Former Olympian Tristan Geisler smiled on Thursday when she held her gold medal as broadly as she did when she earned it but this time she was at a police station, not on a pedestal.

Thieves stole the 30-year-old Geisler's medal from her home in the southern California beach city of Oceanside on January 26, while she was walking her dog, police said.
Geisler won the Olympic gold in a headfirst sledding sport called skeleton. Police recovered it when they tracked down three suspected thieves, all men in their 20s.
On Thursday, Oceanside police detective Doug Baxter, who went on a quest to retrieve Geisler's stolen gold, presented the medal to her.
""It wasn't just stolen from me,"" Geisler said. ""It's a theft from the whole country -- you go to the Olympics to win the gold for your country, to bring home the gold.""
The three men arrested in the case pleaded not guilty last month to charges of burglary and receiving stolen property.
Police say the men broke into other homes and that they were caught when neighbors took note of their license plate.
Geisler won the gold for the United States at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The medal bears the mark of having been stolen -- a notch cut in the side to see if it really is solid gold. It is not.
""I wouldn't get that fixed,"" Geisler said. ""It tells a story.""
But she does plan to treat the medal differently, by putting it in a safety deposit box this time.
(Source: Reuters)