Mike Celizic

TURIN, Italy - It shouldn’t be this way, because there’s been no shortage of stories in these Games of the XX Winter Olympics, but there’s something missing, and it’s been that way from the start.

What’s missing is a defining personality, someone who drives the daily coverage and commands out attention day in and day out.

It could have been Bode Miller, but he’s chosen not to cooperate by doing anything worth celebrating. (Not that he doesn’t celebrate it anyway.) It could have been Michelle Kwan, but she left after half a practice session. It could be Sasha Cohen, Kwan’s heiress-apparent as America’s Ice Princess, but Cohen stubbornly refuses not only to play the role, but also won’t contribute so much as a sound bite to the cause.

Cohen did, however, make a statement on the ice. The U.S. champion skated to first place after the women’s short program on Tuesday night.

It could even have been Chad Hedrick, but his whole “Drive for Five” turned out to be a line manufactured by his own publicity machine rather than by the facts of the competition.

Even now, it should be Hedrick, teammate Shani Davis, and the feud between them. But their talents don’t really overlap except for one race, the 1,500 that will be skated Tuesday. The 1,000 was White’s, the 5,000 was Hedrick’s, the team pursuit was an unsightly squabble, and the 10,000, yet to come, again is all Hedrick’s.

And for whatever reason, even the rivalry between the two and Hedrick’s undisguised disdain for Davis hasn’t lit anyone fuse. That’s probably because they wear skates and tights, but not sequins, and they go around in circles for a timing device instead of leaping and don’t leap and pirouetting for the judges.

And so here we are, charging down the home stretch with nothing to light the way.

It’s like a sitcom without a theme song, a symphony without a leitmotif, a painting without a focal point, a fraternity party without a keg.

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And we need one — badly. We need someone with charisma and prospects that don’t wilt under the spotlight. We need a story with staying power, one that’s worth a call to a talk show, one that can crack the front page of the local newspaper and stay there.

It almost — but not quite, given the seriousness of the accusations — makes you wish that Saturday’s drug raid had been on the American team instead of the Austrians. It’s a really juicy story in Europe, and the Austrian papers are all over it, but, let’s face it, the Austrian cross-country and Nordic combined teams aren’t ever going to get an audience in the United States. At least if it had been the American Nordic teams, we could easily make it last for the rest of the Games and probably up to the middle of March, when NCAA basketball finally gives us something in which to invest our limited attention spans.

As I said up top, there have been good stories. Shaun White, the Flying Tomato, lit up Turin as well as televisions back home when he struck gold in the halfpipe while teammate Danny Kass took silver. And for a day or two, he was everywhere, spreading infectious good cheer with that wild mop of hair and the 100 kilowatt smile.

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A couple of days later, Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler matched White and Kass in the women’s halfpipe. Again, we had another couple days of smiles and fun and talk-show appearances.

But they worked their magic at the beginning of the games and were quickly gone. When you participate in just one event, and the event is over in two days, it’s hard to grow legs on your story.

Since then, we keep getting caught up in stories that don’t pan out, heroes who slip and slide and fall on the ice and snow, and, to be honest, I’m getting tired of talking about them.

I find myself longing for those duller days of yesteryear, when we as a nation were a lot easier to entertain, when finishing fourth or fifth in the medal standings was considered a victory instead of a defeat, when one Ice Princess would last us the entire 17 days of the Games.

Somewhere along the line, though, we as a nation lost our ability to be entertained by the games themselves and to appreciate excellence no matter what uniform it was wearing. Somewhere, we forgot that silver and bronze are worthy achievements, especially when won against the absolute best the rest of the world has to offer.

We’re on the gold standard now, spoiled by the 34 total medals won in Salt Lake City. And if we can’t get all gold all the time, we’d better have a figure skater or a great skier to give us something to build an Olympic story around.

We don’t have it and time is running out. Maybe Cohen will continue shine.

We can only hope.

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