Here's one soccer mom who doesn't just drive a minivan to the game. She's actually in it.

Former Husky soccer star Tina Ellertson gave birth to her second daughter only a week ago, but it hasn't derailed her dream of playing for the U.S. team in Beijing this summer, writes Meri-Jo Borzilleri in this week's Olympics Notebook. It's no longer far-fetched in a world where motherhood and the Olympics are becoming less mutually exclusive every year.

What do American cross-country skiers do in their off-season?

Cross-country ski, at least in the first part of it. We caught up with U.S. skier Torin Koos of Leavenworth, a likely 2010 Olympian, on the phone this week from Whistler Olympic Park, where he and teammates are training in a two-week camp.

The special training session is designed, of course, to give them a feel for the XC courses they'll compete on during the 2010 Games. Because the venue, in the Callaghan Valley south of Whistler, is brand new, that's a major competitive factor.

"We are up here with one goal in mind," says U.S. head developmental coach Matt Whitcomb. "And that is to get to know these trails like we designed them ourselves."

It's the second trip to Whistler Olympic Park for Koos, 27, who competed there during the Canadian Nationals in March. His early take on the place:

"It's cool, man. Whistler is a sweet place," he says. "The Coast Range mountains are awesome, big mountains. And it (the venue) is in real wilderness. You can see bears crossing the trails every once in a while."

Koos and his teammates had only good things to say about the courses, laid out by former skier John Aalberg, who also helped design the cross-country venue at Soldier Hollow, Utah for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.

"Everybody is very enthusiastic about the layout of the courses," Koos says. "They're really skiable. You would think that'd be something you need in a cross-country ski course. But sometimes they just throw in ridiculous steep hills that are too steep to ski. Like, Nagano was known for that.

"This has a really good flow to it. You can tell a skier laid it out. It's going to take really good skiing to win here, not just running up hills, where it's a matter of who has the best engine. It's going to be who's the best skier."

Whitcomb echoed those sentiments.

"They are not as hard as the courses in Canmore, Alberta, but they ski very well," he says. "The layout that John Aalberg created is inventive and flows like a windy river that somehow flows over hill and dale."

As evidenced by the fact that they're still able to ski there in May, snow cover won't be a problem at the Whistler Nordic venue, which also serves as the 2010 home base for ski jumping, Nordic combined, and biathlon. But weather is likely to play a greater-than-usual role.

Because of its relative low elevation and proximity to saltwater, snow conditions can be very mixed in the Callaghan Valley. Example: A 50-kilometer test race conducted last week began in a blizzard, carried on with icey conditions through a break in precipitation, and ended in warm, slushy snow.

That can be an equipment nightmare for cross-country skiers, whose skis are treated with high-tech waxes to grip and glide properly. The choice of wax is based on snow conditions at the start of a race. There's no way to adjust once you're on course. So a bad wax decision can spell doom.

"I've heard there's a 100-percent chance of having a major rain experience during that time in February," Koos said. "There's lots of precipitation, but it's both snow and rain. Weather can move in and out in a moment's notice."

When temperatures are ranging from just below to just above freezing, that can cause ski-wax technicians to pull their hair out, Koos said.

"They're definitely going to earn their keep."

But U.S. skiers, who have improved on the World Cup circuit in recent years, but have not earned an Olympic medal since Bill Koch's silver in 1976, welcome the challenge. Their aim is to make the Whistler course feel like home territory.

"It's going to take a complete skier to be really good here," Koos says. "That's one of the reasons we want to spend so much time here. It's not like hopping on a running track, where the course is always the same."

If they can get permission, the U.S. squad might even host its Cross-Country Nationals at Whistler next spring, Koos says.

In the short term? He's got another competition in mind: The Ski to Sea Race, Memorial Day weekend in Bellingham. Koos will be on the Barron Heating team, known for luring its share of ringers. And he's not even doing the cross-country leg. Koos will make the notorious climb up to the top of Pan Dome to ski the alpine leg.

It wasn't to be. Ludlow, 26, announced her retirement this morning, after 10 years on the U.S. Ski Team.

"The fact that I am healthy right now and can walk away from the sport healthy, happy and satisfied with what I've accomplished is what I've always wanted. It feels really good," Ludlow told U.S. Skiing. "It was clear that now is my time to walk away. I feel really good about my career and I am excited about what lies ahead."

Ski racers who get the need for speed in their system often find it difficult to do what Ludlow is doing -- pull the plug before it has to be done from one of those ski-patrol body sleds. As it is, Ludlow has enough physical scars from her career to serve as reminders for the rest of her life. So cutting the losses is an investment in what surely will be a bright future, away from icy mountainsides.

The sport also appeared ready to exact an even greater toll on Ludlow: She said earlier this year that changes in the U.S. Ski Team's ranking system might mean she would lose her funding to compete on the World Cup next year as she struggled to get healthy.

She leaves with a career of which she can be proud: Ludlow skied in the Turin Olympics, won the 2004 giant slalom national crown, and posted 45 top-30 World Cup finishes, three of them top 10s. She also skied on the 2003 and 2007 World Championships teams. She was ranked 10th in the world in super G at the dawn of the 2007 racing season.

She also was a talented athlete off the slopes. Ludlow was a soccer midfielder and won a state girl's pole-vaulting title at Interlake High School, where she graduated first in her class.

Ludlow, who began skiing at age 2 at Crystal Mountain, and racing with Crystal Mountain Alpine Club at 6, said she will take a year to finish her undergraduate degree -- in philosophy modified by Eastern religion -- at Dartmouth, then work toward certification as a yoga instructor.

"I've been doing yoga for 11 years, and it's something I plan to use to transition into the real world," she says.

Ludlow is one of those determined athletes that makes covering Olympic sports inspiring. Tens of thousands of them are out there every day, putting life and limb literally at risk, for pure love of their sport. Only a handful ever reach the level of a medal podium, and the (brief) fame and sponsorship money that comes with it. The rest of them work hard, enjoy the little rewards along the way, and then move on -- in the best cases, without the assistance of crutches.

So here's to Libby Ludlow, one of the hardest of hard chargers. She left a lot of herself out there on a lot of different mountains -- but still possessed the good sense to know when to hop off.

(Photo: U.S. Ski Team)

The opponents were bigger and better-known. But the way Toby Steward and Barb Beddor see it, their hometown, Spokane, had an ace-in-the-hole when it came to luring the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Championships and Olympic Trials: A perfect track record.

Twice before, skating events organized by Steward and Beddor's Star USA had been lured to the Inland Empire. And each time, participants and sponsors went away feeling flush loved -- and financially flush.

Spokane set attendance records when it hosted Skate America, a major, second-tier skating event, in 2002. It set attendance records again when it hosted the U.S. Championships in 2007. The total sales of 154,000 obliterated the former mark, set in Los Angeles in 2002, by 30,000.

It was a remarkable achievement, given that those championships came a year after an Olympics, when interest in figure skating typically wanes, and that they were held in a place as far off the national radar as Spokane.

It's the sort of locally generated enthusiasm that's difficult for national bodies like U.S. Figure Skating to ignore. Impossible, in this case.

"We felt the ultimate trump card was that attendance record," an elated Beddor said by phone this evening. "And to be able to say with confidence, 'Yeah, we're going to beat that number again.'"

Of that, they have little doubt. Nor do they doubt that the impact from the event has the potential, at least, to balloon at an even greater rate. The '07 championships brought an economic impact estimated at $30 million to the Lilac City. And since then, the event has been dramatically expanded. It now stretches for 10 days over two weekends. Senior men's finals and pairs will take place the first weekend; senior women's finals and ice-dance finals will come on the second. (Official reason: Training schedules for the coming Olympics. More likely reason: NBC.)

Most of that weekend competition will be broadcast live from the 10,500-seat Spokane Arena on NBC, which will be promoting it to death to bolster its upcoming coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics. (Stakes are high for the peacock network, which, recall, paid an unseemly amount of money for Olympic rights through 2012, only to see the Winter Games in Turin get squashed in the ratings contest by the likes of "Dancing With the Stars.")

That's the other factor that turns this event from a major coup to a game-changer for Spokane: The competition dates are Jan. 14-24, 2010. The end of Spokane's skating championships comes only 18 days before the start of the Vancouver Games. The focus of the Olympic world, not just the national skating community, will be on Spokane.

"Olympic fever is a real, tangible item," Beddor says. "It will take over. There's no question we are going to see the benefit of that. Obviously throughout the Pacific Northwest. Certainly in Washington state."

Their company has organized events in the past that would have sold well on their own, but mushroomed because of a timing and proximity brush with the Olympics. A Team USA versus China women's hockey match in Boise, just before the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games, for example, drew a standing-room only crowd. Idaho officials estimated that the match, in conjunction with a torch relay passing and other national teams training in the area, netted as much as $100 million in economic benefit.

Beddor and Stewart believe the same phenomenon is possible in Washington leading up to the Vancouver Games.

Tickets are likely to be in high demand. A survey of previous ticket buyers from the '07 event indicated that 97 percent of fans said they'd come back to Spokane to watch figure skating, an almost unbelievable number, says Steward, a former national weightlifting champion who met Beddor, his wife, at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. They moved to Spokane and launched their event promotion business in 1990.

"We're so proud of the Spokane community," Beddor says. "When they get behind a project, there's no stopping them."

But they both stressed that the event has statewide impact. A sizable chunk of its fan base is based on the west side of the Cascades. And a large portion of the event's sponsors are Seattle-based, as well.

Steward and Beddor have long sought to bring a skating World Championships to Spokane. They lost out on a bid for the '09 World Championships, which went to Los Angeles, although that bid was submitted before Spokane had a chance to show its ablilities with the '07 Nationals.

With that focus on the Worlds, they at one point had nearly decided not to bid on the 2010 Nationals.

"But one day we said, you know what, we don't want to be sitting around four years from now and saying shoulda woulda coulda, and letting a 100-year opportunity (the close proximity of an Olympics) slip through our fingers."

They were confident in their bid, even knowing that San Jose, Portland and Providence, R.I., had their own well-backed efforts. They sensed some sentiment among U.S. Figure Skating board members to host the event on the East Coast. So they weren't sure Spokane would get the call until it actually got the call this afternoon.

"It's figure skating," Beddor said with a chuckle. "They're all about the drama, you know."

Washington state suddenly is set to receive more than its fair share of it. Everett recently landed the 2008 Skate America competition for October at Comcast Arena.

Since you asked: Ticket sales begin at 10 a.m. May 31. See details on the post below, or see the event Web site.

And since you also asked: Yes, there is a hometown favorite. Well, honorary hometown, anyway. Skater Ashley Wagner, who finished third at the 2008 U.S. Nationals, is considered a strong contender for the Vancouver Olympic squad. As a military kid, she's grown up all over the world and is now based on the East Coast. But she has spent many a summer with her grandparents in Kitsap County, where her grandfather, Mike James, was a longtime ranger at Scenic Beach State Park near Seabeck.

Spokane landed a big one today -- the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Nationals, an event that also doubles as the Olympic Trials for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

The city won the event on the strength of its strong performance hosting the Nationals in 2007, when it set event attendance records of more than 154,000 fans. Men's champion Evan Lysacek said skaters "felt like rock stars" in the Lilac City.

Says Ron Hershberger, U.S. Figure Skating's president: "There is huge support for this event from the city of Spokane that goes well beyond the figure skating community. These factors, and the excellent facilities in Spokane, will provide an extraordinarily positive atmosphere for our athletes, The enthusiasm we experienced in 2007 certainly proved that Spokane can host a truly outstanding event."

The venue again will be the 10,500-seat Spokane Arena, built in 1995. NBC will provide more than 10 hours of live coverage for the event.

"We couldn't be prouder or more excited for our hometown," Toby Steward, president of the local managing agency, Star USA," said in a release from U.S. Figure Skating. "The world will be riveted to the excitement of the Olympic Winter Games, and the Pacific Northwest will be in the spotlight. Spokane will now have a direct connection to that excitement."

The event will take place from Jan. 14-24; its scope has recently been expanded to spread major competitions across consecutive weekends, to maximize prime-time TV exposure. Men's and pairs competition will take place during the first weekend; women's finals and ice dance finals will fall on the second weekend.

All-event ticket packages will go on sale May 31 by calling 800-325-SEAT or online at www.spokane2010.com. Single tickets typically are sold later, but they're often very limited because package buyers get dibs on prime events.

U.S. Figure Skating didn't name the other candidate cities, but two were rumored to be Providence, R.I. and Portland. The event is a big deal for the Northwest, and a huge one for Spokane.

Sunday's Seattle Times Olympics notebook, by Meri-Jo Borzilleri, introduces a Seattle athlete you've probably never heard of -- but will, once the Beijing Games begin in August. As she writes:

Meet Brad Walker, Seattle's most anonymous superstar. He's a pro, but not a Sonic, a Mariner or a Seahawk. Unlike any of them, he's ranked No. 1 in the world in his sport -- pole vaulting. He's the favorite for Olympic gold in Beijing this summer. He has won two world championships, including last year's title in Osaka, Japan.

Check out the Olympic Notebook in the Sports Section of every Sunday's Seattle Times.

Just when you thought there was nothing more you could do with that maple leaf, HBC of Canada comes along with its new take on uniforms and casual wear for the 2008 Canadian Summer Olympics team.

And to think people were worried that HBC -- formerly known as Hudson's Bay Company; yes, the fur-trapper people -- would produce staid, boring clothing after wresting the Canadian Olympic contract away from trendy Roots a couple years back.

Check out the full fashion line here.

Anyone else think this left-leaning individual appears to have just urped up all down his front?

Then again, it could be worse. Check out, below, the "iconic" parade wear the HBC draped all over the 1964 Canadian Winter Team. It's the Olympics, Charlie Brown!

As we reach the 100 days countdown to Beijing, a news roundup:

-- A group of Jewish leaders has called for a boycott of the Beijing Games, alleging that the Chinese government is using them as a public-relations screen to shroud blatant human-rights abuses -- just as Adolf Hitler did with the Berlin Games of 1936. In an AP story, Eric Gorski reports that 175 rabbis, seminary officials and other prominent Jewish leaders have signed a declaration urging Jews worldwide to boycott the Games because of China's human-rights record in general, and in Tibet in particular. The statement also accuses China's leadership of providing missiles to Iran and Syria, and maintaining a "friendship" with Hamas.

-- Speaking of human rights, or lack thereof: Nice to see that the Beijing torch procession has finally found a place it can travel in comfort, with none of those nasty protests: North Korea. Maybe they should've run the entire thing there.

-- And speaking of the torch: Nominated for Worst Assignment of the Century is the job of being a journalist assigned to cover the Olympic flame's historic ascent up Mount Everest. In a report here, journos complain of being virtually imprisoned in a remote camp far from Everest's base camp, allowed no freedom of movement and no access to climbers.

"If anything happens, we're supposed to miss it," one of them notes wryly.

No word, meanwhile, on whether the flame will use supplemental oxygen to get to the top. But the Chinese have divulged how they'll get it out of a high-tech lantern and into a full-blown, photographable flame in the almost non-existing oxygen on the summit: rocket fuel. No joke. The ascension of the flame to the top of the world will make history not only for its sheer stupidity, but for being the first time the Olympic flame has employed "missile technology," some Chinese officials are crowing.

Given that the nation's bad rep around the world is partly owing to its generous sharing of that very missile technology, you have to wonder: Who's handling PR for the Chinese government these days? The Rev. Jeremiah Wright? And why do we get the feeling that, before this is all over, we're going to have to dispatch Ed Viesturs to go over and rescue these guys?