Flame on! The countdown to Turin has begun

Someone please wake Bob Costas.

He might not know it — and most of you might be right there with him — but the long snooze-alarm period between Olympics is officially over.

The clock already has tick, tick, ticked down to a mere 80 days from the lighting of the flame for the XX Winter Games in Turin, Italy. We all know what this means. It's only 81 days until the Korean delegation files the first we-got-robbed protest with the International Court of Sport (which, to repeat, is in no way affiliated with the International House of Pancakes).

Just to place all this on the map: Turin is a medium-sized, northern-Italian city heretofore known primarily for unleashing a plague of Fiat sports cars on the rest of the unsuspecting world. The Turinian, thus, have much to make amends for, and have pledged to do just that with a Feb. 10-26 extravaganza the likes of which the world has not seen since, well, 2002.

Other than a few minor details — the usual ice rinks that won't freeze and a few guinea-pig guys launching into Earth orbit off one particularly nasty turn on the new bobsled/luge track, Turin says it's ready.

And so are we, kicking off our now ongoing series of weekly Olympic updates with the following items of interest, alarm or simple amusement:

Step away from that syringe: Turin already has outdone the world by accomplishing something not even Greece could have: sparking a doping controversy months before the first foreign athlete sets foot on Italian soil.

The rub? In most parts of planet Earth, ingesting banned substances in an attempt to get citius, altius, fortius-ier will get you thrown out of competition, sent home — and, if you're an American, a six-figure book advance. But Italy takes its dopes and doping a bit more seriously. There, juicing is a criminal offense. As is possessing the juice, as it were.

The assembled geniuses of the International Olympic Committee are sweating a bit at the notion of the biannual festival of sweetness and light turning into a bad rerun of Cops: Turin. Their concern is not so much over some bad-boy-bad-boy cross-country skier being thrown in the pokey. It's that the Italian coppers might smell steroidal malfeasance emanating from the Olympic Village and conduct impromptu doping raids, right there in front of God, Al Roker, Bud Greenspan and everybody.

Not exactly the kind of good PR you're looking for, especially during the Olympic Truce.

Attempts to broker solutions — namely, asking the Italian Parliament to simply agree to look the other way, pretending its own laws don't exist for a few weeks — have thus far failed. And clout-possessing, would-be mediators, such as the World Anti-Doping Agency, have wisely steered clear of the entire matter, saying it's not their problem.

The IOC's position: Turin, when it signed on for the Games, agreed to play by Olympic rules on doping, period.

The Italian Parliament's response: Well, maybe, but: If our laws are good enough for Italians, they're good enough for the rest of ya.

Our conclusion: Somebody better figure something out soon. We're all for busting dopers, but throwing a guy into the hoosegow wearing nothing but one of those sausage-casing luge suits is a full step beyond cruel and unusual punishment.

And: The more we think about it, the more it becomes clear that this is a matter requiring some delicate international diplomacy. So we Americans better just stay out of it.

Speaking of urine samples: There's bad karma, and then there's Ferenc Gyurkovics' bad karma.

For reasons only he, his pharmacist and urologist know for sure, Gyurkovics, a 26-year-old Hungarian weightlifter, asked a team trainer to pee in a cup for him so he allegedly could submit a bogus urine sample at the Athens Games, say officials with his own sport federation, quoted by the Hungarian News Agency.

The trainer, clearly dehydrated with excitement, did as asked, but failed to provide, um, sufficient amounts of evidentiary material. So the resourceful Gyurkovics had yet another friend, the federation captain, top off the sample.

Alas, pee source number two turned out to be just short of Rafael Palmeiro on the Last Guy In The World You'd Want To Have Pee For You list: He happened to be on a "potency improvement drug" at the time. Result: The hybrid sample tested positive for oxandrolone, a banned substance, and our Hungarian hero was stripped of his silver medal in the 105-kilogram class.

Four other Hungarians were busted for doping in Athens. It's unclear whether the federation captain made his own contribution to their woes.

Simulate this: Atos Origin, the official information technology supplier for the Olympics, is bragging about having the hardware/software system for the Turin Games fully up and running — and even goof-tested.

The company staged its own crisis "dress rehearsal," wherein company "shadow teams" created "every possible meltdown or hack scenario that could happen at the Olympics" — a total of 292 tested debacles, ranging from rampant viruses in hard drives to power failures to no-show employees. The conclusion: It'll all work.

Sorry, but no computer system is completely failsafe until it has survived Scenario 293: the dreaded Sleep-Deprived Clod From Seattle Dumping A Triple-Grande Latte On Main CPU test. And they can't run that one until we get there.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com