Here We Go Again!

By Roger Rosenblatt

Even after four years, it comes back in a sweep. All it takes is one glimpse of a hockey shirt with U.S.A. planted on the front, and suddenly the scene re-erupts in the mind: sticks waved like flags, teammates hugging, a crowd in sweet tears. Odd for the summertime nation that a Winter Olympics provided such a memorable moment in sports, so memorable that half of us still swear that we beat the Russians, not the Finns, in the finals. But winter plays tricks with the senses. If we didn't know better, it would appear that 1 those people are actually traveling on their sides in a bobsled at 75 m.p.h., and sailing off a 90-meter platform on skis, poised in the air like flying hinges, and plunging furiously down a mountain, making erratic Zs among poles stuck in the snow.

Within hours of the opening ceremonies, one will be saying such words as "biathlon" again, and talking of Nordic skiing and the luge. A foreign language for Americans, who in a sense return to the Old World on these occasions, or a dream version of that world, to European movie kingdoms where athletes really do come from Liechtenstein. For 1984: Sarajevo. (Henceforth no schoolchild will be stumped on that

World War I question.) Not our neck of the woods exactly. Yet Americans will be neither out of place nor outclassed this year, even if we will not see Eric Heiden wearing his five gold medals like a Titan's necklace, or pumping his arms in the golden suit that appeared welded to his body. Not that his outfit was wilder than anyone else's in this ice capade: goggle-eyed skiers in interplanetary helmets, figure skaters sprayed with sequins spinning in electric blues, the brash colors seeming to make a protest against the frozen season.

Which may account for a basic appeal of these sports: their headlong assault on the weather. Or maybe it is the controlled craziness of the events. On surfaces difficult enough to walk on upright do these people race, leap, whirl, swerve, and then add an extra unnatural measure of defiance by going airborne. Fanatics. Only a spill proves them mortal. So reckless is their attitude that, watching them, one barely believes in the danger. Then someone's momentum is shattered, and a kid lies piled up in his skis like a broken bird. Silence replaces wonder.

Or then again, it may be the silence that holds us in the first place, and not the speed. Skaters whooshing slightly, skis barely cracking the snow's

shell. Take away the crowds from these Olympics, and there would be very little to hear but your own heart racing. Until the closing ceremonies, when the nations who first entered the stadium as if parading before the galaxy, block by formal block, break ranks, and the competitors, chanting raucously off-key, embrace one another in the most disorderly conduct. Pure mush, of course. Cliches down the line. So why are you smiling?

--By Roger Rosenblatt