TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capoly.1

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                                                                                February 25, 1980

OLYMPICS

Only the Lake Was Placid


Daring, drama and despair as the Olympics get off to a rousing
start


Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty states that no one
can predict the exact behavior of even a single atomic
particle. Heisenberg might have a appreciated the 1980 Winter
Olympics. The Lake Placid Games have developed into a sort of
festival of life's unpredictability. No one knows whether they
will be the last Olympics of the modern era; international
politics will settle that. A similar uncertainty hung like fog
over the frozen spectators; none of them knew whether they would
ever find a bus to carry them away from a darkening mountain to
warmth again. Lake Placid's logistics tended toward the
existential.

A number of athletes were also discovering something about
life's talent for surprise. Canada's Ken Read, for some experts
the favorite to win the most important ski race in the world,
the Olympic men's downhill, pitched himself out of the starting
gate on Whiteface Mountain; 15 seconds into his run, as Read
leaned hard into the approach to the third gate, the safety
binding on his left ski perversely released. Read parted with
the ski and the potential gold he had spent years training for.
The men's downhill winner was just as unpredictable:  Austria's
Leonhard Stock, the 21-year-old Tyrol farmer's son who was not
even supposed to be a starter on the downhill team.

The American pursuit of gold went haltingly at first. Although
Pete Patterson finished an unexpected fifth in the downhill,
Karl Anderson tumbled spectacularly just out of the gate, and
Phil Mahre, considered the best U.S. skier, managed only a 14th.
Bill Koch, 24, who surprised the world with a silver medal in
the 30-km cross- country four years ago at Innsbruck, surprised
it again. With 8 km to go, Koch found himself back in 23rd
position and, rather than finish exhausted, dropped out and
skied off through the forest. His logical explanation:  to save
his energies for his other medal chance, the 15-km
cross-country.

In the 1,500-meter race, Speed Skater Beth Heiden, 20, had
reason for hope as she flashed across the finish line in
2:13.10. She had just broken the Olympic record by 3.48
seconds. The trouble:  17 other skaters also were to break the
record. Beth ended up in seventh place as Annie Borchink, 28,
a sturdy Dutch nursing student, glided off with the gold in a
time of 2:10.95. But no one was hit by Heisenberg's Principle
harder than the American pairs figure-skating team of Randy
Gardner and Tai Babilonia. The Olympics' most touching moment
was the sight of the brilliant Gardner sprawling on the ice,
victim of a muscle pull that ended the golden hopes of Randy and
Tai.

Still, there were sparkling moments for the U.S. Eric Heiden,
21, Beth's big brother and the finest sped skater in the world,
won the 500-meter race by beating the Soviets' Yevgeny Kulikov
and then won again in the 5,000-meter. What was more, the U.S.
hockey team coalesced into a scrappily aggressive surprise.
Having tied the powerful Swedes, 2-2, they gave a 7-3 beating
to the seasoned Czechs, who were rated No. 2 in the tournament
behind only the incredible Soviets. On Saturday, the Americans
defeated the Norwegians 5-1.

As expected, the Soviet Union was winning the most early
medals, showing strength in cross-country skiing and speed
skating, two of its traditional sports. It was the Soviets who
won the first gold medal of the Games when Nikolai Zimyatov
finished first in the 30-km cross-country. Right behind him was
Teammate Vasily Rochev to take the silver.

The setting for the drama of the Games is an old and suitable
theater for winter sports. The third Winter Olympics were held
in Lake Placid in 1932, and although the village has acquired
some modern hotels since then, it remains a remote little world
of its own, with one traffic light at the end of curbing,
two-lane approach roads. The local Olympic Organizing Committee
operated under the slogan, vaguely truculent in its modesty:
AN OLYMPICS IN PERSPECTIVE. Lake Placid, with the help of
local, state and federal funds, spent $178 million fixing itself
up for the winter carnival. THe results revealed both the
advantage and disadvantages of inviting the world to a small
village, but the organizers succeeded in creating an event that
was curiously attractive and well suited to the distinctly
north-country American flavor of the setting.

Lake Placid (pop. 2,700) has none of the international glamour
of Chammonix or Saint Moritz, no air of chic money at winter
play. The village lies in the heart of a 6 million-acre state
park amid the worn and camel-backed Adirondacks that showed
gray-brown all through the Northeast's snowless winter. On cue
last week, they did get sprinkled with white, like a moderate
dose of talcum powder. Without snow all season, the desperate
organizers spent three weeks covering the trails with a thick
base of artificial snow that has provided remarkably fast times.

But all the changes and improvisations were not for the better.
Locals have been complaining for years about the corruption of
contractors and the greed of other residents out to profiteer
on the Games. Houses in town rented for a while at prices up
to $50,000 for the month. Some expensive ski-wear outfits moved
into temporary shops on Main street, near such no-nonsense bars
as Jimmy's and the Arena Grill. Food prices soared:  $1 for a
cup of coffee, $2 for a hot dog. Tickets for the Olympic events
have been priced at an undemocratic $11.20 to $67.20 per person,
and distribution was a chaotic mess. But as the early events
failed to draw the expected crowds, scalpers were forced to
unload tickets at a fraction of their official price. Hockey
tickets costing $28 were going for half that.

Private cars were banned within a 15-mile radius of Lake Placid,
and an elaborate bus system was devised to shuttle some 25,000
spectators per day to outlying parking areas. Initially, the
bus network did not work. Hundreds were stranded for hours in
the subfreezing cold, miles from events, motels or parking lots.
Eventually, the local committee brought in more buses and a
team of Greyhound dispatchers and organizers to unscramble the
mess.

To help out where needed, the committee set up a cadre of
volunteers from the surrounding area. Garbed in bright blue
snowsuits, with yellow trim, they did their earnest best to make
visitors feel welcome. The state police took their
responsibilities so seriously that they hauled away an illegally
parked car belonging to Art Devlin, vice president of the Lake
Placid Organizing Committee, and another belonging to the FBI.
Indeed, the citizens sometimes out- organized themselves. The
mother of American Speed Skater Leah Poulos Mueller, who has
sharpened her daughter's skates through 20 years of competition
and two earlier Olympics, found herself banned from facilities
at the rink, but a Lake Placid teenager let out of school for
the grand holiday could wander in and stare at the stars.

Security, understandably, remained a serious concern. The
Village and the surrounding areas of competition bristled with
small arms-- not the ubiquitous submachine guns manned by guards
that were so startling at Innsbruck four years ago (a legacy of
the massacre of Israelis in Munich in 1972) but an immense
arsenal of handguns. Even the security men working for the
state's environmental-conservation department office carried
pistols.

But Lake Placid has no sinister air about it, nor could it have;
it is not that kind of place. The opening ceremonies were
small-town and goodhearted, vaguely resembling a high school
football halftime show with unlikely overreachings in the
direction of Super Bowl kitsch. A crowd of 22,000--slightly
less than capacity, because some ticket holders were stranded
without transportation--gathered in the stands at the old Lake
Placid horse-show grounds to meet the athletes. The Canadians,
the eighth team to march into the stadium behind their colors,
brought a deep roar of thanks and a standing ovation from
Americans remembering the Canadian diplomats who smuggled six
U.S. hostages out of Tehran last month. The Soviets were
received tepidly but politely; when a man in the stands shouted
"Afghanistan, Bananistan, get your ass out of Kabul!," he was
quickly shushed by fellow spectators.

Vice President Walter Mondale proclaimed the Games open, and a
jogging psychiatrist from Tucson lit the Olympic flame. Like
a county fair run mildly amuck, the ceremonies then erupted with
a swarm of released doves and helium-filled balloons, followed
by the gentle flyby of two dozen immense hot-air balloons. It
was fun, and the display left the crowd in an ebullient and
expectant mood. As the spectators filed out, members of the
American ski team were climbing onto one of the buses that had
brought them from the Olympic Village. "Right on!" someone in
the crowd cheered at the team. The American kids grinned back.

The Austrian ski team was considerably grimmer than the
Americans, and for a good but unusual reason:  it had too much
talent. In fact, so strong were the Austrians that Franz
Klammer did not even make the team. In 1976, Klammer's run in
Innsbruck had instantly become a classic of sport--a headlong,
fanatical plunge of almost mystical recklessness and desire.
But the following year, Klammer's younger brother Klaus, also
a racer, fell so badly that he will probably be confined to a
wheelchair for the rest of his life. After that, some critical
edge of aggressiveness departed from Franz Klammer's racing
style, and he was unable to make the Austrian team for the 1980
Olympics.

Originally, the Austrians had planned to race a four-man
downhill team of Peter Wirnsberger, Werner Grissmann, Harti
Weirather and Josef Walcher, the 1978 downhill world champion.
The team's alternate, Leonhard Stock, a long-nosed and wiry
clerk from Austria's lovely Ziller Valley, had severely injured
his shoulder in December while training for the World Cup, and
went to Lake Placid as a substitute. But in practice runs at
Whiteface, Stock clocked the best time for all racers on the
first day, then repeated the feat the second day. Team
officials met and settled upon a fratricidal little rite of
natural selection. Stock and Weirather had made the team, but
the three other racers would have to fight for the remaining
two slots by making one more training run down Whiteface.
Officials turned down a proposal by the five skiers that they
al be made to qualify on the final day.

There is little camaraderie in ski racing, an individual's
sport, and the three who were thus not assured of starting were
grumblingly bitter. "We didn't want to do it that way,"
Grissmann said later. "We eventually agreed with the team
leadership, but that was the day we lost confidence in it."
Said Walcher:  "I went along because I did not want to ruin the
rest of my racing career, but I did not like it."  In the end,
Walcher was the odd man out, and Stock boomed down Whiteface on
the last training run with a better time than any of his
teammates.

Something about Whiteface, hulking and picturesque, seemed to
agree with Stock. The course that plunges down its side is not
one of the ski circuit's most difficult runs. To accommodate
lesser skiers, Olympic courses generally are not as demanding
as most in World Cup events. With a length of 3,028 meters, the
Whiteface downhill is a little too short and, in its final
third, a little to flat to test the world's best skiers. But
the run has its challenges, especially in the upper third, a
steep (up to 55 degree grade), twisting course that runs through
such expert skier's delights as "Hurricane Alley" and "Dynamite
Corner."  It is there the skier must show the technical
virtuosity to survive the turns while building the momentum to
swing down through the steep, screamingly fast (nearly 90
m.p.h.) middle section that eventually soothes to a long, final
flat. "The secret," said Canada's Ken Read, "is to ski the top
well. That's where the time is lost--and won."

Stock started ninth in a race that any one of four or five men
could have taken. The time to beat was the 1:47.13 set by
Italy's Herbert Plank. With four fast jolts of his ski poles,
Stock propelled himself out of the starting gate and launched
into the knifing and chittering switchback turns at the course's
top. He shot through them with a wildly debonair angling,
self-assured, and then, as the course got straighter and
rougher, he bounced several times violently for an instant as
if he had lost everything, his limbs doing minute, chaotic
leaps--roughly the effect of a man being electrocuted while
descending on a roller coaster. Once or twice his ski tips
flipped up anarchically for a nanosecond in the direction of his
nose. With his strong, gyroscopic instincts, Stock disciplined
those little apocalypses and hurtled on, his body tucked into
a bullet, a jaunty and maniacal capsule rocketing down the
mountainside.

At the finish, Stock looked back up at the mountain and shook
his head, again and again. He was not confident, although his
time of 1:45.5 was more than a second faster than Italy's Plank.
As the moments passed, more skiers descended; Stock kept his
eyes fixed upon the electronic scoreboard to watch their
clockings. Switzerland's Peter Mueller, the top downhill man
in the 1979 World Cup and one of the favorites at Lake Placid,
came in more than a second slower than Stock; he would place
fourth. The Austrian Wirnsberger finished at 1:45.12, good
enough for the silver. Canada's Steve Podborski clocked in at
1:46.62, fast enough for the bronze. As racer after racer
failed to break Stock's time, a small group of Austrian
spectators outside the finish area began to sing Immer Wieder
Austria (Again and Again Austria). When he had finally won, the
Austrian team officials lifted Stock upon their shoulders, and
he held his ski poles high in grinning triumph.

Back home in the village of Finkenberg (pop. 1,200), Stock's
family had not laid in any champagne because they thought it
would bring their racer bad luck. But Wilhelm Haag, the mayor
and principal of the primary school, had thoughtfully procured
a supply of fireworks; liquor was found, and the celebration
went on and on.

After his victory, Stock insisted that the prerace bloodletting
had not disturbed him. Said he amiably:  "I am a big fighter.
I have been fighting since I was a kid. I had to fight to come
back from my injury. I had to fight to get into the race."

THe gold medal that Stock takes back to the Ziller Valley will
be accompanied by some crasser rewards. His triumph on
Whiteface Mountain should be worth between $50,000 and $100,000
a year for endorsing skiing equipment--not bad for an amateur.

Compared with the downhill, with its extravagant relationship
between gravity and a sort of exhibitionist will, speed skating
seems tame to Americans, an exercise grindingly precise, an icy,
athletic watchmaking. Only in recent weeks have Eric and Beth
Heiden, the brother-and-sister speed skaters from Madison, Wis.,
begun to educate Americans about the beauties of their sport:
the swoopingly powerful grace, the lean, economical rhythms of
a skater swinging over very fast, gray-blue ice, bright, silver
shavings leaping minutely in the sun with every snick of the
skate blade. In Norway and The Netherlands, citadels of the
sport, Eric is an athletic hero. As the Olympics approached,
he acquired celebrity in his own country.

The 500 meters is Heiden's weakest event. Five days before the
Olympics opened, he lost the first heat of the world's sprint
championships to U.S. Teammate Dan Immerfall, an upset that
left Immerfall mildly dazzled and Heiden, oddly enough,
relieved. "The defeat took some of the pressure off," said
Heiden. " I could relax a little."

He felt easier as he got set for the 500 meters in Lake Placid,
and found he was in one of those splendid match-ups that rarely
occur in a sport in which the race is not against another but
against the clock. The pairings for speed skating are a matter
of pure chance. For the 500 meters last week, the draw for the
inner-land was the Soviets' Kulikov, the current world record
holder in the event and the gold medal winner in 1976. For the
outer lane:  Eric Heiden.

When Heiden skated onto the ice, the crowd charged rhythmically,
"E- ric!  E-ric!"  Heiden and Kulikov stripped down to their
sleek, skintight uniforms. Their hair was tucked into
constricting hoods that improve their aerodynamics but, says
Heiden, make it hard to breathe in any position other than a
skater's crouch.

There was a false start, charged to both skaters. Then the race
was off cleanly:  it amounted to a little more than half a
minute of intense windmilling energy, an event of amazingly
compacted skill. Speed skating is a contained, glyptic art,
etching heat applied to ice. Kulikov whipped through the firs
100 meters .05 seconds faster than Heiden. Then the Soviet
slipped for an instant on the first turn, stuck out a hand,
regained his balance and held his lead into the backstretch.
The two men switched lanes in the backstretch, as prescribed,
but Heiden was still behind going into the final turn. He began
to accelerate as the most dangerous moment in speed skating
approached:  going at 30 m.p.h., he had to fight the
centrifugal force of the turn. Heiden was digging into the ice
as though his blades were geared to small and furiously spinning
wheels of diamonds.

The American came out of the turn in a dead heat with Kulikov.
Heiden's powerful, heavily muscled legs chopped into the ice and
his strokes sent up rooster tails of shavings. There was no
such trail of glittering ice in Kulikov's wake. Heiden pulled
away to win and establish a new Olympic record of 38:03 sec.,
1.14 sec. faster than the mark achieved in Innsbruck by Kulikov.
The Soviet, who finished in 38.37, had to settle for the
silver. Heiden said later that he felt almost as though he had
been fired out of a slingshot when he came through the final
turn. it was one of the great moments of the Olympics' first
week.

Beth Heiden was less fortunate in the 1500 meters. She had won
the World Championship in 1979 and the event was one of her
best, but a series of irritants nagged her. It was snowing, for
one thing, and she was slated to go first, something skaters
hate to do. The ice is always colder--and therefore
slower--before it is worked over by the competitors. Worse, the
first racer out on the course has to set her own pace. Still,
these were all minor annoyances compared to the fact that she
had sprained her ankle the previous weekend. Oddly, the ankle
did not bother her when she skated, but it did hurt when she
ran, and that was just about as bad. Skaters run before a race
to loosen their muscles, a vital part of their preparation.

Heiden got a good start, but she obviously was beginning to fade
in the final third of the race. Her stroking normally so brisk
and efficient, seemed choppy and strained. It was like watching
a finely tuned machine run out of lubricant and start to seize
up. When it was over, she said she had expected to finish about
sixty. THen she added in her chirpy little kid's voice:  "You
can get pretty nervous thinking about what people expect. But
then you say, 'Hey, it's only two and half minutes out of my
life.'"  The next day, Heiden spent 43.18 sec. of her life and
came in seventh in the 500-meters. THe race was by East
Germany's Karin Enke, 19, the sport's newest sensation, who
finished in 41.78 sec. and broke the Olympic record by .98 sec.
In second place was America's Leah Poulos Mueller.

While the Heidens were warmed by pre-Games publicity, the U.S.
hockey team about its training in cold anonymity. But the team
began to play at Lake Placid and suddenly people started to take
notice:  the young squad was the most promising ever to
represent the U.S. in the Olympics, although it performed with
maddening inconsistency.

The team is coached by Herb Brooks, who directed the University
of Minnesota to the National Championship last year, and who,
understandably, chose for his traveling 16 players who came from
the state of Minnesota. The next largest contingent--six--came
from Massachusetts, the other main center of hockey in the
country.

Brooks once said his team played "sophisticated pond hockey."
Whatever its name, the style of the Americans is oddly
schizophrenic. They ride players into the boards and
forecheck--an oafish game. On offense, on the other hand, they
strive--when they can remember their orders--to practice
pinpoint passing. The weakness of this hybrid approach showed
up in a big game against the Czechs. With a one-man advantage
after a Czech penalty, the Americans go too clever by half: they
fecklessly passed the puck back and forth for 1 min. 40 sec.,
until time ran out. All the while, Brooks was screaming,
"Shoot! Shoooot!"

As the game went on, the Americans settled down and shot plenty.
At times they moved the puck in precise and genteel patterns,
but they were not above reverting to type and giving an opponent
a good old American elbow. Most important of all, perhaps, the
emotional U.S. players performed at a level that surprised even
them, to say nothing of the favored Czechs, who were thoroughly
beaten.

Earlier, against the Swedes, the underdog Americans played like
future members of the National Hockey League, and indeed, 15
members of the team have been drafted by the pros. THey basked
the Europeans into the boards, they scuffled the puck into the
corners. If their pond hockey was not terribly sophisticated,
it was good enough-- barely. THe U.S. trailed Sweden 2-1 going
into the last minute of the game. Coach Brooks pulled out
Goalie Jim Craig and attacked with six men. They were aided in
planning their strategy by a typical example of Yankee know-how:
armed with a walkie-talkie, an aide was up in the stands,
radioing weaknesses he spotted in the Swedish defense to an
assistant coach, who was on the bench with Brooks. With only 27
sec. to play, Bill Baker drilled home a 55-foot slapshot to tie
the game.

It was on Friday night that the Uncertainty Principle hit Tai
Babilonia, 19, and Randy Gardner, 21, the world champions in
the graceful art of pairs figure skating. Not only were the
Americans still getting better, still adding to their repertoire
of lifts and leaps, but they would be competing against the
Soviet Union's husband-and-wife team of Irina Rodnina, 30, and
Alexander Zaitsev, 27, who had taken the Olympic gold medal in
1976 and who had won six world titles. Last year, when Randy
and Tai won the world championship, the Soviets were not
competing; Irina was having a child. The Russians too had added
new moves to their traditional routines to try to match the
young Americans' dazzle. It promised to be a classic encounter:
the veterans against the newcomers, the Soviets' grandiose
style against the fire and flash of the Americans.

When Tai and Randy skated out onto the ice Friday night with
the other pairs for their warmups prior to the pairs
short-program competition, the crowd gave a pleasant stir of
anticipation. THe U.S. pair struck a pose, glided around the
rink and then went into a sit-spin. Randy fell out of it. He
got up and brushed off the ice. They skated over to Coach John
Nicks, talked anxiously, came back and tried the sit-spin again.
This time, Randy stayed up, but he had to put a hand down to
keep from tumbling.

Another hurried conference with Nicks, then around the ice,
building speed for the lift that would be required in the short
program. But Randy did not hoist Tai high above him. The best
he could do was press his partner to the height of his head,
then set her abruptly down again--a maneuver that was quick and
forced and terribly ragged. Randy's face was drawn. Once more
they talked with Nicks, then skated out to try a double axel.
Three times they attempted the move, and three times Randy
fell. The crowd watched in murmurous disbelief; Gardner does
a double axel as easily as a man walked through a revolving
door. He had not fallen out of a double axel in practice or
competition in four years. A shock of bewilderment and concern
passed through the arena. For two weeks, the pair and their
coaches had harbored their secret:  during a practice session
in Los Angeles, Randy had pulled a muscle high in his left
thigh. The injury slowly improved, but 48 hours before the
Olympic short program, he had hurt his leg again and, in
addition, injured the flexor muscles in the front part of the
groin, impairing his ability to lift his legs. Randy and his
doctor tried to repair the damage with physical therapy, ice,
compression and a local anesthetic, Xylocaine. Nothing worked.
Nicks said later:  "He'd been trying hard for many days. In
my opinion, he couldn't perform, and more importantly, the lift
he would have performed would have been a great danger to his
partner. That was what concerned us more than anything else."
At last the loudspeaker at Lake Placid announced the
inevitable:  "Ladies and gentlemen, the U.S. pair is unable to
compete at this time because of an injury."  At the edge of the
Adirondack rink, the American skaters' ambitious dreams
combusted sadly. Tai cried as she left the ice. Said Tai:  It
was a nightmare."  Said Randy:  "I felt nothing. I just
couldn't believe it was all happening."

The excitement--and pathos--of the athletic events happily
overshadowed another Olympic theme:  the fate of the Summer
Games scheduled this year for Moscow. The International
Olympic COmmittee's proposal that the Moscow Games be canceled,
postponed or moved to another site. To present the U.S.
position, President Carter had sent Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance to Lake Placid. Vance told the I.O.C. "We will oppose the
participation of an American team in any Olympic Games in the
capital of an invading nation."  But Vance's tough talk drew
more anger than applause. Ireland's Lord Killanin, I.O.C.
president, said the Games "must be held in Moscow as planned,"
though he later clouded his position somewhat by adding, "We're
keeping our options open."

Publicly or private, 30 nations now support Carter, including
Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. West Germany
and a score more are leaning toward the U.S. position. Said
Douglas Hurd, Minister of State at the British Foreign Office:
"The I.O.C. is not living in the real world."

But all that lies far ahead, and attention remained focused last
week not on the geopolitical aspects of sport, but on the
accomplishments of remarkably gifted athletes. The Winter Games
maintained a marvelous level of tension, as times exhilarating,
at times poignant. The plot seemed only to improve as the
competition went on. And at week's end any number of
stimulating questions were still to be answered. Can the
bumptiously wholesome American hockey players summon up the old
college try and keep on winning?  Can America's Linda Fratianne
capture the figure-skating gold medal?  Can America's stylish
Charlie Tickner possibly triumph in the men's figure skating
against Britain's brilliant Robin Cousins, East Germany's exact
Jan Hoffmann and the Soviet Union's unyielding Vladimir Kovalev?
Will Ingemar Stenmark, the matchless Swedish craftsman, take
the two slaloms that so surprisingly eluded him at Innsbruck in
1976?  Can Lake Placid really bring it off?  WIll the buses ever
arrive on time? As the British sporting phrase so aptly puts it:
"Play on."

Bring Your Own Balloon

"Winter is icummen in," Ezra Pound wrote. "Lhude sing
Goddamm." And he bemoaned the season:  "Skiddeth bus and
sloppeth us." Exhorted Pound:  "Sing goddamm, sing goddamm,
DAMM."

So sing, Ethel, because we've been standing here freezing for
two hours. Thus ran the mood after the opening pieties of this
somewhat dreamily organized chilblain derby, when those in the
audience who had not thoughtfully arranged to travel by hot-air
balloon had to foot it through the slush for the three miles
back to town. Eight marchers were treated at the hospital for
frostbite. The bus system had broken down earlier in the week
because of a labor dispute, but now, after several days of
practice, it was breaking down spontaneously, without need of
a labor dispute. THe hot-air balloons, on the other hand,
worked just fine; they bobbed overhead, all brave and fine and
directionless, as Lord Killanin spoke wistfully in praise of
peace.

The buses turned balky again that very night, after the first
run of the luge, leaving hundreds of people standing on the
pavement with cold water seeping into their shoes. The trouble
is that Americans would sooner take hookworm medicine than a
bus. The fact is that the buses know they are despised, and in
their resentment they simply would not stop.

There are many bus-taking nations represented here--Austria,
for example, where buses are contented and well behaved--but the
Olympic delegations from these nations are made up of big shots
who ride in limousines in their homelands, and they no longer
know how to smile at a bus that has lowered its ears, pat its
flank, and get it to open its doors. No one is quite where the
buses go when they are not sulkily picking up people at the luge
run, but there is not doubt that the ban on private cars has
cleared the streets of traffic. State troopers standing in the
intersections kick pebbles and talk about their vacations. What
is in some question is whether the war between the buses and the
people may also have cleared the Games of a good many
spectators.

Crowds at the venues have been sparse to medium ("venue" in
ordinary English is something you try to change if you face a
richly deserved conviction in a court case, but in Olympspeak
it is a place where an athletic contest is held). Even the
men's downhill, generally thought to be the most grandly lunatic
of the Winter Games, drew less than a swarm. At the men's 30-km
cross-country venue, the American spectators would have fit
around a poker table or two. (Some 400 people rocked from one
cold foot to the other, but most were Norwegian or Finnish
officials.)

For all the occasional rough spots, a U.S. visitor to the
Olympics can take a measure of pride in what is going on at Lake
Placid. The soft, fine old mountains that surround the town
have a North American hugeness to their breadth, if not to their
height. The people of the Adirondacks, who are doing the work,
an occasional hustler aside, are decent and friendly, and they
have a wry humor about the vast self- promotion in which they
are engaged. "Be one of the lucky 75,000 people to own a copy,"
says a young program seller who is not doing well. He makes a
long, sad face, and no one who sees his humor can mistake his
nationality:  he's an American. At the visitor's ramshackle
motel, a venerable roadhouse reactivated for the Olympics after
some seasons of dormancy, the hot water is intermittent, baggage
vanishes, and an unforeseen Dutch journalist settles
determinedly on the spare bed during a period of fuddlement.
In the morning, despite promises, the restaurant is not open for
breakfast. But wait, all is not lost!  "Try upstairs," says the
bartender of the night before, blinking and yawning. There the
help is eating breakfast. And the visitor gets orange juice,
French toast, a passable omelet, and coffee and all, in this
land of grotesque overcharge, for no charge at all.

The world of winter sports is not very large, despite all the
flags that were raised at the opening ceremonies here, and for
most of those on hand the Olympiad is a series of meetings and
reunions. Probably that is why the Games survive; the athletes
and officials and journalists like them. I set out to find a
couple of friends I know to be here, and fail utterly; confusion
triumphs. Then at Mount Van Hoevenberg, I run into an athlete
from my home town, Biathlon Specialist Don Nielsen. He is a
tight-bodied, strong-minded man of 28, happily obsessed by a
sport not much honored or understood. "Listen," he says. We are
standing a the entrance to the field where the Biathletes
practice their curious combination of cross-country and riflery.
A tinkling sound is coming from the rifle pits. "Glass
targets," explains Nielsen. "Come watch; you'll love it."

And at Austria's hospitality house there is Karl Schranz, whose
forlorn ghost had stalked the battlements at the men's downhill.
The Austrians loved to call him "the Lion of St. Anton."  Some
lion. Years ago, before the '60 Olympics, I had asked how he,
as a veteran racer, helped the younger Austrian skiers. "It is
necessary to beat them down to show them who is best," the lion
said then. Now I ask whether competitive tensions are upsetting
the Austrian downhillers. "I was a member of the team for 17
years, and there was no friendship there," says Schranz.
"Never."  He sits back, sipping his beer, a man secure among his
friends.

John Skow