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                                                                                1992 WINTER OLYMPICS, Page 68

Coming In from the Cold


Now that the Games no longer stand as a contest between political
systems, they symbolize more personal battles

By Pico Iyer


    Suddenly the confrontation's over. The two great rivals
of the postwar era -- America and the Soviet Union -- are more
or less friends. East and West Germany are one. Even North and
South Korea have signed a treaty of reconciliation. Yes, much of
the world remains as fractious as ever: the Khmer Rouge has
followed Prince Sihanouk back to the haunted palaces of
Cambodia, and Iraq occupies the place on the blacklist formerly
reserved for its archenemy Iran. But in a world where even South
Africa is again part of the Olympic family, it may seem that the
Olympic Games of 1992 are the first Games for a while that many
are not regarding as the last.

    It is tempting, then, to call the coming Olympics the
first post-cold war Games. For two decades at least, the
superpowers in particular -- the main players in the East-West
struggle -- have looked on the Olympics as a way to show off
their systems to the world: an extension of war by other means.
Off the field, this led to constant bobbing and feinting before
and during the 1980 and '84 Games in Moscow and Los Angeles. On
the field, it meant the contest between nations became a
competition between systems: the East Bloc called upon the
efficiency and single-mindedness of its cradle-to-grave training
programs; the West countered with the fruits of affluence and
freedom. The Olympics were the one battleground on which the two
enemies could meet and have it out. And the highlights of these
Games, for many, have been the Soviet Union's stunning,
last-second defeat of the U.S. basketball team in 1972, and the
victory of a ragtag collection of American collegians over the
mighty Soviet hockey machine in 1980.

    The last Winter Games too provided a perfect illustration
of the struggle: Katarina Witt, the self-styled "worker's hero"
from Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany, vs. Debi Thomas, the
all-American Stanford premed student. In the left corner, a
communist figure skater who lived like a princess and had been
trained since infancy to go for gold; in the right, a determined
young black woman who had overcome hardship to chase her dream.
In the middle, the opera both chose as accompaniment was Bizet's
tale of the working-class heroine, Carmen. Who could not see
their rivalry as a war of the worlds -- especially in a sport
where medals are decided by judges and where whispers persisted
that East Bloc judges favored East Bloc athletes and Western
judges Western? In the end, though, as soon as the champions
took the ice, all such issues became irrelevant: what held the
world spellbound was an age-old contest of coquetry against
industry, art against craft, style, in a sense, against
sincerity.

    The Winter Games, in any case, have always been the
Cinderella Games, the odd Games out; a poor sister, it sometimes
seems, to the sun-splashed dazzle of the Summer Games. Barcelona
this year has Gaudi, Miro, Isozaki; Albertville has mostly an
industrial town that sounds as if it were named after the Crown
Prince of Monaco (a member of the Monegasque bobsled team). The
Winter Games are chill, Nordic, taciturn -- redolent of Ingmar
Bergman and dark Decembers. Instead of sprints and dives, they
offer double Axels (not what you find on the bottom of your
Peugeot) and luges (which one American Congressman took to be
something to eat).

    The Winter Games are to that extent the eccentrics' Games,
where athletes jump when they skate, and skate when they ski,
and ski when they jump. Apart from the epochal Witt-Thomas
confrontation in Calgary in 1988, what many people remember
about recent Games are the Jamaican bobsled team, the skier from
Senegal, the Taiwanese brothers who formed a bobsled crew and
a 24-year-old English plasterer who put on his uniform and
became "Eddie the Eagle" Edwards, an almost world-class ski
jumper. This year the captain of the U.S. curling team is 55,
and his teammates are his son, his brother-in-law and his
brother-in-law's son. The Winter Games are for anomalies and
curiosities: children everywhere dream of running faster,
jumping higher and swimming better than their friends. But of
shooting down an icy slope at 70 m.p.h. on their backs? Or
skiing as fast as they can around some loops, then stopping and
shooting at a target while lying on the ground? Or curling?

    That is the abiding charm of the Olympics: in an age of
made-for-TV political campaigns and prepackaged beauty contests,
they are almost the only universally watched events that seem
decidedly unpredictable. And in that sense the Games have not
changed at all. Yes, it is true that geopolitics has produced
almost as many miracles as sports since the last time the world
met under the five Olympic rings; a bipolar world is now
multicultural. But John le Carre, the poet laureate of the cold
war, has not seen fit to lay down his pen. He recognizes, it
seems, that the real cold war has always been internal and that
inside the heart the walls have not come down, and one side is
still fighting the other. The opponents the athletes will face
are the same as ever: the climate, the crowd, the knot in the
stomach. Even the rule makers: one of the most eagerly awaited
contests this year will pit France's ice-dancing Duchesnays --
hometown favorites -- against the limiting regulations of their
sport. But that, in a sense, is what the Olympics have always
been about: not rules, really, but exceptions.