There being no persuasive reason to have even one Winter Olympics every four years, the world now is offered two in two. This is like getting a second boil lanced for free. Gratitude is not the emotion that springs to mind.
It seems like only yesterday I was losing my laundry in LaLechere, France, and here I am tempting the Lost Sock Gods again, in a whole new language and foreign detergent.
I had saved my laundry receipt from France on the off chance that somehow my underwear had followed me from Albertville along with Bonnie Blair and Viktor Petrenko.
A smiling laundry clerk took my 2-year-old claim check, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and handed me back the receipt.
“It’ll be ready Tuesday,” she said.
These are the Tailgate Games, coming so closely behind the last ones that if the French had slowed down, they would have been rear-ended by Norwegians.
This is so soon, the motor on the Zamboni is still warm.
Doing it this way is supposed to allow the Winter Olympics to float alone instead of merely being the ice that chills the great mixed drink that is the Summer Olympics. Excuse the florid romp down metaphor alley, but that’s the way they talk here.
Liv Ullmann, the actress and only famous living Norwegian, begged a scattered room of journalists waiting for the U.S. figure-skating press conference to go save the children of Sarajevo.
“Don’t crush the fragile blossoms of the next generation,” she begged.
I would have gone, too, except the one road out of town is clogged and I heard Michael Jackson make a similar plea before a Super Bowl. Listen, if the Olympic message was all it was cracked up to be, Sarajevo wouldn’t be Sarajevo 10 years later.
Where was I? Oh, yes. The Tailgate Olympics. The shortness of time is also clearly responsible for the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan mess, or as U.S. Figure Skating clerk Paul George called it Friday, “a tragic aberration.” (See. This flowery speech is catching).
If the International Olympic Committee had waited its usual four years to wax its runners, neither Harding nor Kerrigan would be back. They would have gotten on with their adulthood, or they would have flipped a coin to see who gets to skate as Snow White and who has to be the Wicked Queen tonight. No doubt about who is which now.
A few Portland grand jurors might be idle and a lot of attorneys would be billing fewer hours. But no one would be wringing hands over Harding and Kerrigan sharing the same practice ice.
On the other hand, if they had hurried the Summer Games back, we would have gotten Carl Lewis one more time instead of Torvill and Dean. You pay your money, you pick your costume.
These Games already have a sort of used feel, what with antiques like Brian Boitano and Alberto Tomba and even the Jamaican bobsledders. One of the few refreshing things about an Olympics is as a new stage for new talent. Torvill and Dean are old enough to play senior tennis.
The freshest group might be the U.S. hockey team, a bunch of kids barely past their teens who have been touring together for six months. This is the last time such a thing might happen if hockey goes to the Dream Team structure as basketball did.
“Philosophically and romantically, I like what we do here,” said U.S. coach Tim Taylor. “I like to see a team mold its personality and chemistry. This can’t happen if NHL players just come together for the Games.
“I don’t think the Olympics ought to be an afterthought or a pause in business. Doing it that way, something gets lost.”
Without philosophy and romance, of course, the Winter Olympics are just a bunch of foreigners sliding down hills on their backs.
No matter. Ready or not, another Winter Olympics is here. The torch is lit, the ice is cold and the lawyers are busy.
“We want to show the world who we are,” said Gerhard Heiberg, head clerk of the Lillehammer committee.
No need to go to so much bother. Anyone who has seen Terry Bradshaw has seen the face of Norway.
