And in snowboardcross, a rollicking new event, American Lindsey Jacobellis lost a sure gold medal Friday when an airborne board-grabbing maneuver sent her sprawling near the finish line.

Many Italians have been less than obsessed with the games — on some days sports coverage has focused more heavily on the national soccer league. The results for Italy’s Olympians, as for other big teams, were mixed — an unexpected gold medal in speedskating, no medals at all in Alpine skiing. The Turin newspaper La Stampa, evoking the national team color, called the skiers “blue snails.”

Nonetheless, leading Italian sports commentator Candido Cannavo declared Week One a success and denounced U.S. media reports suggesting otherwise.

“The Americans have no right to pontificate — they who organized at Lake Placid, Atlanta and Salt Lake City the most controversial, if not the worst, Olympics in history,” Cannavo wrote in Gazzetta dello Sport, a national sports daily.

“Turin is filled with joy,” he asserted. “The venues are splendid, the competitions beautiful, the slopes marvelous, the TV ratings extraordinary.”

Indeed, domestic ratings have been impressive, more so than NBC’s in the United States. About 37 percent of Italian viewers watched the opening ceremony; several million are hooked on broadcasts of curling, a distinctly non-Italian sport.

Many Turin residents seemed pleased by the attention lavished on their city and by the improvements — cleanup work, police sweeps, new transit options — that the Games had prompted.

“I can’t believe how the city has changed — it’s fantastic,” said Stefano Dal Toso, a university student who was playing a biathlon computer game at a Coca-Cola pavilion. “Turin was under construction for so many years, and we thought it wouldn’t be ready, but they made it.”

Silvia Toscano, a Telecom Italia employee, was strolling nearby through the Sponsors Village. “I feel like a tourist in my city,” she said, uncomplainingly. “Turin is so beautiful, crowded and full of foreigners.”

The benign mood was summed up by La Stampa columnist Massimo Gramellini, who marveled tongue-in-cheek at the suddenly clean streets and on-time buses, and the newfound absence of drug pushers around the train station.

“Since we don’t want to return to our previous habits,” he wrote, “I ask the International Olympic Committee to declare a permanent Winter Games in Turin, 365 days a year.”