Winter Wonderland

Fleets of street-vacuuming machines have been working around the clock. At one ceremony, 700 cleaning ladies solemnly pledged to "do our best to carry out our internationally important duty." At a Shinto shrine, taxi company officials offered prayers "to keep our drivers from getting involved in accidents." At the Mitsukoshi department store, each day has begun with mass English lessons piped over the public address system. And at the Chitose Airport, Lieut. Colonel Toshio Tojo, son of the notorious World War II Prime Minister, has 200 soldiers keeping the runways free of snow. The scene is Sapporo, Japan, and the drama is the 1972 Winter Olympics. After six years and $688 million worth of preparation, the Sapporo games will be opened this week by Emperor Hirohito in what has been billed as the "World's Greatest Metropolis for Winter Sports."

It just may be, Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, is no quaint village tucked away in the mountains. Larger than Boston, it is a teeming industrial city (pop. 1,030,000) ringed by ice-blue lakes and volcanic mountains. For the 35 Olympic events, the Japanese have built 14 ultramodern facilities, none more than an hour's drive from the city, at a cost of $31 million, the largest expenditure ever for the Winter Games. From the breathtaking downhill course carved in the side of Mount Eniwa to the giant 50,000-seat Makomanai Speed-Skating Rink, Sapporo is a wintersports wonderland. After one launching off the steeply sculpted ski jump on Mount Okura, one jumper exclaimed: "You feel as though you're going to fly right over the city!"

Fried Squid. Accommodations at the Olympic Village are more down to earth. Destined to be a public housing complex after the games, the rooms were built to Japanese specifications with 7-ft. ceilings that many Western athletes find a trifle "repressive." Save for that, the Japanese hosts have anticipated every need right down to the installation of toilets equipped with heaters to prevent the water from freezing. The dining halls serve richly varied menus with items ranging from hamburgers and milkshakes to such local delicacies as hairy crab and fried squid. The village's sauna features an "enzyme ion bath" in which the athletes bury themselves in a pile of fermenting cedar sawdust. Every aspect of the games, in fact, from the new $119 million subway system that rolls on noiseless rubber tires to the crack team of abacus scorekeepers who back up the computers, was arranged with super-efficiency--sometimes to a fault. For the opening ceremonies, for example, officials have decided to ground the traditional flight of uncaged pigeons. The reason: the rites will be held in the speed skating arena and "pigeons might damage the glasslike surface."

Nobody is grounded on Sapporo's Susukino Street, a neon strip of honky-tonk bars and nightclubs. To accommodate the estimated 1,000,000 visitors to the games, the corps of bar hostesses in kimonos and miniskirts has been swelled to more than 5,000 by imports from Tokyo. For a price, some are available for afterhours visits to the city's 450 tsure-komi-yado (take-girl-in hotels), where room rates are quoted by the hour. Other popular sports are the Genji Turkish Bath, where the New York Times breathlessly reported that "girl attendants cover their nude bodies with soapy foam to serve as human washrags," and the Green Building, a kind of high-rise hangover haven with no fewer than 187 bars under one roof.

The action on the slopes promises to be just as wide-open. Russia is expected to excel in hockey, cross-country skiing and the biathlon (a combined skiing and rifle-shooting event), Italy in bobsledding and West Germany in the luge (a type of sled race), but the men's glamour skiing events--downhill, slalom and giant slalom --are a tossup. With such brilliant racers as Switzerland's Bernhard Russi, Italy's Gustavo Thoeni and France's Jean-Noel Augert at the peak of their powers, it is highly unlikely that anyone will win all three events as France's Jean-Claude Killy did in the 1968 games. In the women's division, though, the 18-year-old Austrian whiz, Annemarie Proell, has a good chance of becoming the first woman skier to take the three gold medals.

The U.S. invaded Sapporo with a 131-member team, the largest among the 35 competing countries. Tyler Palmer, who finished third in the World Cup slalom last winter, could swivel his way right to the top. In women's skiing, the flying Cochran sisters, Marilyn and Barbara, figure to cop at least one medal. In figure-skating, Janet Lynn and Julie Lynn Holmes are strong contenders while John Mischa Petkevich, the leaping dervish from Harvard, is capable of an upset. In the pairs the young California team of Ken Shelley and Jojo Starbuck rate as third-place finishers at the very least. When it comes to surefire bets, though, the hottest thing on ice is 16-year-old Speed Skater Anne Henning, the world record holder at 500 meters. Says her coach: "They may as well carve Annie's name on the gold medal right now."

While the ultimate results of Winter Olympics are as unpredictable as the doka yuki--super blizzards that shriek in from Siberia--the one certain winner in the 1972 games is Sapporo itself. "In all the heady process of reshaping our city for the games," Sapporo Mayor Takeshi Itagaki said last week, "we've gained well over ten years in urban renewal."

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