Stretched flat on his 48-inch luge, Duncan Kennedy will see only his toes. The laws of wind resistance require him to burrow into his gurney of a sled. But he can’t fly blind at 75 mph, so he will pick up his head a few centimeters from the horizontal, steer with a flick of his calf or shoulder and seek to slide as fast as he can see.
As a reward for her two medals, speed-skater Bonnie Blair carried the U.S. flag at the closing ceremonies of the 1988 Games in Calgary. On Saturday again she will march with the delegation from les EtatsUnis d’Amerigue, and because of an accident of l’alphabet, she will see the new world order pass before her eyes. She will follow the 19-member delegation from I’Estonie, whose flag will appear at the Olympics for the first time since 1936. And marching ahead of them, under a five-ring Olympic banner, the 141 men and women of I’Equipe Unifiee, the united team of Russia, Ukraine and three other former Soviet republics. The cold war is over; this time the wars in the cold will reflect only on the athletes. At last, the Games are just that.
The XVI Winter Olympiad begins this week in Albertville, France, and in all of sports no other event is such a sight. There is beauty enough for the eyes of all beholders: grace, flight, power; skis against the sky, skates against the ice, courage against all foes. Pick your hyperbole: It’s the best ice show you saw as a kid; the most spectacular winter carnival any college town ever hosted; the ski trip as perfect as any travel agent’s brochure. And for a bit of added sizzle, there are winners and losers, athletes we can care passionately about for a brief moment and then, for the most part, forget, since they have no claim on our loyalties to town and season.
For the next fortnight, it will all be in your living room. What you will see, for the most part, will depend on the judgment of a 48-year-old American named Michael Pearl. The coordinating producer of CBS’s 116 hours of broadcast, Pearl stares out at the Games through Roy Orbison frames. He will orchestrate the coverage, flashing among the 10 venues, seeking to keep alive into prime time some suspense about events that will have finished hours earlier. Pearl brings to the task the experience of working with the true television Olympian, Roone Arledge of ABC. Beginning with the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Arledge transformed the Games into a made-for-TV event and then watched with chagrin as other networks bought the rights. “This is a show,” says Pearl. “Every day we will find a story line and we will tell it.”
Some of the stories are predictable. On the first Sunday, Kitt and his competitors will lift about 9,000 feet above Val d’Isere for the men’s downhill: 120 seconds, more or less, straight down, with only a few flags to slip past. This year’s course may be the most spectacular setting in Olympic history, although some critics fear that the mountain’s natural turns will slow the racers by a few nanoseconds. Because of the high speed involved-skiers typically reach 70 mph–the weather must be good. By scheduling it early, the organizing committee allows room for postponements on account of blizzards or fog.
At the end of the first week comes the most dramatic personal drama, the men’s 500-meter speed skating. That sounds like an oxymoron–dramatic speed skating, with its exaggerated form, and oh-so-many turns along the oval track-but not with Dan Jansen sprinting on the ice. Jansen was the U.S. favorite in Calgary, but his championship heat went off shortly after he learned that his sister had died from leukemia. He fell twice. The world-record holder, Jansen gets a second chance at an Olympic gold on Feb. 15.
The televised story lines will be unrelenting-sort of like the traffic which will clog the narrow roads around Albertville until the Olympic Flame is doused on Feb. 23. Can defending women’s slalom champion Vreni Schneider repeat at the advanced age of 27 and return in triumph to tiny Elm, Switzerland (population: 1,000), where her family runs the Vreni Schneider restaurant, ski school, and shoe and sport shops? Will the old-fashioned judges of the ice-dancing competition join the. crowd in a standing ovation for the avant-garde dancing pair from France, Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay? Will NFL running back Herschel Walker help the United States win a gold medal as a member of the bobsled team, picking up more yards pushing off the sled than he did during his dismal season with the Vikings? Will any team throw a better party than the Jamaican bobsledders whose insouciant style and improbable fight song-“we be hobbin’ and bobbin’, strainin’ and gainin’. . ."-led to a lucrative beer commercial after the Calgary Games? And can Katarina Witt, the sex symbol of the 1988 Winter Games, score a 6.0 as a commentator for CBS?
The Winter Games give Americans a chance to marvel at the madcap Europeans who insist upon watching the Games in person. It is, of course, cold in the Alps this time of year, and spectators can do little to stay warm but zip up their Gore-Tex, stamp their sweaty feet and hope the line at the WC eases up soon. For this sacrifice, they may get a chance to spot a bobsled as it zips past or wait for a skier to finish a race that was conducted up the hill. But on the days of the slalom and the giant slalom, the crowd will gather, hoping to be in the presence of the great Tomba.
To Italians he’s just Alberto, or, on second reference, la Bomba. But whatever he’s called, Tomba is the defending slalom gold medalist and, with his well-advertised animal magnetism, the European skier with the best chance of translating into the American market. (That’s just speculation, of course; if the sportswriters were so smart, nobody would bother to hold the Games. We’d just announce the winners and head for the hot tubs.) Paul Accola, the Swiss slalomist, is Tomba’s leading rival. After him comes the remarkable Marc Girardelli, the best Austrian skier in the world who now competes for Luxembourg. Girardelli’s father bridled at turning his son over to the coaches of the Austrian national team; words were exchanged, then passports. (If George Steinbrenner had been as interested in the Winter Olympics as he is in the Summer Games, the U.S. team might have signed Girardelli as a free agent. Then maybe someone would name a chocolate bar after him.)
Girardelli plans to ski in four alpine events. If he sweeps them-an unlikely event, according to the ski-lift touts-he would rank with the greatest Olympic skier of our time, Jean-Claude Killy. In 1968, Killy won three golds-all they raced that year; this year he’s helping to run the Winter Games and will be the most glamorous Frenchman in Albertville.
Another Austrian, Petra Kronberger, is competing in all five women’s alpine events. Like Girardelli, she’s a factor in every race she enters. “Petra has an incredible instinct for speed and she also happens to be a perfect technician in the slalom,” says Austrian trainer Gidi Achhorner. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
Olympic history is already guaranteed by the mere names on the dormitory doors. Croatia will send four of its own athletes and with any luck none will walk into the cafeteria as the 22-man Yugoslav (primarily Serb) team is leaving. Ski-jumper Franci Petek will lead the 36 Slovenian athletes, whose training was severely disrupted last summer when the Yugoslav air force bombed the Alpine training grounds. “It’s not so easy to train if you wonder about your future and what’s going to happen to your country,” Petek says dryly. “And it’s hard to ignore the planes flying overhead.”
For the nationalists in the audience, the Germans are favored to win the most medals, even though the former Ostlanders have sworn off steroids. Second place won’t go to a single country but to the five former Soviet republics that will compete as the Commonwealth of Independent States. The CIS athletes will wear the same uniforms, but their sleeves will be adorned with patches from their home republics. Since the CIS isn’t exactly a nation, there is no national anthem for its gold-medal winners. Instead, the International Olympic Committee decided to have the Olympic anthem played rather than run the risk of slipping in the Kazakhstan cassette when the occasion calls for the ballad of Belarus.
Without the kindness of strangers the CIS team might not have made it to Albertville. With the economy in a well-advertised free fall, there simply wasn’t much public money left for sports. According to Viktor Mamatov, the Russian in charge of the CIS preparations, “Some of our major factories came up with last-minute support.” And Western sponsors, like Adidas and BMW, donated hard currency to keep the teams afloat. But not in the style to which the former heroes of the motherland had grown accustomed. At the Novogorsk Olympic training complex just outside Moscow, Russia’s top figure-skating pair complained of being grouped three to a room in a dormitory with little heat and no hot water. The skaters, Natasha Mishkutyonok and Artur Dmitriyev, also charged that the food was bad and there wasn’t much of it, either. “In the last two weeks it has been very hard to provide normal meals to Olympic athletes,” says Mamatov. “It’s a good thing that they have many fans” who’ve been bringing in lunch.
And then there were the political indignities. The favorite downhill-training facilities in the old U.S.S.R. were in the mountains of southern Georgia. The civil war there made the skiers moving targets, and the Georgians never signed up for the CIS anyway. Instead, the team headed for an expensive, but bullet-free, Austrian camp. On ice, CIS retained the services of Lithuanian Darius Kasparaitis for the hockey team, but watched as Russian Margarita Drobiazko reportedly offered to renounce her citizenship in order to skate with her longtime partner Povilas Vanagas, a Lithuanian. Drobiazko has petitioned the International Olympic Committee to make an exception enabling her and Vanagas to skate together. The IOC planned to consider the appeal at its meeting last weekend.
With a week to go, the organizers fear only the weather. Snow actually looms as a major drawback at the Games. The French would much rather use their artificial-powder machines. The last big storm during Christmas week set off avalanches near Val d’Isere. One person died, more than a dozen others were injured and thousands of tourists were left to sleep on cots far from their ski resorts. A reprise at the Olympics would be disastrous: about 1 million tourists are expected to visit during the fortnight.
No one will watch the Games with greater interest than a small group of Norwegians. For them, the parking problems and overloaded fax facilities will mean as much as the results on the slopes. Thanks to an IOC decision to stagger the Winter and Summer Games, the next Winter Olympics will be held just two years from now in Lillehammer, Norway. Besides the logistics, Lillehammer may also be the scene of new Olympic sports. At every Olympiad, demonstrations are performed by athletes eager to have their event put on for medal competition. Four years ago spectators cheered for freestyle skiing, a cross between a slalom and a gymnastics event. Next week freestyle skiing will be a marquee event with Donna Weinbrecht of New Jersey a leading contender. At Albertville, speed skiing will have its chance to fly onto the Olympic agenda. It’s an old sport–dating back to the 1870s in California-and it’s a dazzling one. Speed skiers-dressed like color-coordinated Darth Vaders–head straight down a steep course that has no flags and no margin for error.
For all their daring, the Winter Games are better known for being simply charming. For the most part, the athletes play their sports for love, thrills and obsession. In the pairs-skating competition, for instance, U.S. champs Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marval have perfected their “Frankie and Johnny go skating” routine. Marval, 26, owns a small New Jersey trucking firm. Urbanski, 31, didn’t start competing in pairs until the age of 23 and has worked full time as a waitress to support her skating habit. Last year, long after she’d been advised to quit, the 4-foot-11, 93-pound Urbanski teamed up with Rocky, her sixth partner. This year they struck gold at the national championships in Orlando, Fla., but neither quit their real jobs.
Isn’t it refreshing when the athletes can keep some perspective on their events? So settle back and enjoy. This is great recession entertainment. Anyway, it’s too late to find a table at Million in Albertville–the two-star restaurant has been booked for months. Just reach for a bottle of wine-when you say Bur-gun-dy, you’ve said it all-bless the efficiency of your furnace and watch the grand spectacle. These are sights to be seen.
