"Can Lindsey Vonn _______ in the women's giant slalom tomorrow in Whistler?"

And the correct answer is podium. Athletes and journalists in the English-speaking world are increasingly using podium as a verb during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, as in, "She can definitely podium here today." It was called "a new and annoying verb" in the Miami Herald and "a horrible development" by the Daily Telegraph.  

Words like podiuming are part of a tradition of noun-to-verb changes in English, which result in what linguists call "denominal verbs". In a famous 1979 paper in the journal Language, "When Nouns Surface as Verbs", Eve V. Clark and Herbert H. Clark wrote that "people readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to Houdini one's way out of a closet." Podium fits into their category of "location verbs" based on nouns that are places to go: the plane landed, the boat docked, the diver surfaced, the the snowboarder podiumed.

Lindsey Vonn of the United States won the bronze medal in the Super-G last week after taking the downhill gold medal earlier. On Sunday, Bode Miller continued the US team's Olympic alpine skiing success when he won the men's super-combined title. Miller's Olympic gold was the United States' eighth medal (two gold, three silver, three bronze) out of a possible 18 from six alpine skiing events raced so far.