Gold Rush at Lake Placid

For the 13th Winter Olympics, the U.S. has dazzling athletes, high hopes

Amid the crumbling columns and pediments in the ancient city of Olympia, a shaft of sunlight glanced off a reflector one day last week and set fire to a slender torch. Next week, after a 5,000-mile flight from the Peloponnesian Peninsula to Athens to the U.S., and a 780-mile relay run from the Virginia Tidewater to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, the Olympic flame will ignite a huge torch on a pedestal at the Lake Placid High School. With that, the 13th Olympic Winter Games "will be officially under way. In 1932, tiny Lake Placid (pop. 3,300) played host to the first Olympic Games ever held on American soil. Nearly five decades later, the same village, now even smaller (pop. 2,997), is bracing for what could prove to be, if events take the darkest of turns, the final true Olympics. The sad truth is that the political pressures that have always borne so heavily on the Olympic Games today threaten to open an irreparable schism in world sport (see ESSAY).

Whatever the fate of this summer's Moscow Games, the winter competition seems secure. All told, 37 countries will send athletes to the Games: the downhill demons and slalom masters from Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and France; the hockey magicians from the Soviet Union, Canada, Czechoslovakia and Sweden; the spectacular speed skaters from East Germany and the U.S.S.R.; high-flying figure skaters from Britain and Russia; the ski jumpers from any country with athletes crazy and courageous enough to think they can hurtle off a 257-ft. tower and land without breaking every bone in their bodies. And in most of the major events, for the first time ever, there will be Americans with at least a well-founded dream of winning Olympic medals --bronze, silver and, yes, gold.

The athletes will be competing in a winter playground that has been groomed with the help of $178 million in federal, state and local funds. The money went to build better roads, dormitories, communication systems and, not just incidentally, ski slopes, bobsled runs and skating rinks. Because of the tragedy at Munich in 1972, where eleven Israeli competitors and coaches died in the wake of an attack by Palestinian terrorists, security has been a paramount consideration. That meant building an Olympic Village seven miles from Lake Placid, accessible to vehicles only via a narrow forest road and surrounded by double chain-link fences 12 ft. high that send out an alarm at the slightest touch. With its narrow-windowed dormitories, the village bears an unfortunate resemblance to a prison; it will, indeed, become a minimum-security federal pen after the Games.

For all the construction, and despite the fact that some 50,000 people are expected to swarm into Lake Placid during every day of competition, the 1980 Games involved no large-scale dislocation of the town's citizens, as happened in Montreal during the 1976 Summer Games. To be sure, a certain amount of displacement has occurred. A young clerk for the Lake Placid Organizing Committee was bumped from her $300-a-month apartment so that the landlord could rent it during February to wealthy snow bunnies for $4,000. Another story making the rounds has houses being purchased for $75,000 and rented for half that figure for the 13-day duration of the Games.

The cost of gold has skyrocketed too, but Tiffany, the New York jeweler commissioned to design and strike medals for the Games, agreed to supply them at 1978 prices. The designers hit a snag, however, when they submitted their sketches: the Lake Placid Organizing Committee responded with a veto. The reason: the medals' obverse side showed the rolling Adirondack Mountains, but not the peak where one of the committee members owned a farm. The medals were redesigned and the mountains were shifted. The medal winners of 1980 will always have a view of one committeeman's homesite.

To win those medals, the athletes must meet, in all-out competition against the world's best, the Olympic challenge: higher, swifter, farther.

U.S. athletes have long excelled during the Summer Games, especially in track and swimming events. But in a nation where winter sports are an expensive leisure activity, not a passion or a way of life as they are in Eastern and Western Europe, Olympic medals have always proved elusive or costly or both.

The families of figure skaters often find the $20,000-a-year cost of renting rinks and hiring coaches a crushing expense. From their mid-teens, skiers and speed skaters live nearly half of each year as expatriates, training and racing in Europe because facilities or competitors are not up to par in the U.S. Unheralded by their countrymen, they are idolized abroad, where youngsters collect their pictures on bubble-gum cards and the monied denizens of Alpine resorts ask for their autographs. A U.S. sports fan who can routinely tick off the starting outfield of the Kansas City Royals would be hard pressed to recognize America's heavy hitters at the Winter Olympics. Yet despite these drawbacks, a new generation of talented and dedicated U.S. athletes has emerged to perform to Olympic standards in the demanding and treacherous Winter Games.

ERIC AND BETH HEIDEN. In the final weeks before the Olympics, the U.S. Speed Skating Team established a training camp in Davos, Switzerland. There, on one of the world's fastest speed-skating rinks, they churned through one exhausting workout after another, honing the technique and building the stamina required for what may be the most physically demanding of all sports. Few living things can travel a mile faster than the men and women who, hunched over their skates like broken-backed dolls, swoop around an oval of ice at more than 30 m.p.h. Each stroke is a study in precision, an intricately choreographed transfer of power from body to blade.

At Davos, the Heidens drew knowing and admiring crowds. With good reason: in the long history of their sport, only Eric has been deemed capable of winning the gold in all five men's events, ranging from the lightning-fast 500-meter sprint, through the middle distances of 1,000 and 1,500 meters and on to the grueling 5,000-and 10,000-meter endurance races. His younger sister Beth is favored in two of the four women's events. Said a Dutch father, his hand resting lightly on his son's head to guide the boy's eyes toward the Davos rink: "I tell my son, 'Look at them. Look at the Heidens, so you can say you have seen the best.' "

At 21, Eric Heiden is the first man ever to win both the World Sprints and

All-Around titles in the same year--and he has done it three straight times. He holds world records in two distances (1,000 meters and 1,500 meters). In a sport where victory is usually measured in hundredths of. seconds, Heiden outstrips human comparison: he is Secretariat, stronger, faster, possessed of a greater racing heart than has ever been known. "Sometimes when I'm racing and I'm really stroking strong, I can feel the ice breaking away beneath me," he says. "It is a wonderful feeling, because it means that I have reached the limit, the ice can't hold me any more."

He is a straightforward young man, not much given to such mysticism about his sport because he knows, perhaps better than anyone else (with the possible exception of his sister), the price that must be paid for those moments. "The secret to the Heidens is simple," says Team Manager Bill Cushman. "They have talent and they just work harder than anybody else."

Their regime would drive a marathoner to retirement. During the summer, they work out twice daily, running (up to ten miles), bike riding ("Oh, 100 miles some days, other days just 45"), weight training and, finally, going through the exercises to strengthen specific muscles for speed skating: several miles of duck-walks with weights on their shoulders, endless circling to strengthen the left, or inside leg for turns. When fall comes to their Madison, Wis., home, they put on skates and start training in earnest. "Sometimes I want to quit," Eric says. "But then I look at Beth, and she's digging in and it inspires me. I keep going."

So does she. Says Beth, 15 months younger than Eric: "I played with my brother and his friends from the day I could stand up and run after them. It helped to have a wild older brother, because then people didn't think I was so strange when I came along. But my mother told me that the first word I learned to say was 'Mine!' Not 'Mama' or 'Dada,' but 'Mine,' because Eric was always trying to take my things away."

Beth's drive is as palpable as her brother's. Both seem to have inherited a desire to excel. The Heidens' father Jack, 45, is an orthopedic surgeon who was Big 10 fencing champion as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Last year he finished second in the national senior cycling time trials championships. Their mother is the city seniors tennis champion in Madison, and her father Art Thomsen is a former hockey coach at the University of Wisconsin. The young Heidens began skating on the lake behind their house when they were two years old.

When Eric was nine and Beth eight, their parents enrolled them in the Madison Figure Skating Club, but that proved too tame. Says Beth: "Everybody was twirling around and all we wanted to do was go fast and race around the rink. We weren't exactly the favorite kids in the Madison Figure Skating Club."

They were, however, the favorite kids in the local speed-skating club. By the time Eric was 17 and Beth 16, they had made the Olympic squad for the 1976 Innsbruck Games. They placed well below their more seasoned competitors, but by 1977, they were world beaters. When Beth won the World Championship in 1979, she became only the second skater to win all four women's races (the 500, 1,000, 1,500 and 3,000 meters). At that point Eric, though already a three-time World Champion, had never managed to win all his events. Recalls Beth: "I said to myself, 'Hey, even my brother hasn't done this.' " Her distinction lasted a week. Eric went out and won all four of the men's races at the World Championships in Oslo. Says Beth: "You've got to respect a brother like that. He's inspiring."

TAI BABILONIA AND RANDY GARDNER.

They finish each other's sentences. Randy takes the noun, Tai handles the verb, and, as often as not, the object comes simultaneously. They laugh at the same things, share many of the same friends, even agree on passing up lucrative professional careers to attend college. Most important, they skate as one, their blades stroking in purest harmony, legs extended perfectly parallel. Nor is the mirror image effect confined to their obvious moves. They continue it through the most delicate gestures; heads tilted at precisely the same angle, fingers matched and mated as if held by a glove. "It comes from time, from growing up together," says Randy Gardner. "A pair doesn't achieve that harmony until after four or five years of skating together. We keep working with each other and it just keeps growing."

After ten years together, Tai, 19, and Randy, 21, have grown into the most technically sound, artistically refined figure skating pair in U.S. history. Also the most successful. In 1979 they became the first U.S. pair to win the World Figure Skating Championship since 1950, when the champions were Karol and Peter Kennedy. When they take the ice on Feb. 15 and 17 at the Olympic Ice Arena before a crowd of some 8,500, they will be co-favorites (along with Soviet Warhorse Pair Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev) to win a gold medal. It would be the first U.S. gold in the pairs in the 56-year history of the Winter Games.

For all the balletic grace of their performances, Babilonia and Gardner are athletes first, masters of physical disciplines as demanding as almost any in sport. Tai's ability to leap high enough and remain airborne long enough to complete whirling triple turns would be the envy of any N.B.A. star. Randy is only 5 ft. 9 in. and 142 Ibs., but there is tremendous strength and stamina coiled within that seemingly slight frame. He lifts Tai (5 ft. 5 in., 113 lbs.) as easily as others pick up their skates. In stamina tests conducted last summer at Squaw Valley, Calif., Randy came out the winner against a marathon runner.

Randy began skating at age six, Tai at age eight. Her first exposure to the sport came when a friend's birthday party included a trip to a rink in Burbank, Calif. "After that, I begged my mother for lessons," she says. They did not come cheap: her father, a Los Angeles police detective, has held as many as five part-time jobs at once to offset the financial burden. To cut back on expenses, Tai used a pair of hand-me-down skates from one of Dean Martin's daughters. At nine she was picked to skate with Randy in a local ice show because she was the only girl smaller than he. The serendipitous meeting was just the beginning.

For years, the two rose at 4:30 a.m. to take advantage of the only time when the rink would be free of cavorting kids and sedate leisure skaters. During those predawn hours, Coach John Nicks, a onetime world champion at pairs figure skating, would drill the two relentlessly. Tai, whose serene beauty masks a fierce competitiveness but reflects an exquisite racial mix (American Indian, black, Filipino, Chinese and German), paid for failed jumps with a missing tooth, a broken tailbone and a fractured arm.

World-class figure skating is not only a fiercely competitive but also an intensely political realm, in which judging often breaks down along East-West, oldtimer-newcomer lines. If Tai and Randy have suffered from misjudgments in the past, they may benefit from them at Lake Placid. When the couple won the 1979 world title, defending champions Rodnina, 30, and Zaitsev, 27, winners of six world titles and one Olympic gold medal, were in temporary retirement awaiting the birth of their baby. Tai and Randy's victory was thus tainted by the absence of truly commanding competition. But by now their fluid style has won converts among international judges.

The skate-off between the two powerful if uninspired Soviets and the expressive but less physical young Americans could be the most dramatic confrontation of the entire Games. As reigning champions, Randy and Tai must be beaten, not merely battled to a draw. Says Randy: "We're setting the pace now. We have to skate well, but to beat us, they'll have to risk our style."

LINDA FRATIANNE. At 14, she whisked onto the ice for the 1975 National Championships and reeled off the first series of successful triple jumps ever done in competition by a woman skater. Dorothy Hamill, the reigning queen who would soon win the Olympic gold medal, leaned down from her perch on the victory stand and, as the applause washed over them, told Fratianne, "Listen, kid. Next year this is going to be all yours."

Next year, it was. She made the Olympic team, and though 15 and frightened of the pressure and the presence of machine-gun-toting guards, she placed a respectable eighth at Innsbruck. She won the World Championship in 1977, a tiny (5 ft. 1 in., 97 lbs.) wisp of a girl who could whip through spectacular leaps and spins in the blink of an eye. Yet her skating never flowed with the liquid style of Peggy Fleming's; it flared in a series of brief, athletic explosions. Before one could count the spins, she was gone, halfway across the ice and midway through another trick. She never imparted the joy of Janet Lynn or pushed her personality to the rafter seats as Hamill had done. She simply whipped the bejabbers out of gravity and seemed to make it all look easy.

For judges, and the very vocal figure-skating crowds, what had been exciting in a young princess was disquieting and vaguely mystifying in an ice queen. In

1978 Fratianne lost her title to East Germany's Anett Poetzsch, 19. In 1979 Linda regained the title, having stretched her style and slowed it somewhat in an effort to infuse her routines with the grace that had been lacking. She got a new hairdo, a nose job to repair the deviated septum that impaired her breathing, and checked in with Pat Collins, the Hip Hypnotist of Sunset Boulevard, to learn "positive reinforcement self-hypnosis." She gets up at 6:30 a.m. six days a week to travel to a rink near her Northridge, Calif., home for practice. She takes a break for a two-hour nap at midday, then practices until 6 p.m. Twice a week she works out in a gym, and once weekly she attends ballet class.

She will never be a classically elegant skater: her body is too small for the sculptured reach that accents the intricacies of the tricks she performs. But she will always be lightning fast and agile. Says she of what will be her last Olympic meeting with Poetzsch: "I'm glad it's in the States. I'll feel more comfortable. But it's hard going in as the favorite. The underdog has it easier, nothing to lose and a lot to gain. If I can just realize that the world doesn't end if I have a silver..."

CHARLIE TICKNER. If Tai, Randy and Linda face tough times, consider Charlie Tickner's task. The current European champion among men's figure skaters is Great Britain's Robin Cousins, a dramatic, innovative stylist in the mold of his countryman John Curry, the 1976 gold medalist at Innsbruck. The Soviet Union's

1979 World Champion Vladimir Kovalev, like Countryman Zaitsev, is fast, strong and sure, if a bit wooden. East Germany's Jan Hoffmann is a methodical craftsman, usually not daring enough to take chances but steady enough to walk over those who risk and fall short. Tickner, 26, whose turn in the round-robin of world champions came in 1978, is like a sophisticated Broadway chorus dancer who can give you the big moves but takes particular delight in demonstrating the fun and precision of a few simple tap steps.

Tickner came to serious skating at an age when most coaches felt he was too old to reach world-class standards: during his freshman year in college. He had to go back to work on his compulsory figures, those painstaking loops and turns that judges squat to scrutinize like the Rosetta stone. He has never caught up with the class; school figures remain his weakest point. But naysayers who insist that the double lutzes and triple salchows are jumps that have to be grooved into muscle memory before a boy is old enough to shave have been proved wrong: a typical Tickner free-skating program contains just as many crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics as any on the skating scene.

HOCKEY. For Lake Placid, the U.S. Olympic Hockey Association decided to get its act together and take it on the road. Last summer a 26-man team was culled from the country's hockey hotbeds (16 from Minnesota, six from Massachusetts, two each from Michigan and Wisconsin), then sent off on a grueling, 61 -game schedule (the National Hockey League regular season schedule is only 80 games). Coach Herb Brooks' team is a long shot, especially in the face of a superb Soviet squad, for the first hockey gold medal since the 1960 team pulled its stunning upset in the Squaw Valley Games (see box page 83). But the team could surprise everyone with its hybrid style, matching traditional North American aggressiveness with European finesse. ("Sophisticated pond hockey," Brooks calls it.) Against a variety of college, N.H.L. and foreign national teams, the Americans have so far won 41 games, tied three and lost just 15.

The U.S. has achieved most of its glory during past Winter Games on the ice. Df the 24 gold medals awarded to singles figure skaters in the twelve Olympic Winter Games, eight have been won by Americans. From Dick Button to Dorothy Hamill, American skaters have not only dominated, they have defined the standards of the sport. The entire U.S. figure-skating team was killed in a plane crash in Belgium in 1961, yet the program was strong enough to produce a gold medalist, Peggy Fleming, by 1968.

The speed skaters have done even better, collecting 32 of the 94 medals won by Americans in all the Winter Olympics. They have also won more than one-third of all American gold medals--eleven of 30.

Yet with something like 14 million skiers in the U.S., Americans have won just 13 medals, four of them golds, out of a possible 135 in the Olympic downhill, slalom and giant slalom and just one of 168 in cross-country events. No American man has ever won a gold medal in skiing. In the downhill and giant slalom, no American man has ever won a medal of any kind.

The poor performance in skiing is one of the biggest mysteries--and greatest disappointments--in American sport. Lack of support was a valid reason in the early '60s, when the American team would fly to Europe on one-way tickets, ski the winter circuit, then scrounge airfare home. Now the U.S. Ski Team operates on an annual budget of $2.2 million (compared with $275,000 for the U.S. Speed Skating Team); American skiers have access to equipment and technicians as good as any n the world. Says Team Director Bill

Marolt: "We have no excuses any more. What we don't have are enough good athletes who are willing to do the hard work it takes to become a champion. But we've got a few, and they're the match of any skiers in the world." The best of the few will attempt to reverse American fortunes at Lake Placid.

PHIL MAHRE. His right ankle is held together by a metal plate and four screws, yet he still hustles down mountains at speeds faster than a parachutist in free fall. He is, quite simply, the best American man ever to put on skis in international competition. Since the launching in 1967 of the World Cup circuit--a four-month-long series of 15 meets--U.S. men have won only 15 races. Mahre, 22, has won eight of them, and his twin brother Steve has won one. Last year Phil was second in the overall World Cup standings when he went to Lake Placid for a meet. While he was pounding down the hill in the slalom, the tip of his right ski caught one of the gates, and he went down, his ankle shattered. His skiing season was over. Unable to compete in the final three events, he finished third in the World Cup.

Three of the seven screws installed to repair the ankle have been removed, but the rest conduct cold, and he must use a heated boot. Nonetheless, he is now skiing as well as ever. Says Marolt: "Even I didn't think it was really, truly possible, but he's done it." Mahre fought back to peak form by the painful expedient of refusing to limp. "If you let yourself limp, it gets to be a habit. If you don't limp, then you won't favor your leg. So I just told myself that no matter how much it was killing me, I wouldn't give in."

The same tenacity makes him one of the toughest skiers on the mountain. He started skiing at two in the deep snow of the Cascade Mountains, where his parents ran a ski resort at White Pass, Wash. A gifted athlete, he has made himself into a downhill racer, even though the slalom and giant slalom are his natural events. In an age of specialization, he has become a genuine contender in all events. Can he win a gold at Lake Placid? Says Mahre: "So many things can be a factor. The snow, the weather, is it warm so that waxing is a factor, or cold and icy? Will you fall? Will someone else just have an incredible run? All I can do is run my race, run it the best I can, and we'll see after everybody gets to the bottom."

CINDY NELSON. She is 23 now, and it has been nearly a decade since she burst on the skiing scene. At 15, a native of Lutsen, Minn., she was the top U.S. woman downhiller, tuning up for the Sapporo Olympics with startling performances on the World Cup circuit. Then, less than a month before the Games opened, she took a dreadful fall on Switzerland's treacherous Grindelwald course and was laid up for months with a dislocated hip. She won the bronze in the '76 Olympics in the downhill. This is her last Olympics, and to win a gold she will have to beat out the likes of Switzerland's Marie-Theres Nadig. "I don't know how long I'll ski after Lake Placid," says Nelson, "but it won't be another four years. I've lived ten months of every year out of a suitcase since I was 15. I've got a home and a dog, and I'd like to do some cooking."

No one on the U.S. Ski Team has campaigned longer and harder than Cindy Nelson, and no one has experienced the disappointments of the American ski effort more keenly. During the early '70s, she recalls: "A skier was just told what to do, whether it was different from the training program that had been successful for you or not. Things are better today, or I wouldn't still be skiing. I think we can have great skiers hi this country now and really develop their potential to the fullest. Sometimes I look back and I wonder. If it had been like this when I was 17, I might have really been something."

BILL KOCH. Americans do not win crosscountry ski races. So when Bill Koch, a reclusive Vermonter from Putney (pop. 1,789), won the silver medal in the 30-km race at Innsbruck in 1976, the first U.S. medal ever in Nordic siding, nobody was there to notice. In fact, after the race was over, Koch had to go out again in his uniform and skis so that photographers could take his picture for the papers back home.

Since then, lots of people have noticed Bill Koch. Says Koch: "Suddenly there was pressure from all sides. Every tune I competed, people expected me to win. Becoming a top contender, I soon realized, had been easy compared to staying on top." Koch went into a slump that deepened as he was bombarded with questions. He has now completely revised his style, stretching out his once choppy stride and strengthening his arms in an attempt to generate more power on the uphills. And as the Olympics have drawn closer, he has emerged again, better than ever at age 24. Good enough? "Yeah," he says. "With a good race, I could bag it."

In the remaining events, the U.S., as usual, has only the faintest shot at any kind of medal. The 70-and 90-meter ski jumps often produce surprises, but the Soviets and Finns should go into both events as favorites. The same is true of the three biathlon events, which combine cross-country ski races and marksmanship contests. The luge (pronounced loozh), a kind of toboggan that careens down an ice track with one-or two-man teams, should be dominated by the East Germans.

The East Germans should win again in bobsledding, an event that might produce a drama of its own at Lake Placid. The star will not be a driver or brakeman, but the bobsled run itself. Since work was completed on the new refrigerated run at Lake Placid, bobsledders have come to know it as one of the sport's toughest, trickiest courses. One particular turn, the Zig-Zag, a high-banked 60DEG left turn for 165 ft., followed by an equally tight 170-ft. right turn, is deemed the most technically difficult in the world. More than 50 bobsled teams have crashed on the turn this whiter. When the run was opened in December for practice by U.S. and foreign teams, as many as four sleds a day were coming a cropper at Zig-Zag.

Ironically, the U.S. put on its finest performance in Winter Olympic Games in 1932--at Lake Placid. That year Americans carried away four gold medals in speed skating and two in bobsledding, as well as four silvers and two bronzes in other events. This year, for the first tune in the history of the Games, the U.S. has strong contenders in most sports, and in one, speed skating, a brother and sister alone who could win more gold medals than U.S. athletes have ever managed to collect in a single Winter Games. With a bit of luck, the town that first introduced whiter sports to the U.S. could become the site of America's greatest Winter Olympic showing.

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