Futures on the Line

In just about every event at Grenoble this week, far more than medals are at stake. Personal futures as well as national prestige are on the line. Figure skaters from the West vie for ice-show contracts as well as medals; speed skaters from the East draw salaries from the State. They want to win and stay on the payroll. Colonel Marceau Crespin, France's director of sports, retorts to the charge that his team is 50% professional: "You are mistaken, monsieur. It is 100%." For 1,355 athletes from 37 nations the competition has never been so tough. The main events:

sbSPEED SKATING. Though speed skating is a Scottish invention and the first pair of steel racing skates was manufactured in the U.S., the sport has long been dominated by the Norwegians and Russians, who between them have won 30 out of the 46 gold-medal awards since the Winter Olympics began in 1924. Norway still has Fred Anton Maier, 29, the world record holder at 5,000 and 10,000 meters; Russia has Lidia Skoblikova, 28, who swept all four women's races at the 1964 Olympics. But Maier faces stiff opposition from The Netherlands' Kees Verkerk, 25, who beat him twice at last year's world championships, and Skoblikova now ranks as only the fourth fastest female skater (behind The Netherlands' Stien Kaiser, her own teammate Lasma Kauniste and the U.S.'s 16-year-old Diane Holum). The U.S. team is a strong threat in the sprints: either Tom Gray or Neil Blatchford could win the men's 500 meter; top contenders in the ladies' 500 include Diane Holum and Mary Meyers, 22. Luck of the draw will play a big part at Grenoble. The outdoor rink is unprotected against sun and wind, and racers in early heats will have the advantage of hard ice and still air.

sbBOBSLEDDING. Rocketing down a narrow, twisting tube of ice at more than 100 m.p.h. is no sport for the squeamish. "No one ever goes on a bob run without the awareness that this may be his last ride," says Erwin Thaler, the 38-year-old paint salesman who drives Austria's No. 1 sled and is favored to win both the two-man and four-man contests at Grenoble. Thaler's toughest competition in the two-man race is expected to come from Italy's "Red Devil," nine-time World Champion Eugenio Monti, 40, whose face represents a triumph of plastic surgery over sled crackups.

sbSKI JUMPING. "Cold as ice," is the way competitors describe Norway's Bjorn Wirkola, 24, and among ski jumpers Wirkola is a cool bird indeed. "I look down that big jump and it does not scare me," he says. "It's beautiful; it calls me, that thing." Short and squat, Wirkola wears elevator lifts in his boot heels to help him lean forward as far as possible on his skis--thereby creating an airfoil effect with his body. The current world champion on both big and small hills, he is a heavy favorite to win both the 70-meter and 90-meter jumps at Grenoble.

sbFIGURE SKATING. If the U.S. has a sure bet for a gold medal at Grenoble, it is Peggy Fleming, 19, a consummate technician who two weeks ago won her fifth straight U.S. championship with 135.96 points out of a possible 150. A perfectionist in the classic school figures, which count for 60% of a skater's score, Peggy should go into her free-skating routine with a comfortable lead; if not, she could run into trouble from Japan's Kumiko Okawa, 22, a breathtaking free skater. At Grenoble, Peggy will probably be joined on the winners' platform by Austria's two-time men's world champion, Emmerich Danzer, and the defending Olympic pairs champs, Ludmilla Belousova and Oleg Protopopov of Russia.

sbHOCKEY. The Americans are big; the Canadians are brutal. The Russians are both. They also have won five world amateur titles in a row. At last year's championships in Vienna, they out-scored all opponents 58-9. Anything but a Russian victory at Grenoble will be a major upset.

sbCROSS-COUNTRY SKIING. Skiing, as a mode of cross-country transportation, dates back at least 4,000 years, and this may be the one sport in which today's Olympians are not clearly superior to their predecessors. In 1884, for example, one Apmut Ahrman arrived late from a wolf hunt for the start of a 137-mile race in Sweden, spotted his competitors a twelve-mile lead and wound up second by only eleven minutes. Ahrman then skied twelve miles home, to discover that a bear had broken into his stable. He chased the bear for 30 miles, killed it, and carted the meat and skin home in two trips--covering, in all, 370-odd miles on skis in a week. Competitors at Grenoble will have things easier, or at least shorter: the longest race is a mere 50 kilometers (31 1/4 miles). Russian women are expected to sweep the ladies' races as they did at the 1964 Olympics. Among the men, the favorite is Norway's sinewy Gjermund Eggen, winner of three gold medals at the 1966 world championships, but he will be pressed hard by his own teammates and a strong Swedish squad.

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