the bad-boy behavior embodied by Bode Miller, and the truly lousy performances by American women that somehow slipped under the radar.

Nobody seems to have noticed that the American women, once our shining pioneers, were thumped all over the rinks and slopes by the Germans, Canadians, Russians and Swedes.

It was the tale of two genders here: The U.S. men won their medals table, with seven golds, four silvers and five bronzes. The women captured only two golds, four silvers, two bronzes — half the totals of the German and Canadian women.

The women speedskaters were particularly terrible, going medal-less in both long- and short-track. The dynastic days of Bonnie Blair and Cathy Turner are long gone, and the Chris Witty generation was simply too old this time around to do much of anything. The U.S. can hope these things are cyclical, and not an irreversible trend. After all, it required just one dominant Canadian skater, Cindy Klassen, to capture five medals.

Jim Scherr, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, had been in the forefront of predicting a higher medals count than this, and afterwards was forced to issue an apology of sorts.

“It was a combination of mismanaged expectations and unforeseen circumstances,” Scherr said of unmet projections.

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The most famous athletes before the Games — Miller, Michelle Kwan, Sasha Cohen and Team USA hockey — left without a single gold medal, though Apolo Ohno rescued his own Q-ratings with an 11^th-hour victory. Mostly, Scherr was embarrassed by the bad boys and the grandest failure of them all, Bode.

Miller drank at night, played hoops on the mountain and said he didn’t care. He medaled in zero of five races. He left the Olympics, swinging his ski poles in faux triumph, uttering hedonistic nonsense that made him sound more like Paris Hilton than an athlete.

Bode said he “rocked” at these Olympics.  “My quality of life is the priority,” Miller told the Associated Press, after scampering away from the mountain toward his RV. “I wanted to have fun here, to enjoy the Olympic experience, not be holed up in a closet and not ever leave your room. I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level.”

He got drunk and got his photo taken with a Playmate, dancing away another good night’s rest. He screamed at everyone to look at him and look away from him at the same time.

Obviously, U.S. team officials were very unhappy with Miller. Scherr said the team had “taken a little bit of a hit with its comportment of high-profile athletes.”

“If they’re not taking the Games seriously, that’s where we draw the line,” Scherr said. “In Bode’s case, we thought he could get focused.”

Several other athletes were naughty here, as well. Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick won golds, but feuded like knuckleheads. Mike Modano didn’t just want an aisle seat, he wanted his own row on the airplane. Speedy Peterson punched somebody in the mouth, not long after flubbing his “helicopter” trick in aerials. He got thrown out of the Olympics.

“It’s like pornography, everybody has a different opinion, you can look at it every way,” Scherr said, about what qualifies as genuinely bad behavior.

Scherr said the USOC would sit down with Davis and Hedrick in the next few weeks, try to talk some sense into them. They had lifted each other on the speedskating oval to a combined two golds, two silvers and a bronze. But they had dragged each other down in the mixed zones and press conferences.

“They could have handled it much better,” Scherr said. “But they’re very young people.”

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He also said Modano was wrong complaining about U.S. Hockey. But you look at these transgressions, at Johnny Weir wearing a C.C.C.P. jacket at an official practice or Lindsey Jacobellis blowing her gold with a silly trick, these things are nothing compared to what Miller did.

Four years ago, Miller won a couple silvers and was the toast of Salt Lake City. He owned the professional ski tour last year. He seemed sane, a thoughtful, productive maverick.

Now he is a symbol of everything that went wrong for the U.S. at these Olympics, just as speed skater Joey Cheek became a symbol of everything that went right, with his two medals and his $40,000 donation of USOC prize money to impoverished Darfur.

Turin was a mixed bag, and Miller came off as more mixed-up than anybody.

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