Ben Olsen, seen here holding off Real Madrid’s Kaka in an August 2009
friendly, will reportedly announce his retirement next week.
Photo by Kyle Gustafson / http://www.photokyle.com

Steve Goff had the big soccer news from RFK Stadium yesterday: D.C. United midfielder Ben Olsen will announce his retirement next week. Olsen, a tenacious midfielder who played in the World Cup for the United States men’s national team in 2006, is about as Washingtonian an athlete as you’ll ever find. After leaving the University of Virginia in 1998 for MLS, Olsen led United to a championship in his first season and again in 2004. He has been a fixture in the D.C. community — choosing, unlike many D.C. sports stars, to actually live inside the District — and has served as a mentor for many young United players.

Olsen’s career had plenty of highlights, despite the fact that recurring ankle troubles — the most serious of which occurred while Olsen was on loan at Nottingham Forest in 2000 — cost him a considerably unfair portion of his prime, especially on the international stage. United fans certainly have plenty of memories to look back fondly on from his time in the Black-and-Red: his hat trick at RFK against New York in 2007, his man of the match performance in the 1999 MLS Cup final, or even his equalizer against New England early this year. Personally, my favorite memory of Ben Olsen was on a sweltering hot day in June 2008, when Olsen — in but 15 minutes, his only action that season — received an overwhelming reception from the nearly 36,000 fans who had come to the stadium that day to jeer David Beckham.

Anyone who follows United can tell you that Olsen was the consummate footballer. Always the heart and engine of the team, many players would never have recovered from missing 18 months of playing time, let alone making the rather large adaptation from a wide, speedy player to a gritty central one. In the end, this writer never watched Ben Olsen ever play a game as if it wasn’t his last; that will be his lasting legacy. One hopes he will stay with the team in some capacity — United could certainly do much, much worse in terms of a new assistant coach.

We’ll miss ya out there, Benny.