When the '20s newspaperman Paul Gallico was asked why he abandoned sportswriting to write The Snow Goose and The Poseidon Adventure, he answered in a single word. "February," he said.
Into that awful vacuum of back-and-forth sports, lodged like a gallstone between the Super Bowl and spring training, the Winter Olympics fell as welcome snow. CBS television, recently priced out of the professional football business, reaped a chilblains windfall as spectacular as anything seen in Lillehammer with the possible exceptions of Johann Olav Koss's thighs and Nancy Kerrigan's eyes.
As the second week wore out, Super Bowl records were falling like figure skaters. Come the final accounting in the next couple of days, even "M*A*S*H," "Roots" and "Who Shot J.R.?" may be in trouble. All of the world couldn't have been snowed in for the whole fortnight. For some other reason, practically everybody was near a TV set and in the mood for schussing and skating and sliding and singing.
Tonya couldn't have done it, although Harding and Kerrigan probably did cause the initial buzz. And the whirlwind around these two women will always be the emblem of the XVII winter games, no matter how many spectators would prefer it to be the American speed skaters Bonnie Blair and Dan Jansen (with the tears in their eyes) or the Norwegian and Russian cross-country skiers (with the icicles in their eyebrows).
"I want to ski through the Norwegian pines again," sang the U.S. Nordic racer John Aalberg, who was born in Norway, "and maybe beat a few Norwegians." "I hope to beat some Norwegians," chimed in a teammate, and yet another. But, at the end of their line, the jug- eared kid of 19, Ryan Heckman, shook his head. "I want to meet some Norwegians," he said. "Girls."
Heckman finished back in the pack in the Nordic combined, but the glint coming off his braces outgleamed the gold medal. "I've been smiling so much," he said, "I've got cuts all over the inside of my mouth."
That's the Olympics, or it used to be, or it ought to be. But Betty and Veronica were the story.
Even more than the world and the stomach, the story has turned over so many times that many people are now saying it was an overblown flapdoodle from the start. It was not.
The Chicago "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, the only World Series known to have been fixed, had a darker consequence. But, for hideous deeds in the annals of games, nothing on the record quite compares with hiring a club-wielding thug to cripple the competition on the eve of the championship.
("Great!" exclaimed the confessed hit man, Shane Stant, when he heard his victim was leading the Olympics. This was a fairly strange competition.)
Stant, Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and the other admitted conspirators have been shouting Tonya's involvement. She was obliged to brandish an attorney under the principals' noses to keep her place on the team. Unindicted, uncharged, although not out of the woods until a grand jury issues a report March 21, Harding skated into Lillehammer under unprecedented pressure. The only comparable circumstance was Nancy's.
Besides a saga and a soap opera, it developed into a sexist carnival conducted on an Olympic scale. The stereotypes were too perfect: the lightly blushed angel and the well-rouged vixen, according to popular press reports, one each of the only two kinds of women they allow.
All of a sudden then, at the base of the great morality play, a real sporting event broke out, at least of a kind. To fathom figure skating, you mustn't think in terms of any other sports. NFL referees don't consider the field goals made in practice as mitigators to the ones missed in the game. But skating seeds are guaranteed the highest scores, a consideration earned over time. Skating judges speak openly of spacing out their marks so that, no matter the quality of earlier performances, room is reserved for the eminences to come.
In most other games, coming out of nowhere to beat the best is a time-honored glory. But anomalies are counted as injustices in figure skating. The essential grace and only defense of the system is that the athletes don't seem to mind literally and figuratively waiting their turns. "Ultimately," said Dorothy Hamill, the sweetheart of 1976, "the best one usually wins."
By a step over the Ukrainian teenager Oksana Baiul, Kerrigan was the best on the first night of two, the shorter technical program, when Harding skated too early to do much good even if she hadn't bobbled and wobbled and landed 10th. Tonya went out on the closing night in a melodrama of fits and restarts and lonely tears and cursed bootlaces: a brave or brazen eighth.
After a practice collision, the waifish and wonderful 16-year-old Baiul came to the finale with a three-stitch seam in her shin, an exquisite reminder that Kerrigan could have limped her way down Madison Avenue and declared herself the winner. Instead Nancy skated, competed, soared like, well, an angel. And who can say she lost?
