NAGANO, Japan – Trying to define the Olympics is like counting ants in the driveway; just when you think you’ve seen it all, a few thousand more show up to be defined. The games are as multifaceted as the athletes, families, organizers, friends, fans, and local residents. They are all here, mixing and mingling, singing and walking in the crowded small side streets of this city in the Japanese Alps.

The great common thread at one level are the common fans and true amateur athletes. At another level the common thread is big business and big-time athletes. Never has that mix had the extremes of the 1998 Olympics.

Multi-millionaire NHL players will spend their off hours in rooms smaller than their wallets, sleeping in beds that will allow both legs and at least one arm to touch the floor. They wanted it this way – to stay in the athletes’ village in the quad rooms that house the Kazakhstan speedskaters and Canadien snowboarders.

For the NHL players, it is a chance to step back and remember what the simple joy of competing is about. Not that they would ever not want the millions, but here are the Olympics and a chance to have both. Games where the dairy farmer from the Netherlands, who happens to be able to ski with the world’s best, gets to share tall tales with big guys from over there.

Then there is Dutchman Rintje Ritsma, a speed skater who has won three Olympic medals since 1994 and turned his success into a one-man, privately sponsored team that earns him more than $500,000 a year. When asked where his Dutch teammates were as he worked out in Hawaii, he told CBS, “I don’t know.” With his long blond hair blowing in the Pacific wind, he hesitates a moment, gives a toothy grin, and without animosity adds, “And I don’t care.”

Millionaires wanting the experience of shared athletic dreams in a simple setting, and a middle class Dutchman trying to turn a simple sport into millions. It’s all part of the Olympic Games.

Former Olympic medal-winners are everywhere, usually corporate-sponsored, speaking at a luncheon here, a reception there. U.S. speedskating darling Bonnie Blair comes to watch her husband, David Cruikshank, skate. She wears the turtleneck of a soft drink company, the name in large letters just beneath her smile.

The Games still emotionally move millions around the world, believing, or wanting to believe, the purity of amateur sports still lives somewhere within the rings.That’s the kind of heartfelt attachment the corporate world wants to be associated with, and there’s no better way to do that then through the national heroes created through the Olympics.

This becomes another reason to win for the athletes. That big payoff after the gold, so obvious in the Bruce Jenner story, is recrated after every Olympics.

Yet, there are hundreds of athletes here who struggle to raise money just to pay expenses to come and compete. Unfortunately, you will hear very little about them. The media must also make money off the Games, and that means finding – or creating – heroes whose story you will want to follow night after night.

Then there is Lewiston-born Marc Pelchat. A speedskater and former hockey player, he will win no medals. No American speedskater had ever made the Olympic team for the first time at age 30 until Pelchat did.

He wanted to play hockey at the University of Maine. “I was stuck on that,” says Pelchat. “The problem was, the coach wouldn’t give me a scholarship unless I was drafted in the first six rounds of the NHL draft, but that didn’t happen because all the scouts were scared away because I was so small [5-foot-9, 175 pounds].”

In 1992, he took up speedskating. On Sunday and Monday he raced in the 500 meter. No medals. No endorsements. No corporate luncheons. Just simple competition at the world-class level, a trip to Nagano, a binder full of pictures and stories about tiny rooms and short beds and millionaire hockey players.

The Japanese bow a stately bow to their Olympic visitors, and to you Marc Pelchat and what your represent. Hajimemashite.