Poor Robert "Sandy" Vietze

Well, if Robert "Sandy" Vietze were a petite 18-year-old instead of a big hulking would-be Olympic skier, perhaps people would find his drunken antics cute or amusing.

Vietze was on the US ski team. He was flying back to Vermont from Oregon where he'd been training on Mount Hood. He somehow managed to buy a large amount of beer and liquor in a bar somewhere---he had 8 drinks---then he got on a plane. During the flight, he got up and relieved himself on a sleeping 11-year-old girl. He was arrested, but the family decided that their daughter is under enough stress so they aren't pressing charges, not that prosecutors would need them to.

But look at him! Tall, strapping! Relatively even features! If he'd been in the Olympics, if he did any good, he could have been the new Bruce Jenner, the new Kurt Thomas. He could be doing TV, movies, commercials.

Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas was in a martial arts movie called Gymkata. He combined gymnastics with kung fu to form a ridiculous "new" martial art.

Bruce Jenner, who won some gold medals for something, starred in Can't Stop the Music with The Village People.

Well, if you're going to get drunk and urinate on a child, it's probably best to do it before you become famous, not after. Look what poor Gerard Depardieu is going through, and he just went on the carpet. And he's old. He couldn't help it. He has prostate trouble.

Depardieu probably made the wisest choice under the circumstances. He could wet his pants and become known as a pitiful, incontinent old man, or he could go in the aisle and become known as a drunken wild man, the elderly Bad Boy of French cinema.

Vietze could still parlay this into a screen career. Maybe get a reality series out of it.

I wonder what he actually hoped to do. His parents paid over $40,000 a year for him to attend an exclusive ski academy in Vermont. He was planning to be in the Olympics. Was he figuring on becoming a celebrity? They had to have been expecting some sort of payoff.