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American skier Lindsey Vonn is being tipped to become the global superstar of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Vonn is bidding for a clean sweep of gold medals in the prestigious Alpine ski events to add to her consecutive World Cup titles.
The 25-year-old goes to her third Winter games without having won an Olympic medal but she is favourite to win the downhill, Super G and super combined events.
She is married to US skier Thomas Vonn, and first took to the slopes when aged only two, moving to the snowy peaks of Vail, Colorado, for training a decade ago.
“Lindsey Vonn is going to be enormous,” said former skier Graham Bell, who competed for Britain at five Winter Olympic games.
“She has got the potential to win a clean-sweep of medals and has already taken the world championships by storm.
“She's got the talent and the looks and has the potential to do for skiing what Usain Bolt is doing for athletics. Her big rival — and best friend — is Maria Riesch from Germany who has come back from injury and is already winning races again.”
Bell, a BBC pundit in Vancouver, believes the men's ski events could be the story of whether the men dubbed the Canadian Cowboys — including Whistler-raised talent Manuel Osborn-Paradis and Mike Janik — can make local knowledge of the piste count as they seek to break the traditional dominance of a Switzerland team boasting Didier Cuche and Carlo Janka, reigning world champions respectively at Super G and giant slalom.
“Both (Janik and Osborn-Paradis) learnt to ski in Whistler and there's going to be a big and raucous support for them,” said Bell.
American Shaun White — nicknamed the flying tomato after his shock of red hair — is promising to once again become the king of the half pipe at the Olympic snowboarding event in Cypress Hill.
White, who has a cult following and puts his name to a lucrative computer game, is working on a difficult stunt that could well guarantee gold if he pulls it off — but may hospitalise him if he doesn't. Team-mate Kevin Pearce has just come out of a coma after he attempted it.
In the snowboard cross event — a head-to-head race down an obstacle course — American Lindsey Jacobellis is seeking to put things right after a grandstanding move while leading in 2006 went wrong and cost her gold.
Bell believes the snowboard cross event will capture the imagination.
He said: “The half-pipe is for purists and there's a lot of kids into it. But the general public like snowboard cross because they can see what's happening as the competitors go head-to-head, crashing into one another and going off jumps.”
American Apolo Ohno — a previous winner of the American edition of TV's Dancing with the Stars — looks set to become the most-decorated short-track speed skater of all time by adding to his tally of five Olympic medals.
The hottest ticket in Vancouver, 80 miles south of the Alpine ski events, will be for the 19,000-seat arena during the ice hockey, the host nation's national sport.
Bell believes British medals are more likely in Vancouver and hopes the Games can bring in similar ratings to 2002, when six million watched the women's curlers win gold.
He said: “2002 was a different story when people stayed up to watch a single gold medal being won. But Great Britain has won a lot of gold medals since then in Athens and Beijing and maybe the British are getting blasé.”
Graham Bell will commentate at the Vancouver Winter Olympics for the BBC, which will broadcast more than 160 hours of the 17-day event on BBC Two and BBC HD.
