Now that the Olympic flame has been extinguished for another four years, and the glitter of the gold sufficiently dimmed, it might be appropriate to step back and try to make some sense out of the last two weeks' double camels and missed slalom gates.

I'll admit I've never been much of a winter Olympic fan, but I think that's largely due to the fact that the winter games always seemed to be studded with rather crazy competitions designed to capture the thrill of viewing the agony of defeat.

While I've always enjoyed a whirl down the Highland St. hill on my Flexible Flyer, my idea of a good time stops short of broken bones and cranial concussions.

This does not seem to be the case for our winter Olympic friends. And so the fabulous footage of downhill racers disappearing into groves of trees, or luge drivers sailing off a bank of glare ice into the Austrian sunset, or ski jumpers Evil Kneivling their way to the hospital, has made me reluctant to embrace the winter games.

My indifference towards the February frolics goes beyond any disdain for their masochistic appeal. Yes, the root of my indifference lies largely in the fact that, from the first time I heard of the Olympics to last Sunday's closing ceremonies, our gang has never done particularly well. And that has rubbed my nurtured nationalism just the wrong way.

Everything about the winter festivities seemed geared for those foreign athletes. I remember wondering as a young Olympic spectator why none of the events was out of the American winter sports tradition.

There were no endurance races sneaking rides on car bumpers, no style points allotted to the technique of your driveway shoveling, and heaven forbid, no contests of throwing snowballs at moving Mack trucks.

No, what ruled the roost at Innsbruck, Grenoble and Sapporo were those weird foreign sports, athletic events I could never comprehend. What do those middle two men do in the four-man bobsled? How does one ever learn to ski jump? I imagine one is either very good after the first jump or else very dead.

And while I don't want to take anything away from these incredible athletes--Franz "King of the Hill" Klammer put one of many marvelous performances--I'm afraid I'm just simply a summer games man.

But until July rolls around, when I can savor the hoopla of Olympic basketball and appreciate the runs and jumps and swims which I grew up on, I'll just have to look back to Innsbruck.

And there I'll see the hell-bent run of Klammer or the powerful grace of Sheila Young, or Dorothy Hamill blissfully fondling the golden dreams hanging around her neck. And perhaps I'll be able to see, through all my provincial prejudices, that those winter games aren'