Only the Lake Was Placid
Daring, drama and despair as the Olympics get off to a rousing start
Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty states that no one can predict the exact behavior of even a single atomic particle. Heisenberg might have appreciated the 1980 Winter Olympics. The Lake Placid Games have developed into a sort of festival of life's unpredictability. No one knows whether they will be the last Olympics of the modern era; international politics will settle that. A similar uncertainty hung like fog over the frozen spectators; none of them knew whether they would ever find a bus to carry them away from a darkening mountain to warmth again. Lake Placid's logistics tended toward the existential.
A number of athletes were also discovering something about life's talent for surprise. Canada's Ken Read, a favorite to win the most important ski race in the world, the Olympic men's downhill, pitched himself out of the starting gate and 15 seconds into his run, felt the safety binding on his left ski let go. Read parted with the ski and the potential gold he had spent years training for. The men's downhill winner was just as unpredictable: Austria's Leonhard Stock, the 21-year-old Tyrol farmer's son who was not even supposed to be a starter on the downhill team. The women's downhill, however, followed form. The favorite was Austria's Anne-marie Moser-Proell, 26, who had captured the World Cup six times but had never taken an Olympic event. She attacked Whiteface Mountain fiercely, won easily and was mobbed by jubilant members of her ski club from back home in Kleinarl, who trampled down fences to get to her.
The American pursuit of gold went haltingly at first. Although Pete Patterson finished an unexpected fifth in the downhill, Karl Anderson tumbled spectacularly just out of the gate, and Phil Mahre, considered the best U.S. skier, managed only a 14th. Bill Koch, 24, who surprised the world with a silver medal in the 30-km cross-country four years ago at Innsbruck, surprised it again. With 8 km to go, Koch found himself back in 23rd position and, rather than finish exhausted, dropped out and skied off through the forest. He hoped to save energy for the 15-km event, but he ended up 16th as, in an astonishing finish, Sweden's Thomas Wassberg edged Finland's Juha Mieto by one-hundredth of a second.
In the 1,500-meter race, Speed Skater Beth Heiden, 20, had reason for hope as she flashed across the finish line in 2:13.10. She had just broken the Olympic record by 3.48 sec. The trouble: 17 other skaters also were to break the record. Beth ended up in seventh place as Annie Borchink, 28, a sturdy Dutch nursing student, glided off with the gold in a time of 2:10.95. But no one was hit by Heisenberg's Principle harder than the American pairs figure-skating team of Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia. The Olympics' most touching moment was the sight of the brilliant Gardner sprawling on the ice, victim of a muscle pull that ended the golden hopes of Randy and Tai.
Still, there were sparkling moments for the U.S. Eric Heiden, 21, Beth's big brother and the finest speed skater in the world, won the 500-meter race by beating the Soviets' Yevgeny Kulikov and then won again in the 5,000-meter. What was more, the U.S. hockey team coalesced into a scrappily aggressive surprise. Having tied the powerful Swedes, 2-2, they gave a 7-3 beating to the seasoned Czechs, who were rated No. 2 in the tournament behind only the incredible Soviets. On Saturday, the Americans defeated the Norwegians 5-1.
As expected, the Soviet Union was winning the most early medals, showing strength in cross-country skiing and speed skating, two of its traditional sports. It was the Soviets who won the first gold medal of the Games when Nikolai Zimyatov finished first in the 30-km cross-country. Right behind him was Teammate Vasily Rochev to take the silver.
The setting for the drama of the Games is an old and suitable theater for winter sports. The third Winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid in 1932, and although the village has acquired some modern hotels since then, it remains a remote little world of its own, with one traffic light at the end of curving, two-lane approach roads. The local Olympic Organizing Committee operated under the slogan, vaguely truculent in its modesty: AN OLYMPICS IN PERSPECTIVE. Lake Placid, with the help of local, state and federal funds, spent $178 million fixing itself up for the winter carnival. The results revealed both the advantages and disadvantages of inviting the world to a small village, but the organizers succeeded in creating an event that was curiously attractive and well suited to the distinctly north-country American flavor of the setting.
Lake Placid (pop. 2,700) has none of the international glamour of Chamonix or Saint Moritz, no air of chic money at winter play. The village lies in the heart of a 6 million-acre state park amid the worn and camel-backed Adirondacks that showed gray-brown all through the Northeast's snowless winter. On cue last week, they did get sprinkled with white, like a moderate dose of talcum powder. Without snow all season, the desperate organizers spent three weeks covering the trails with a thick base of artificial snow that has provided remarkably fast times.
But all the changes and improvisations were not for the better. Locals have been complaining for years about the corruption of contractors and the greed of other residents out to profiteer on the Games. Some expensive skiwear outfits moved into temporary shops on Main Street, near such no-nonsense bars as Jimmy's and the Arena Grill. Food prices soared: $1 for a cup of coffee, $2 for a hot dog. Tickets for the Olympic events have been priced at an undemocratic $11.20 to $67.20 per person, and distribution was a chaotic mess. But as the early events failed to draw the expected crowds, scalpers were forced to take losses. Hockey tickets costing $28 were going for half that.
Private cars were banned within a 15-mile radius of Lake Placid, and an elaborate bus system was devised to shuttle some 25,000 spectators per day to outlying parking areas. It did not work. Hundreds were stranded for hours in the subfreezing cold, miles from events, motels or parking lots. To help out where needed, the committee set up a cadre of volunteers from the surrounding area. Garbed in bright blue snowsuits with yellow trim, they did their earnest best to make visitors feel welcome. The state police took their responsibilities so seriously that they hauled away an illegally parked car belonging to Art Devlin, vice president of the Lake Placid Organizing Committee, and another belonging to the FBI. Indeed, the citizens sometimes out-organized themselves. The mother of American Speed Skater Leah Poulos Mueller, who has sharpened her daughter's skates through 20 years of competition and two earlier Olympics, found herself banned from facilities at the rink, but a Lake Placid teenager let out of school for the grand holiday could wander in and stare at the stars.
Security, understandably, remained a serious concern. The Village and the surrounding areas of competition bristled with small arms--not the ubiquitous submachine guns manned by guards that were so startling at Innsbruck four years ago (a legacy of the massacre of Israelis in Munich in 1972) but an immense arsenal of handguns. Even the security men working for the state's environmental-conservation department office carried pistols.
But Lake Placid has no sinister air about it, nor could it have; it is not that kind of place. The opening ceremonies were small-town and goodhearted, vaguely resembling a high school football halftime show with unlikely overreachings in the direction of Super Bowl kitsch. A crowd of 22,000--slightly less than capacity, because some ticket holders were stranded without transportation--gathered in the stands at the old Lake Placid horse-show grounds to meet the athletes. The Canadians, the eighth team to march into the stadium behind their colors, brought a deep roar of thanks and a standing ovation from Americans remembering the Canadian diplomats who smuggled six U.S. hostages out of Tehran last month. The Soviets were received tepidly but politely; when a man in the stands shouted "Afghanistan, Bananistan, get your ass out of Kabul!," he was quickly shushed by fellow spectators.
Vice President Walter Mondale proclaimed the Games open, and a jogging psychiatrist from Tucson lit the Olympic flame. Like a county fair run mildly amuck, the ceremonies then erupted with a swarm of released doves and helium-filled balloons, followed by the gentle flyby of two dozen immense hot-air balloons. It was fun, and the display left the crowd in an ebullient and expectant mood. As the spectators filed out, members of the American ski team were climbing onto one of the buses that had brought them from the Olympic Village. "Right on!" someone in the crowd cheered at the team. The American kids grinned back.
The Austrian ski team was considerably grimmer than the Americans, and for a good but unusual reason: it had too much talent. In fact, so strong were the Austrians that Franz Klammer did not even make the team. In 1976, Klammer's run in Innsbruck had instantly become a classic of sport--a headlong, fanatical plunge of almost mystical recklessness and desire. But the following year, Klammer's younger brother Klaus, also a racer, fell so badly that he will probably be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. After that, some critical edge of aggressiveness departed from Franz Klammer's racing style, and he was unable to make the Austrian team for the 1980 Olympics.
Originally, the Austrians had planned to race a four-man downhill team of Peter Wirnsberger, Werner Grissmann, Haiti Weirather and Josef Walcher, the 1978 downhill world champion. The team's alternate, Leonhard Stock, a long-nosed and wiry clerk from Austria's lovely Ziller Valley, had severely injured his shoulder in December while training for the World Cup, and went to Lake Placid as a substitute. But in practice runs at Whiteface, Stock clocked the best time for all racers on the first day, then repeated the feat the second day. Team officials met and settled upon a fratricidal little rite of natural selection. Stock and Weirather had made the team, but the three other racers would have to fight for the remaining two slots by making one more training run down Whiteface. Officials turned down a proposal by the five skiers that they all be made to qualify on the final day.
There is little camaraderie in ski racing, an individual's sport, and the three who were thus not assured of starting were grumblingly bitter. "We didn't want to do it that way," Grissmann said later. "We eventually agreed with the team leadership, but that was the day we lost confidence in it." Said Walcher: "I went along because I did not want to ruin the rest of my racing career, but I did not like it." In the end, Walcher was the odd man out, and Stock boomed down Whiteface on the last training run with a better time than any of his teammates.
Something about Whiteface, hulking and picturesque seemed to agree with Stock. The course that plunges down its side is not one of the ski circuit's most difficult runs. To accommodate lesser skiers, Olympic courses generally are not as demanding as most in World Cup events. With a length of 3,028 meters, the Whiteface downhill is a little too short and, in its final third, a little too flat to test the world's best skiers. But the run has its challenges, especially in the upper third, a steep (up to 55DEG grade), twisting course that runs through such expert skier's delights as "Hurricane Alley" and "Dynamite Corner." It is there the skier must show the technical virtuosity to survive the turns while building the momentum to swing down through the steep, screamingly fast (nearly 90 m.p.h.) middle section that eventually soothes to a long, final flat. "The secret," said Canada's Ken Read, "is to ski the top well. That's where the time is lost--and won."
Stock started ninth in a race that any one of four or five men could have taken. The time to beat was the 1:47.13 set by Italy's Herbert Plank. With four fast jolts of his ski poles, Stock propelled himself out of the starting gate and launched into the knifing and chittering switchback turns at the course's top. He shot through them with a wildly debonair angling, self-assured, and then, as the course got straighter and rougher, he bounced several times violently for an instant as if he had lost everything, his limbs doing minute, chaotic leaps--roughly the effect of a man being electrocuted while descending on a roller coaster. Once or twice his ski tips flipped up anarchically for a nanosecond in the direction of his nose. With his strong, gyroscopic instincts, Stock disciplined those little apocalypses and hurtled on, his body tucked into a bullet, a jaunty and maniacal capsule rocketing down the mountainside.
At the finish, Stock looked back up at the mountain and shook his head, again and again. He was not confident, although his time of 1:45.5 was more than a second faster than Italy's Plank. As the moments passed, more skiers descended; Stock kept his eyes fixed upon the electronic Scoreboard to watch their clockings. Switzerland's Peter Mueller, the top downhill man in the 1979 World Cup and one of the favorites at Lake Placid, came in more than a second slower than Stock; he would place fourth. The Austrian Wirnsberger finished at 1:46.12, good enough for the silver. Canada's Steve Podborski clocked in at 1:46.62, fast enough for the bronze. As racer after racer failed to break Stock's time, a small group of Austrian spectators outside the finish area began to sing Immer Wieder Austria (Again and Again Austria). When he had finally won, the Austrian team officials lifted Stock upon their shoulders, and he held his ski poles high in grinning triumph.
Back home in the village of Finkenberg (pop. 1,200), Stock's family had not laid in any champagne because they thought it would bring their racer bad luck. But Wilhelm Haag, the mayor and principal of the primary school, had thoughtfully procured a supply of fireworks; liquor was found, and the celebration went on and on.
After his victory, Stock insisted that the prerace bloodletting had not disturbed him. Said he amiably: "I am a big fighter. I have been fighting since I was a kid. I had to fight to come back from my injury. I had to fight to get into the race."
The gold medal that Stock takes back to the Ziller Valley will be accompanied by some crasser rewards. His triumph on Whiteface Mountain should be worth between $50,000 and $100,000 a year for endorsing skiing equipment--not bad for an amateur.
Compared with the downhill, with its extravagant relationship between gravity and a sort of exhibitionist will, speed skating seems tame to Americans, an exercise grindingly precise, an icy, athletic watchmaking. Only in recent weeks have Eric and Beth Heiden, the brother-and-sister speed skaters from Madison, Wis., begun to educate Americans about the beauties of their sport: the swoopingly powerful grace, the lean, economical rhythms of a skater swinging over very fast, gray-blue ice, bright, silver shavings leaping minutely in the sun with every snick of the skate blade. In Norway and The Netherlands, citadels of the sport, Eric is an athletic hero. As the Olympics approached, he acquired celebrity in his own country.
The 500 meters is Heiden's weakest event. Five days before the Olympics opened, he lost the first heat of the world sprint championships to U.S. Teammate Dan Immerfall, an upset that left Immerfall mildly dazzled and Heiden, oddly enough, relieved. "The defeat took some of the pressure off," said Heiden. "I could relax a little."
He felt easier as he got set for the 500 meters in Lake Placid, and found he was in one of those splendid matchups that rarely occur in a sport in which the race is not against another but against the clock. The pairings for speed skating are a matter of pure chance. For the 500 meters last week, the draw for the inner lane was the Soviets' Kulikov, the current world record holder in the event and the gold medal winner in 1976. For the outer lane: Eric Heiden.
When Heiden skated onto the ice, the crowd chanted rhythmically, "Eric! E-ric!" Heiden and Kulikov stripped down to their sleek, skintight uniforms. Their hair was tucked into constricting hoods that improve their aerodynamics but, says Heiden, make it hard to breathe in any position other than a skater's crouch.
There was a false start, charged to both skaters. Then the race was off cleanly: it amounted to a little more than half a minute of intense windmilling energy, an event of amazingly compacted skill. Speed skating is a contained, glyptic art, etching heat applied to ice. Kulikov whipped through the first 100 meters .05 seconds faster than Heiden. Then the Soviet slipped for an instant on the first turn, stuck out a hand, regained his balance and held his lead into the backstretch. The two men switched lanes in the backstretch, as prescribed, but Heiden was still behind going into the final turn. He began to accelerate as the most dangerous moment in speed skating approached: going at 30 m.p.h., he had to fight the centrifugal force of the turn. Heiden was digging into the ice as though his blades were geared to small and furiously spinning wheels of diamonds.
The American came out of the turn in a dead heat with Kulikov. Heiden's powerful, heavily muscled legs chopped into the ice and his strokes sent up rooster tails of shavings. There was no such trail of glittering ice in Kulikov's wake. Heiden pulled away to win and establish a new Olympic record of 38:03 sec., 1.14 sec. faster than the mark achieved in Innsbruck by Kulikov. The Soviet, who finished in 38.37, had to settle for the silver. Heiden said later that he felt almost as though he had been fired out of a slingshot when he came through the final turn. It was one of the great moments of the Olympics' first week.
Beth Heiden was less fortunate in the 1500 meters. She had won the World Championship in 1979 and the event was one of her best, but a series of irritants nagged her. It was snowing, for one thing, and she was slated to go first, something skaters hate to do. The ice is always colder--and therefore slower--before it is worked over by the competitors. Worse, the first racer out on the course has to set her own pace. Still, these were all minor annoyances compared to the fact that she had sprained her ankle the previous weekend. Oddly, the ankle did not bother her when she skated, but it did hurt when she ran, and that was just about as bad. Skaters run before a race to loosen their muscles, a vital part of their preparation.
Heiden got a good start, but she obviously was beginning to fade in the final third of the race. Her stroking, normally so brisk and efficient, seemed choppy and strained. It was like watching a finely tuned machine run out of lubricant and start to seize up. When it was over, she said she had expected to finish about sixth. Then she added in her chirpy little kid's voice: "You can get pretty nervous thinking about what people expect. But then you say, 'Hey, it's only two and a half minutes out of my life.' " The next day, Heiden spent 43.18 sec. of her life and came in seventh in the 500-meters. The race was won by East Germany's Karin Enke, 18, the sport's newest sensation, who finished in 41.78 sec. and broke the Olympic record by .98 sec. In second place was America's Leah Poulos Mueller.
While the Heidens were warmed by pre-Games publicity, the U.S. hockey team went about its training in cold anonymity. But then the team began to play at Lake Placid and suddenly people started to take notice: the young squad was the most promising ever to represent the U.S. in the Olympics, although it performed with maddening inconsistency.
The team is coached by Herb Brooks, who directed the University of Minnesota to the National Championship last year, and who, understandably, chose for his traveling 16 players who came from the state of Minnesota. The next largest contingent--six--came from Massachusetts, the other main center of hockey in the country.
Brooks once said his team played "sophisticated pond hockey." Whatever its name, the style of the Americans is oddly schizophrenic. They ride players into the boards and forecheck --an oafish game. On offense, on the other hand, they strive --when they can remember their orders--to practice pinpoint passing. The weakness of this hybrid approach showed up in a big game against the Czechs. With a one-man advantage after a Czech penalty, the Americans got too clever by half: they fecklessly passed the puck back and forth for 1 min. 40 sec., until time ran out. All the while, Brooks was screaming, "Shoot! Shoooot!"
As the game went on, the Americans settled down and shot plenty. At times they moved the puck in precise and genteel patterns, but they were not above reverting to type and giving an opponent a good old American elbow. Most important of all, perhaps, the emotional U.S. players performed at a level that surprised even them, to say nothing of the favored Czechs, who were thoroughly beaten.
Earlier, against the Swedes, the underdog Americans played like future members of the National Hockey League, and, indeed, 15 members of the team have been drafted by the pros. They bashed the Europeans into the boards, they scuffled the puck into the corners. If their pond hockey was not terribly sophisticated, it was good enough --barely. The U.S. trailed Sweden 2-1 going into the last minute of the game.
Coach Brooks pulled out Goalie Jim Craig and attacked with six men. They were aided in planning their strategy by a typical example of Yankee know-how: armed with a walkie-talkie, an aide was up in the stands, radioing weaknesses he spotted in the Swedish defense to an assistant coach, who was on the bench with Brooks. With only 27 sec. to play, Bill Baker drilled home a 55-ft. slapshot to tie the game.
It was on Friday night that the Uncertainty Principle hit Tai Babilonia, 19, and Randy Gardner, 21, the world champions in the graceful art of pairs figure skating. Not only were the Americans still getting better, still adding to their repertoire of lifts and leaps, but they would be competing against the Soviet Union's husband-and-wife team of Irina Rodnina, 30, and Alexander Zaitsev, 27, who had taken the Olympic gold medal in 1976 and who had won six world titles. Last year, when Randy and Tai won the world championship, the Soviets were not competing; Irina was having a child. The Russians too had added new moves to their traditional routines to try to match the young Americans' dazzle. It promised to be a classic encounter: the veterans against the newcomers, the Soviets' grandiose style against the fire and flash of the Americans.
When Tai and Randy skated out onto the ice Friday night with the other pairs for their warmups prior to the pairs short-program competition, the crowd gave a pleasant stir of anticipation. The U.S. pair struck a pose, glided around the rink and then went into a sit-spin. Randy fell out of it. He got up and brushed off the ice. They skated over to Coach John Nicks, talked anxiously, came back and tried the sit-spin again. This time, Randy stayed up, but he had to put a hand down to keep from tumbling.
Another hurried conference with Nicks, then around the ice, building speed for the lift that would be required in the short program. But Randy did not hoist Tai high above him. The best he could do was press his partner to the height of his head, then set her abruptly down again--a maneuver that was quick and forced and terribly ragged. Randy's face was drawn. Once more they talked with Nicks, then skated out to try a double axel. Three times they attempted the move, and three times Randy fell. The crowd watched in murmurous disbelief; Gardner does a double axel as easily as a man walks through a revolving door. He had not fallen out of a double axel in practice or competition in four years. A shock of bewilderment and concern passed through the arena. For two weeks, the pair and their coaches had harbored their secret: during a practice session in Los Angeles, Randy had pulled a muscle high in his left thigh. The injury slowly improved, but 48 hours before the Olympic short program, he had hurt his leg again and, in addition, injured the flexor muscles in the front part of the groin, impairing his ability to lift his legs. Randy and his doctor tried to repair the damage with physical therapy, ice, compression and a local anesthetic, Xylocaine. Nothing worked. Nicks said later: "He'd been trying hard for many days. In my opinion, he couldn't perform, and more importantly, the lift he would have performed would have been a great danger to his partner. That was what concerned us more than anything else." At last the loudspeaker at Lake Placid announced the inevitable: "Ladies and gentlemen, the U.S. pair is unable to compete at this time because of an injury." At the edge of the Adirondack rink, the American skaters' ambitious dreams combusted sadly. Tai cried as she left the ice. Said Tai: It was a nightmare." Said Randy: "I felt nothing. I just couldn't believe it was all happening."
The excitement--and pathos--of the athletic events happily overshadowed another Olympic theme: the fate of the Summer Games scheduled this year for Moscow. The International Olympic Committee, meeting at Lake Placid, last week rejected the U.S. Olympic Committee's proposal that the Moscow Games be canceled, postponed or moved to another site. To present the U.S. position, President Carter had sent Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to Lake Placid. Vance told the I.O.C. "We will oppose the participation of an American team in any Olympic Games in the capital of an invading nation." But Vance's tough talk drew more anger than applause. Ireland's Lord Killanin, I.O.C. president, said the Games "must be held in Moscow as planned," though he later clouded his position somewhat by adding, "We're keeping our options open."
Publicly or privately, 30 nations now support Carter, including Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. West Germany and a score more are leaning toward the U.S. position. Said Douglas Kurd, Minister of State at the British Foreign Office: "The I.O.C. is not living in the real world."
But all that lies far ahead, and attention remained focused last week not on the geopolitical aspects of sport, but on the accomplishments of remarkably gifted athletes. The Winter Games maintained a marvelous level of tension, at times exhilarating, at times poignant. The plot seemed only to improve as the competition went on. And at week's end any number of stimulating questions were still to be answered. Can the bumptiously wholesome American hockey players summon up the old college try and keep on winning? Can America's Linda Fratianne capture the figure-skating, gold medal? Can America's stylish Charlie Tickner possibly triumph in the men's figure skating against Britain's brilliant Robin Cousins, East Germany's exact Jan Hoffmann and the Soviet Union's unyielding Vladimir Kovalev? Will Ingemar Stenmark, the matchless Swedish craftsman, take the two slaloms that so surprisingly eluded him at Innsbruck in 1976? Can Lake Placid really bring it off? Will the buses ever arrive on time? As the British sporting phrase so aptly puts it: "Play on."
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