Olympics: The Rush of Winning

Speed skating and cross-country skiing are faint stars in the firmament of U.S. sports. The first can claim no more than 3,000 competitors in the entire nation and only one full-size training rink. The second holds a national championship meet so obscure that last year a total of twelve fans watched the finish of one race.

Now all that may change. As the Winter Olympics got under way in Inns bruck last week, competitors from these two obscure sports put America well up in the medal rankings with performances that were the talk of the Tyrol.

In a three-day tour de force of stamina and strength, Midwesterner Sheila Young, 25, collected three medals--gold, silver and bronze--in speed skating. The total was the most ever won by an American in a Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, in the wooded high country above Innsbruck, Vermont Farm Boy Bill Koch, 20, stunned the European cross-country establishment by finishing second in the 30-km. marathon.

It was the first Nordic skiing medal in history for the U.S.

The games began with the familiar splendid pageantry: athletes in the uniforms of 37 nations marched past the box occupied by Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschlager. Overhead, helicopters unfurled the Austrian, Olympic and Tyrolean flags. A three-gun howitzer salute preceded the lighting of the Olympic flame, symbol of the history and fellowship of the quadrennial games.

The Austrians did not have to wait long for their first payoff for playing host to the show. On the opening morning of competition, Native Son Franz Klammer, 22, flew down the downhill course, approaching 90 m.p.h. at one point, to win the gold medal. It was a rough, reckless run. Said Klammer, "I thought I was going to crash all the way."

It was a fast start too for the Russian fans, who turned out in strength at every event with red flags and bushy fur hats. Their ace speed skater Tatiana Averina won a gold in the 1,000-meter race to go along with two bronze medals in the 500 and 1,500. Galina Stepanskaya, 27, a last-minute addition to the Soviet speed skating team, took the 1,500-meter race. The favored figure-skating duo, Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev, though performing slightly off their usually impeccable form, easily won the gold medal. Also, the juggernaut Russian hockey team beat but did not embarrass a youthful American squad 6-2.

The East Germans also did well. On Saturday, they won six out of nine possible medals in three different events, including first places in the men's and women's single luge and the 70-meter ski jump.

No Socks. The biggest winner of the week, though, was Sheila Young, a compact (5 ft. 4 in., 130 lbs.), strong-legged athlete with an intense competitive fire.

Bolting off the starting line like a jack rabbit in each of her races--1,500 (silver), 500 (gold) and 1,000 (bronze) meters--she drove through the all-important turns in near perfect form. "It feels weird to win a gold medal," declared Sheila, who had a bad cold and a hacking cough. "I felt this rush through my whole body when I knew I had won."

Daughter of a traffic-department worker at the Budd Co. in Detroit, Sheila has been speed skating since she was twelve.

She skates without socks "for better rapport" with her blades. She was edged out of a second silver in the 1,000 by fellow American Leah Poulos.

If Sheila was the first big winner in the games, Bill Koch was the most surprising. Competing in only his third 30-km. race (he is a 15-km. specialist), Koch was considered no match for a pack of endurance racers from Scandinavia and Russia. As he swallowed an energizing mixture of Coke syrup, glucose, minerals and salt at the course's first checkpoint, he was leading Finland's favored Juha Mieto by 10 sec.

He knew then that he could get a medal. Repressing the pain--"Every muscle aches," he says--and breathing "like a freight train," Koch pounded his poles into the snow like a farmer churning butter. He covered the hilly, torturous course in 1.30:57, only 28 sec. slower than Russian Winner Sergei Saveliev.

Koch's victory was the culmination of a youth movement in the U.S. cross-country program begun by Coach Marty Hall two years ago, and it followed some 5,000 miles of practice skiing, running and hiking for Koch this year. His career began when he was three. His father strapped him to an old pair of oak skis and pointed him down a gentle hill on the family maple-syrup farm in Guilford, Vt. Three years later, he switched to Nordic skiing and jumping and later got to grade school by skiing 10 km. through the woods. "It's a form of self-expression," he says. "It feels so good to train and be out there in the woods that if someone tried to stop me, I'd go bananas."

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