The 20th Winter Olympics starts today in Italy. Whether you call it Turin or Torino, something which has been debated on the pages of several U.S. newspapers, it’s still an exciting event. Or at least, it’s exciting to me since I was so involved with the 19th Winter Olympics in Utah. Gary has put together a list of important Web resources for the 2006 Olympics here . Some of what I wrote back in 2002 in FreePint is still pertinent to this year’s Winter Olympics.

“As an event that happens every four years, there’s a definite cyclical element to information. As the Games come closer, more local sites spring up, only to disappear as the world’s attention shifts to the next venue. Four years ago I followed events in Nagano on sites that no longer exist.

Information about the Olympics falls into several categories: the official organizations, unofficial observers of the Games and the sports (personal and political), news outlets, and sponsor pages.”

The URLs I listed for the various country Olympic Committees and for the individual winter sports are still largely unchanged. One huge difference is the increased news coverage on the Internet, including some commentary by the athletes themselves. Take a look at Yahoo Sports , which I think is doing one of the better jobs of covering the event from many perspectives.

It does make you wonder, though, how NBC can wait until this evening (8 p.m. Eastern time is 2 a.m. in Italy) to broadcast the highlights of the day when anyone with an Internet connection already knows what happened and has probably seen photos, if not video, of the opening ceremony.

The real addition to Olympic coverage since I wrote that FreePint article is blogs. It’s great fun to go to one of the blog search engines and read what bloggers are saying about the Olympics. Again, the timeliness of the blogs makes NBC look silly.

Internet radio is another information source. The Park City (Utah) public radio station, KPCW , will give its unique brand of coverage.

Personally, I’m happy to know two members of the U.S. Ski Team, both of them Parkites, one a downhill skiier and the other competing in bobsled (or bobsleigh as they say in Torino). So I’ll be looking for news on them and hoping they do well.