Four years ago, the American public was riveted to a figure skating rivalry between two U.S. women. Their confrontation made the 1994 Winter Olympics as visible as a Super Bowl, and, from a U.S. perspective, the tawdry Harding-Kerrigan affair overwhelmed everything else that happened in Norway, where the Winter Games became a beautiful extension of the country’s culture.
There is a rivalry between two U.S. skaters even more compelling from a competitive standpoint in the 1998 Winter Olympics–XVIII, for those who like the Super Bowl touch–that open here Saturday (Friday night in the U.S.). After all, few expected Tonya Harding to challenge for any prize except the one Mr. Blackwell awards.
The upcoming battle between 1997 world champion Tara Lipinski and 1996 world champion Michelle Kwan, as well as the Winter Olympics themselves, have been overwhelmed in the U.S. by the press of other events. The execution of a woman in Texas, the possibility of war with Iraq and an alleged presidential scandal have reduced the Winter Games to their former proportions as a sporting event.
For the sake of entertainment, who needs a Lipinski when there is a Lewinsky?
CBS, broadcasting its final Olympics for at least 12 years, still will use many of its 128 telecast hours for figure skating, featuring the sport in prime time for 10 of the next 16 nights. It is unlikely to get any ratings near the 48.5 for the 1994 women’s short program, then the third-highest-rated sports telecast of all time.
That gave the 1994 Winter Olympics a millenial feeling in the U.S. These final Olympics of the second Western millenium are gargantuan in a different way.
They are just the second Winter Games to take place in Asia, with Japan also having served as host on its northern island of Sapporo in 1972. Back then, the Games included 1,232 athletes from 35 nations competing in 35 events. Those numbers have increased to 2,450 athletes from 72 nations–including Winter Games newcomers Uruguay, Kenya, Azerbaijan, Venezuela and Macedonia–competing in 68 events.
Among those events are seven in three new Winter Olympic disciplines–snowboarding, curling and women’s hockey. Snowboarders, expected to make up 40 percent of all those on U.S. slopes within a decade, and women’s hockey players think the Olympic exposure will boost their growing sports.
The new athletes include National Hockey League players, whose presence is expected to turn the men’s hockey competition into a dream tournament among six strong teams–the United States, Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Having the NHL players is a dramatic change from the Japan Olympics of a quarter-century ago, when Austrian ski star Karl Schranz was banned because he had used his name and picture in advertising. Chicagoan Avery Brundage, then the president of an International Olympic Committee that still clung to 19th Century notions of Olympic amateurism, even talked of ending the Winter Games because they “are not universal and foster professionalism.”
Many Winter Olympic events still are dominated by the countries with strong winter sports traditions that won medals at the first Winter Olympics in 1924–Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria. Other European countries, including the Netherlands and Germany, soon came to prominence, and Russia was an immediate power at its entrance as the Soviet Union in 1956.
The United States was among the medal leaders until 1988, when its six medals were a postwar nadir. The total improved to 11 in 1992 and 13 in 1994, but nine of those 24 medals were in events added to the program since 1988.
Dick Schultz, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, thinks his 195-athlete team (the largest of any nation) will at least match the 13 medals of four years ago. The U.S. may need several medals in the new 1998 events to do that.
With the likes of India, Jamaica and the Virgin Islands in the Winter Games, universality no longer is such a problem. In Nagano Prefecture, the administrative region of Honshu island that is host to Winter Olympic events at five different areas, the concerns are of a much different nature–with nature being paramount among them.
The Japanese have allowed anything-goes development in their big cities but are fiercely protective of their countryside. Environmentalists forced switches in several venues because of birds and bugs whose habitats were threatened. A three-year argument over the length of the men’s downhill course, which resulted from not wanting it to intrude on a national park, was settled with a compromise that has it briefly cross two park areas.
Now the question is whether the quickly changing weather in the Japan Alps town of Hakuba will allow the downhill to go off as scheduled Sunday (Saturday night in the U.S.). Operation managers in Hakuba said Friday that heavy snow was forecast for Sunday.
“We consider it lucky if we have fine weather for four days out of all the days set aside for competions,” one official said.
As the most southerly site for a Winter Olympics–about the latitude of San Francisco–the mountains in Nagano Prefecture frequently are affected by fog. During a World Cup competition last year, Italian ski star Alberto Tomba called the slushy conditions “perfect for water skiing.”
The bridge between seasons is clear at the curling site in Karuizawa, 60 miles south of Nagano. The city also was host to equestrian events at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the first time a single place has been used for both Winter and Summer Olympics.
Changes related to nature conservancy contributed to the $10.5 billion cost of bringing the Olympics to what had been an isolated city in central Japan. More than half the money, $6.3 billion, was spent on building a bullet train line from Tokyo. The Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee also has shelled out $3,000 a night for IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s suite in a local hotel.
Despite such big financial ends to meet, the Nagano organizers never stooped to the level of commercial saturation that turned Atlanta’s Centennial Olympics into a garish display of capitalism. Even the city’s prosperous sex industry has toned down, agreeing to cover pornographic vending machines and to suspend advertising for telephone dating clubs.
“Our Games are not going to be as over the top as Atlanta’s,” said NAOC director general Makato Kobayashi.
There are no 10-story watches, four-story soft drink bottles or giant inflatable Gumbies on the streets of Nagano City. Only the official credit card sponsor has plastered itself so ubiquitously–it gave brand-name jackets to seemingly every merchant in Nagano–as to be annoying if not offensive.
“Atlanta was wild commercialism, uncontrolled,” said IOC director general Francois Carrard. “This is more disciplined.”
The Olympic organizers worry most that Nagano’s drivers will not show the same restraint to help ease the transportation problems that have become more severe as the Olympics have grown. Traffic in Nagano frequently is snarled to a standstill under normal conditions. Unlike Atlanta, which used out-of-town drivers who never were properly trained before the 1996 Summer Olympics, the Nagano bus drivers know where they are going, even if they can’t get there.
“Smooth transportation is a key to the success of the Olympic Games,” said NAOC transportation director Takashi Yamada. “In the history of the Olympic Games, there is no transportation system that has been highly acclaimed.”
Nagano already can count one part of its Olympic plan as a success. Its citizens have overcome their natural reserve–much of which comes from years of living in a backwater–to welcome foreigners. Nagano shop owners who previously dealt only with cash clients now take credit cards. Many restaurant menus have been translated into English.
One restaurant owner said he didn’t expect much extra Olympic business but would profit from the opportunity to meet outsiders. He and his family posed for pictures with a group of U.S. diners.
“Nagano is such a small city, but now it is world famous,” said Taka-Kazu Fukushima, a priest at the Zenkoji Temple. “We have to be international.”
A chef at Sushijin restaurant laughed heartily with his Western clients as they ate raw fish while a TV above the sushi bar showed a variety show whose guests were eating fried insects and worms. A grocer stopped two pedestrians wearing Olympic credentials and ran back in his store to bring them two of the prized Nagano apples, at $3 to $8 apiece.
The joys of such simple contact, not the meeting of a metal baton and a skater’s knee, are supposed to be the attraction of the Olympics.
