Yahoo! Bids Fond Farewell to 2010 Winter Olympic Games

Executives at Yahoo! may have shed tears during the closing ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, as comScore reported that Yahoo! Sports Winter Olympics drew 32 million unique visitors during the Games Feb. 12-28, compared with 19 million apiece for NBCOlympics.com and ESPN.com.

Yahoo! also cited comScore data saying visitors to Yahoo! Sports Winter Olympics spent 314 million total minutes on the site, versus 218 million on NBCOlympics.com.

As far as Yahoo!’s search engine, the most-searched athlete was U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn, curling was the most-searched sport, and the company said searches for trivia such as “how heavy is a curling stone” and “why does Apolo Ohno yawn” were extremely popular. The top mobile search was the reported feud between Vonn and fellow U.S. skier Julia Mancuso. And Yahoo! added that many users sought information on the personal lives of U.S. athletes such as figure skater Evan Lysacek, snowboarder Shaun White, Ohno, and skier Bode Miller.

And the most clicked Olympics stories from the Yahoo! homepage: a private pre-race conversation between White and his coach that was accidentally broadcast; the controversy over the Canadian women’s hockey team’s gold-medal victory celebration; and swimmer Michael Phelps‘ announcement that he would retire following the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.

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