With six days to go before the opening of the 17th Winter Olympics, sparks are flying on the Storgata, Lillehammer’s main street.
The moving sparks aren’t being caused by the recent minor frictions that have come from the Olympic organizing effort-controversies over reports of beer costing $8 per glass in Lillehammer pubs, the alleged cruelty of shipping reindeer from northern Norway for the opening ceremonies, and a protocol flap with the Greeks over the Olympic torch run.
The cause is rather what every Olympic organizer dreams of-a near-record snow depth, 50 inches on the ground in unplowed areas. There is so much that some of it had to trucked away, 59-inch-high fences alongside the cross-country ski course are nearly buried, and hungry elk are wandering out of the forests and onto railroad tracks in search of food.
Two weeks ago, a moose with the same motive strolled down the Storgata. There his bill of fare would have been almost limited to pricey Olympic souvenirs.
The snow is nearly too much of a good thing, but definitely enough that the streets of Lillehammer and the other two Olympic venue cities of south central Norway are full of the picturesque, standing sleds called sparken.
Some of the sleds are used to push red-cheeked children, who ride them sitting upright. Others are used to run errands in place of thin-wheeled bicycles, which could not get through the snow. The sled owners chain them to posts with bicycle locks.
The scene is something out of Norwegian Currier & Ives, just what one might imagine for a country where spring, summer and fall are brief and inconvenient interludes between winters. Having the world see these images of Norway’s traditions is just what Lillehammer Olympic boosters hoped would happen when the city of 23,000 improbably won its bid to be the 1994 Winter Olympic host.
“Everyone knew we could ski and skate,” said Jan Staubo, Norway’s member on the International Olympic Committee, “but no one knew anything about our culture.”
That culture will be exposed to nearly a billion TV viewers during Saturday’s opening ceremonies. The two-hour program will include reindeer, the arts, crafts and music of the Sami (called Laplanders by the politically incorrect), and the enactment of a Norse fairy tale, complete with cave-dwelling trolls and water sprites and humanoid vetter who live underground.
The role of skiing, especially cross-country skiing, in Norway’s culture will be clearer to viewers here than the U.S.
Norwegian TV will devote 26.6 percent of its 300 hours of Olympic broadcasting to the 10 cross-country events and will show the 50-kilometer (31.6-mile) race from start to finish.
CBS will devote 1.25 percent of its 120 broadcast hours to cross-country skiing. That amounts to 90 minutes, or less than the single Norwegian telecast of the 50-kilometers.
About 100,000 people are expected to line the 50-kilometer course. Demand for seats in the 31,000-seat amphitheater at the finish was so impossible to satisfy that the Olympic organizers are allowing people to camp overnight along the cross-country courses, despite the security risk that could present.
“We often say Norwegian children are born with skis on, and many of our rival countries believe it,” said Ola K. Bakke, head of Norway’s Alpine ski program.
Lillehammer believes it is the the only city in the world with a skier on its coat of arms. These certainly will be the first Olympics in which a torch bearer has skied down the jump with the flame in the opening ceremonies. He will receive the torch at the top of the large jump hill and carry it down into the arena where the Olympic cauldron will be lit by Crown Prince Haakon Magnus.
If that sounds like playing with fire, it is meant to. After all, the very idea of having Lillehammer as a Winter Olympic host often seemed a notion destined to crash and burn since local banker Petter Roenningen came up with it as a virtual joke 17 years ago.
When the IOC vote for the 1994 Winter Olympics took place on Sept. 15, 1988, in Seoul, South Korea, Roenningen already had returned to Norway because he did not want to miss the opening of the hunting season. Lillehammer’s bagging the big one came as such a surprise that IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch had not even practiced how to say it before announcing the winner, which he mispronounced as Lilly-hammer instead of Lill-uh-hahmer.
How to avoid having these Games pronounced dead from gridlock then became the main problem for Lillehammer, 120 miles north of Oslo. It is the second smallest Olympic host city after Lake Placid, N.Y., where the 1980 Winter Games were remembered for buses that never came.
Relocating some of the events originally set for the Lillehammer area to Gjovik (pop. 26,000), 36 miles away, and Hamar (pop. 26,000), 42 miles away, has eased some of the pressure on the main site. Lillehammer still must be prepared to handle 100,000 visitors a day.
One of which may be a moose.
