TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capoly.2

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                                                                                March 3, 1980

OLYMPICS

A Triumph, After All


Heiden's golden hoard and a hockey upset highlight Lake Placid's
Olympics


The hoisting of the five-ringed Olympic flag supposedly
internationalizes a site, enfolding it in the pristine and
timeless kingdom of sport. But the Winter Games at Lake Placid
seemed to bear a distinctly American stamp, from the incredible
hoard of gold in speed-skating to the site itself, a pleasant
little mountain town swamped by the world. The Games provided a
kind of ritual relief during a troubled American moment,
supplanting cold war fears with cheers for an ice hockey upset.
Like all Olympics, the 13th Winter Games left a gallery of
bright images on the retina:

- The American hockey team exploding with jubilation after
beating the seemingly invincible Soviets on Friday night in the
most astonishing upset of this or perhaps any Games.

- Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark snaking through the slalom gates
with seemingly offhanded genius.

- America's Phil Mahre, skiing with four screws and a metal
plate in an ankle he had shattered just a year ago on the same
mountain, winning a silver in the slalom, trailing only the
mighty Stenmark.

- Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proll working the women's downhill
course with the no-nonsense smacking-and-caressing style of a
baker kneading dough.

- East Germany's redoubtable four-man bobsled team rattling
down the refrigerated 1-mile run on Mt. Van Hoevenberg in 59.86
sec., breaking the one-minute barrier for the first time in
history.

- Alexander Tikhonov's teammates hurling him in the air after
his smooth skiing and deadeye shooting helped them capture
first place in the four-man biathlon relay. For the Soviet
army major, it was the fourth gold medal in four Winter
Olympics, a feat never achieved before.

The two weeks were filled with astonishing accomplishments, but
none came close to matching the truly stunning feats of a young
and unassuming speed skater from the Midwest. Indeed, the most
vivid single image that the world carried away from the 1980
Winger Games was surely the sight of Eric Heiden's heroically
muscled thighs molded in a skating skin of gold as he stroked
his way to five Olympic golds, five Olympic records and one
world record. Nothing in Olympic history rivals that
performance.

For chauvinists and chroniclers, the race for medals was hardly a
race:  the East Germans and Soviets generally overwhelm
everybody else in the Winter Games, scooping up medals by the
fistful in events like the luge, the bobsled, the biathlon,
cross-country skiing and figure skating. But thanks largely to
Heiden, the U.S. did remarkably well. On a per capita basis,
however, the hands-down winner of the Lake Placid Games was
tiny Liechtenstein (pop. 24,000); the brother and sister skiing
act of Andreas and Hanni Wenzel whisked down Whiteface Mountain
to win two golds and two silvers.

It is a good thing the Lake Placid Games were so athletically
dramatic, because not since Napoleon's armies withdrew in
frostbitten disarray from Russia have crowds in winter been
handled in quite such fashion. Thousands of spectators who had
made their expensive way to Lake Placid stared numbly down
empty roads, waiting for buses in the Adirondack cold. The
Rev. Bernard Fell, the local chairman for the Games, was moved
to such irrational frustration by the wayward buses, that at
one point he actually suggested, somewhat facetiously, banning
all spectators from the events so as not to overtax the
transport system.

But in the end, the foul-ups and the price gouging seemed
merely part of the freight to be paid for bringing the vast
apparatus of a modern Olympics to a tiny upstate New York
village. The skill and desire of the athletes and their
eagerness to excel made the Games exactly what all had hoped
they would be:  a splendid spectacle.

Nowhere was it more splendid evidence of that skill and desire
than on the 400-meter skating oval in the heart of Lake Placid.
It was there that Eric Heiden, with his smooth, ferocious
scissor steps, his trunk crouched double, long skate blades
tearing minute excavations in the ice, stroked toward an
astonishing procession of gold medals.

Heiden spent 25 min. 19.07 sec. at Lake Placid elevating
himself to the company of the greatest Olympic athletes who ever
lived. Along the way he kept shaving whole seconds off the
existing Olympic records--in a sport where hundredths of a
second can be crucial. In the 500-meter race, he cut 1.14 sec.
from the Olympic mark; in the 1,000-meter, 4.14 sec; in the
1,500-meter, 3.94 sec.; in the 5,000- meter, an incredible 22.19
sec.; in the 10,000-meter 22.46 sec. (for good measure, he broke
the world record for this grueling event by 6.2 sec).

Not only did Heiden take more gold medals than anyone else at
Lake Placid, he alone won more than any American team in any
Winter Games since the 1932 competition at LAke Placid, when
the U.S. took six. No man had ever won more than three gold
medals in a Winter Olympics, no woman more than four (Soviet
Speed Skater Lydia Skoblikova in 1964). The record holder for
gold medals, winter or summer, is U.S. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who
won seven in 1972. But three of his were for relays, and he
was racing over comparatively short distances--100 and 200
meters.

In the last four 400-meter laps, Heiden was magnificent. Despite
the growing pain, he skated each lap in exactly 35.2 sec.
Finishing in 14.28.13, he was so tired that he could not even
lift his head on his victory lap, let alone acknowledge the
cheers.

WIth one of the great performances in Olympic history behind
him, Heiden plans a sort of post-Olympic idyl of "goofing
off"--racing bicycles in Florida, then camping and traveling in
the western U.S., passing up his killer drills for the first
time in years. "It's been so long since I've had a lot of free
time, no training, no meets. Now I can do what I want to do."
Eventually, he expects to go into sports medicine, possibly as
an orthopedic surgeon like his father. He will spend next year
studying at a sports medicine institute in Norway, where he has a
Norwegian girlfriend.

"After I come back," says Eric, "I may do some endorsements, if
people are still interested in me. People forget awfully fast.
I remember in 1977 after I won the world championships. The man
who held the title before me was skating around the rink and
nobody recognized him.  I came out and was mobbed. Popularity
drops pretty quick after you stop being on top. THings will
cool off for me, and that's the way I want it."  How would he
like to be remembered?  "The way I am. Just me, Eric Heiden."

Eric's celebrity left his little sister, Beth, 20, in a
bittersweet state. SHe had been swept along in her brother's
wake, and some said she could take four golds. The
expectations were much too high and put far too much pressure
on her. Although she had won the World Championships in 1979,
some of her rivals were then still rounding into top form. They
were ready for Lake Placid, and Beth finished seventh in the
500, fifth in the 1,000 and seventh in the 1,500 meters. It was
an excellent showing, but some newsmen treated her like a
failure.

Beth had a good excuse, but did not use it:  her left ankle had
been injured a month ago much more seriously than outsiders
suspected. When she began to favor the leg, the other ankle
flared up, and her main strength--the efficiency of her
strokes--was impaired. For all that, Beth finally won a bronze
medal in the 3,000 and would have been the all-round women's
skating champion if the events had been judged collectively, as
they are in the world championships. Still, her medal brought
tears of anguish as well as joy. At her press conference, she
said:  "I'm happiest when I skate for myself. But this year I
feel I have to skate for the press. The hell with you guys."

If the Winter Olympics turned Eric Heiden into a golden
apotheosis to Americans, the Swedes had long since made a
national hero of Ingemar Stenmark, and eerily perfect slalom
racer who is as popular at home as Bjorn Borg, the tennis
champion. At 23, Stenmark has won the World Cup three times.
Before Lake Placid, he had taken 14 World Cup giant slalom races
in a row while competing against the best racers in the world--a
record as awesome in its own way as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game
hitting streak in 1941. In some ways, Stenmark is the Alpine
equivalent of DiMaggio. He has the same gift for doing the
impossible in an unhurried, almost languid, offhandedly elegant
manner. Declares Austria's Coach Karl Kahr:  "He has that
special feeling. Certainly, training is part of it, but it's
also a gift-- like the ability to learn a foreign language."

Stenmark only rarely competes in the downhill; its headlong
plunge does not appeal to his sense of precision. He is
strictly a specialist in the slalom and the giant slalom,
fascinated by their intricate swoops and switchbacks. At
Innsbruck four years ago, Stenmark fell in the slalom and had to
content himself with a bronze in the giant slalom. He came to
Lake Placid determined to take the big prize that had escaped
him, a gold medal.

Thousands climbed up Whiteface Mountain to watch Stenmark in the
first of two runs in the giant slalom. At the countdown,
Stenmark poled powerfully out of the start house and into the
first few tightly set gates. He was minutely off on the turns
at first, then settled into the swoopingly rhythmic
gate-to-gate dance that makes his style instantly recognizable.
Just at the penultimate gate, Stenmark slid down so low on his
right ski that his body was canted almost parallel to the snow.
For an instant, it looked as though his try for gold would
vanish in a white detonation of arms and legs and skis.
Instead, Stenmark simply reached down and pushed himself up with
his right hand. But the near fall slowed him just enough to
leave him in third place, behind Liechtenstein's Andreas Wenzel
and Austria's Hans Enn.

There is in Stenmark a certain wintry remoteness that recalls
another perfectionist of Scandinavian blood, Charles Lindbergh.
After that first run, Stenmark irritably fended off reporters,
as he almost always does. "Questions, bloody questions," he
muttered, and turned away.

Something about the second run of the giant slalom seems to
evoke all of Stenmark's skills and desire. Once, he ranked
23rd after the initial round and still managed to win, since
first place is decided by the combined times of the two runs.
On the second run down Whiteface, Stenmark swept down the
course in a style close to perfection. His timing, his
anticipation of the gates, his relaxed air, gave the run a
preternatural grace. A cat can slink across a dressertop dense
with perfume bottles and barely brush them with its fur;
Stenmark went through 55 gates like that. Near one of the final
gates, his skis chattered into a left turn and slid slightly.
He corrected, and shot home to a gold medal, more than a second
faster than Wenzel. The bronze went to Austria's Enn.

Three days later, Stenmark skied the shorter slalom course with
such artistry that he won his second gold medal, plucking it
away from Phil Mahre, 22, probably the finest male skier the
U.S. has ever produced. After his ankle injury on the same
Whiteface course a year ago, Mahre began skiing toward a
surprising comeback. In his first race in Europe this winter,
he did well enough to earn World Cup points. Said Team
Director Bill Marolt:  "Who could have believed he could do it
in his first race?  God, what an athlete!"

Mahre is a strong and bold competitor. His first run down
Whiteface last week was a brilliant attack--nothing held back,
no ghosts, no fear, just a great technical skier slicing
through the gates on a line as pure and fast as the mountain
would allow. Leading after that first run, he was hardly out
of the start house on the second when a bouncing gate pole
dropped across his skis, slowing him for an instant, upsetting
his concentration, almost making him fall. The damage was done;
the imperturbable Stenmark overtook Mahre in the second run and
snared the gold by half a second.  Still, Mahre's silver made
him only the third American man ever to win an Olympic alpine
skiing medal of any kind. (Billy Kidd took a silver and Jimmy
Heuga a bronze in the slalom at Innsbruck in 1964, the only
other medalists.)  Mahre went over and congratulated Stenmark,
and then the two super skiers, who used to train together, sat
side by side in the sun like old friends and watched the rest of
the competition.

While Stenmark was being Stenmark, Europe's top women racers
were putting on a spectacular show of their own on Whiteface
Mountain. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proll had also come to Lake
Placid with a point to prove. Like Stenmark, she held the
record for World Cup career victories (61 for her, 46 for him)
and, like Stenmark, she had never won an Olympic gold medal. At
Sapporo in 1972, when she was 18, she had been forced to settle
for two silvers, and she missed Innsbruck in 1976 because she
was at home in Kleinarl, Austria, nursing her father, a Tyrolean
farmer, in his terminal illness. She came to Lake Placid, at
age 26, knowing it was her last chance for gold.

"Moser-Proll, says former U.S. Ski Team Director Hank Tauber,
"is the toughest woman athlete I have ever met."  She is a
calm, concentrated woman with fiercely appraising ice-blue eyes
who carries a solidly efficient 147 lbs. on a 5-ft. 7-in.
frame. At the downtown Lake Placid house rented for the women's
team by the Austrian Ski Federation, all talk about gold medals
was banned  Moser-Proll spent the evening before the women's
downhill crocheting a red tablecloth-- possibly something for
the Cafe Annemarie that she runs with her husband Herbert in
the off-season at Kleinarl.

At Whiteface next morning, the temperature was zero and the
wind- chill factor made it feel like -50 degrees. Team
assistants used a hair dryer to keep annemarie's boots warm and
flexible in the small start house atop the 2,698-meter downhill
run. Her face was coated with an anti-frostbite cream. Sewn
inside her uniform was a photograph of her father.

Skiing in sixth position, Moser-Proll charged the course hard,
risking everything in the tight, steep, slippery turns on the
top of the run. SHe crouched into a aerodynamic tuck where no
one else dared. It was a display of intimidating control, and
it gave Moser- Proll a gold medal as well as a slight case of
frostbite.

Behind Annemarie to take the silver came Liechtenstein's Hanni
Wenzel, 23, the stocky older sister of Andreas, 21. In the
women's giant slalom, Hanni and Annemarie reversed their
positions, and then some. Hanni worked down the course in
smooth each runs to take the gold, with West Germany's Irene
Epple winning the silver and France's Perrine Pelen the bronze.
Annemarie, who does not care much for the giant slalom, finished
sixth.

Two days later, Moser-Proll took a spill on the steep upper
portion of the shorter women's slalom in the first run and was
eliminated. Hanni stayed upright and swept to her second gold by
a commanding margin of nearly 1.5 sec. With two golds and a
silver in the three alpine events, she matched the smashing
performance of West Germany's Rosi Mittermaier in the 1976
Winter Games at Innsbruck.

No moment was sweeter for the Americans than the last instant in
the 4-3 hockey victory over the Soviets. The berserk din in the
Olympic arena must have been dimly audible at the Canadian
border 50 miles away. Anyone on the International Olympic
Committee who thought that politics has nothing to do with the
Games should have sampled the crowd's ear-splitting roar:
"U.S.A.!  U.S.A.!  U.S.A.!"  The feisty young American players
began by raising their sticks toward the rafters in an eruption
of glad amazement, and ended by arcing them into the cheering
crowd for souvenirs.

If it was a bit foolish, even sad, to savor the victory as an
act of geopolitical symbolism, Americans nonetheless had a
right to be proud of their boys. A pond-hockey pickup crew of
collegians, they had knocked off an athletic machine assembled
from the best that the Soviet army and the Moscow Dynamo could
produce--the best team in the world, professional or amateur.
Basically the same Soviet outfit trounced the National Hockey
League All-Stars at Madison Square Garden last year. THe
Soviets have won the title in every Olympics since 1964; the
Americans last took the gold 20 years ago in Squaw Valley.

This year's U.S. team, assembled by Coach Herb Brooks from cold-
weather colleges in places like Massachusetts and Minnesota,
were occasionally ragged, but as tough and willing as a
neighborhood mutt. Just a few days before Lake Placid, they had
lost to the Soviets, 10- 3, in an exhibition game in Madison
Square Garden. But at the end of the first period last Friday,
the Americans left the ice with a 2-2 tie, thanks to a
last-second goal scored by Mark Johnson from the University of
Wisconsin. When the Soviets returned from intermission, they
came out playing as if they had had intimations of Siberia.
Their slam-bank forechecking kept the Americans from
penetrating much beyond center ice. The game got brawlingly
physical. Trailing 3-2 as the final period started, the
Americans started skating better and controlling the puck with
more authority. Thrown offstride, the Soviets were unable to set
up their intricate plays or pass cross-ice.

A penalty for high-sticking gave the U.S. a man advantage and
Johnson rammed in his second goal, with an assist from Boston
University's Dave SIlk, to tie the game.  Just 81 sec. later,
Mike Eruzione, the team captain, drove home a rebound for what
proved to be the winning goal. Across the American night,
millions of living rooms and bars reverberated with a noise of
deep satisfaction, and President Carter invited the whole team
to the White House, along with the rest of the U.S. Olympians,
for lunch.

In figure skating, there were occasional dazzling moments, but
much of it was disappointing. At Lake Placid, the ice belonged
to Heiden and the hockey players.

Reigning Men's World Champion Vladimir Kovalev of the Soviet
Union dropped out of the singles figure-skating competition,
supposedly disabled by flue. The best American hope, Charlie
Tickner, 26, is normally a stylish and energetic skater, but
all week he seemed curiously flat. In the free-skating
competition, he suffered some awkward technical problems with
a triple jump, but his main difficulty seemed to involve
something spiritual:  he rarely displayed any of the fire and
joy he has given his skating in recent years.

Tickner did take the bronze, but the men's gold went to
Britain's Robin Cousins, 22, who brought to Placid the elegant
and fluid style that had won him his first European
championship several weeks earlier. But even he did not skate
with his usual relaxed confidence. He faltered on one of the
triple jumps in his undemanding program; his gold medal was a
triumph of style over substance.

The silver went to East Germany's Jan Hoffmann, who made no
mistakes in his athletic free-skating program but left the
overall impression of an expertly twirling oak tree. Many of
the figure skater, in fact, seemed to be phoning in their
performances from Albany. That was not so of Americans David
Santee, 22, who had made a fetish out of the movie boxer Rocky,
and tiny Scott Hamilton, 21, who ricocheted around the arena
like an exuberant puppy. The two gave the men's competition
badly needed short of enthusiasm; they placed fourth and fifth.

The best U.S. hope for a U.S. figure skating goal medal after
Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner dropped out was Linda
Fratianne, 19, but she got off to a shaky start, finishing third
in the compulsory figures. Fratianne complained that West
Germany's Dagmar Lurz, who finished second, had been rated too
high. "I went out and saw her third figure and the second
circle of her loop was short, fat and off-axis," said Linda.
Her coach, Frank Carroll, said irritably that "the judges always
put Dagmar in there as a buffer between Linda and East Germany's
Anett Poetzsch, so that Linda has to come from behind to win."
A two-time world and four-time U.S. champion, Fratianne is an
excellent but vaguely apprehensive skater; she has only rarely
been able to disperse the little cloud of worry that hovers
over her performances. SHe had come to Lake Placid as the
favorite, but now she had to beat both Poetzsch and Lurz.

Linda was ready. Her mother had lit some candles in church and
stuck to other rituals as well. She believes it is bad luck to
watch her daughter's free skating program. "I stand in the
back and visualize her program and try to send her all the vibes
I can," Virginia Fratianne told TIME-Reporter-Researcher Peter
Ainslie. At the U.S. nationals in Atlanta last month, she
violated the rule after Linda had succeeded on the difficult
combination jump that opens her program. "I said, 'O.K.,
that's over.'  And when I came out to watch the rest, she fell
twice in twelve seconds."

In the finals, Fratianne not only did not fall, she skated
superbly. Even so, she was unable to make up the ground she had
lost in the compulsory figures. Linda won the silver; the gold
went to East Germany's Poetzsch.

As the Games drew to an end, an East European official shrewdly
noted:  "The only amateurs are the people who organized them."
An Italian reporter called the 1980 Winter Olympics the second
worst assignment in the 20th century--the worst being World War
II. There were other problems. Prices in Lake Placid were
pumped up high enough to tatter the social contract:  the $2
hot dog and the scalper's $100 hockey ticket. SOme of the
North Country Boys, as they liked to call themselves, showed
they could hustle a buck like city slickers.

All too true, but Lake Placid will really be remembered for
much, much more. There was a curious charm to the Games:  the
prison-to-be that served as an Olympic Village and that came to e
admired by skeptical athletes; the small-town high school that
was turned into a press center; the fact that passers-by on
Main Street had only to peek through a fence--for free--to watch
some of the finest speed skating in the history of the sport.
Trading in the multicolored pins of the participating nations
became a local fad and then a frenzy; among the most
sought-after were the Soviets. There was the miracle of the
man-made snow, which was admired by most of the skiers. One
Lake Placid official admitted that sure, the transportation had
been a mess, but then he proudly recounted how European skiing
representatives had complimented the locals on the superb
organization of the alpine races.

The Games were filled with moments of warmth. The American
crowd, despite its deep disappointment at the forced withdrawal
of the favored U.S. pairs figure skaters Tai Babilonia and the
injured Randy Gardner, applauding the two smiling Soviet
figure-skating gold medalists, Irina Rodnina and Alexander
Zaitsev. The nightly Gemutlichkeit at Austria House, a
fragment of Europe transplanted to the frozen shores of Mirror
Lake. The welcoming hands that rubbed feeling back into the
cheeks of the women downhillers who had just braved
bone-chilling temperatures in their daredevil runs down
Whiteface. The consoling words that Giant Slalom Winner Hanni
Wenzel whispered to France's Fabienne Serrat, who was weeping
because she had missed the bronze by one hundredth of a second.

Unless the turmoil over this summer's Moscow Games succeeds in
destroying the Olympics altogether, some of the athletes who
were at Lake Placid will meet again at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia,
four years from now. But most athletes have a competitive
prime that does not last much longer than a cherry blossom, and
for them there will be no more Games. Some left Lake Placid
with medals and glory. Some came away with nothing more than
the memory of having competed. Yet in a sense, that is
everything. Beth Heiden, fighting back tears after her last
race because, even though she had performed superbly, too many
people had expected too much of her, put it pretty well. "You
probably heard that slogan about participation is more
important. Well, I believe in it."