Rolling Out the Red Carpet

By John Skow

I believe we are completely ready to host the Games The Winter Olympic Games, as anyone who has attended these wondrous chilblain festivals will testify, can be counted on for natural and man-made disasters of a kind unmatched since the early days of polar exploration. The arresting uncertainty every four years is not whether a pickup team of U.S. hockey players can confound the world by winning again, or even whether the Olympic committee can exceed its previous stuffiness in the matter of amateurism (it can: two champion skiers, Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark and Liechtenstein's Hanni Wenzel, were ruled out of this Olympics for accepting their loot too directly). No, what is fascinating is to learn whether the harried and exasperated hosts, driven googly by the problems of cosseting tens of thousands of athletes and their keepers and watchers in a region where even lichen feel uncomfortable, will drink up all the booze in their country before competition starts.

Heartening news: two weeks before the first puck is to drop in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (for the first of six hockey games to be played Feb. 7, the day before the opening ceremonies), the supply of slivovitz, a high-octane schnapps made from plums, is still holding out. Zivjeli! ("Bottoms up!" in Serbo-Croatian). All reserves may be needed, however, before the closing ceremony, Feb. 19. The proud and fiery Yugoslavs have quelled their tendency to airy improvisation, and they have succeeded against considerable odds in transforming an amiable Balkan backwater into a cred ible third-rank winter resort. This is a lot higher up in the rankings than any visitor to the grim and snowless 1980 Olympics would place Lake Placid, N.Y. (First-rank resorts like Saint-Moritz or Sun Valley generally don't want the Olympics these days. Why disrupt an already profitable business?)

Thus the Games will open on schedule in a mood of well-justified gaiety and self-congratulation among the Yugoslavs. Branko Mikulic, the forceful fist banger who is president of Yugoslavia's Olympic Organizing Committee, and a former president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, of which Sarajevo is the capital, guaranteed the complete success of the Games and then went off to give his staff a dressing down described as "thunderous" on some unspecified subject. "I believe we are completely ready to host the Games," insists one official. Still it was true that there were a few minor shortcomings. Sarajevo's new Holiday Inn had been invaded by a tribe of rats with the instincts of Albanian terrorists, and they were giving ground only slowly before the plates of poisoned food left in the halls by the staff.

The comfortable apartments reserved for ABC television people on the sixth floor of the new press living quarters were all ready--comfortable is what you get if you pay $91.5 million of the $140 million budgeted to put on the Games, which is what ABC did--but the elevator that was supposed to reach them was not working. It was almost impossible to make a transatlantic phone call unless you could explain your needs in Serbo-Croatian. Hotel cashiers prudently refused to accept payment in anything but dinars.

These were trifles. What mattered was that ski lifts rose and racing trails plunged where none had existed two years before, that suitably awesome ski jumps and a bob and luge run had been built, that the ice of an elegant skating complex had already been tested by joyous Sarajevans, and that the city's householders had been persuaded--very firmly, the rumor goes--to vacate their homes for those of the expected 25,000 tourists who could not be accommodated by hotels. And what mattered more than anything else was that at last it had snowed. Haifa meter of wet, soggy stuff fell as the year began, just right for foot packing on the racing trails by Yugoslav troops whose fathers and grandfathers had fought with Marshal Tito's partisans in World War II. Fear of snowlessness haunts the Winter Olympics. Scanty snow at the Olympic men's downhill trials at Sarajevo last winter finally persuaded the doubtful Yugoslavs to buy enough Swiss snowmaking equipment to cover a 5-km cross-country loop in an emergency, though not enough for the Alpine racecourses. But this year's first snowfall looked so good to staffers at the Sarajevo Olympics headquarters that a bunch of them ran out of the building as the flakes started coming down and began dancing.

Vast pine forests overhang the valleys of the Miljacka and Bosna rivers, effectively isolating the ski competition sites from the fog and clatter of the city. The women's Alpine races will be held at

Mount Jahorina, for years a minor ski resort running somewhat sleepily 28 km southeast of Sarajevo. About the same distance to the southwest, the 70-and 90-meter jumps have been cut into the wooded hillsides below 1,600-meter Mount Igman. The 15-km cross-country course winds through the peaceful beauty of this isolated place, and if good snow cover allows the entire course to be used, its relative steepness of 120 meters should please Bill Koch and the other Americans who excel on downhill stretches. There is no log-cabin rusticity to the quarters built for Nordic skiers; their roost is a spectacular 500-bed hotel daringly cantilevered out from a buttress of Mount Igman.

There was nothing but an old storm-battered weather station at Mount Bjelasnica, 10 km beyond the Nordic trails, when the Yugoslavs began to prepare for the Olympics. Since then they have cut ski trails out of the forest and built lifts enough for the crowds of tourists they hope will follow the racers. When they discovered that the men's downhill racecourse was 9 meters shy of the 800-meter vertical drop required by international ski-racing rules, they brought Balkan ingenuity to bear by building a restaurant on top of the mountain and installing the starting gate inside the restaurant. Racers can put down their coffee cups and plunge downward at a 51DEG angle that seems almost vertical, able to see only the first control gate. Welcome to the Bosnian big leagues.

As the hours tick away toward Feb. 7, and chores accomplished are crossed off lists, the easygoing mood of the late fall is changing to edgy watchfulness. Metal detectors are appearing in doorways, and if not all of them are connected yet, no one points this out to the unsmiling guards who gravely check their blank video screens, just for practice. Tomasek Juric, the impassive head of security who was once a bodyguard for Tito, flatly guarantees the safety of everyone who will be here. Even at the trials, his operatives were impressive; when someone among the Austrian downhillers set off a cherry bomb in the lobby of their hotel (standard apres-ski joshing among downhillers, who are considered by other skiers to be mad), the place filled with police instantly. "Ha-ha-ha," went the Austrians. "Ha-ha-[long pause] ha." No further cherry bombs have been detonated.

On Mount Bjelasnica, some 500 soldiers were packing the racecourses, stolidly enduring the 5DEGF cold and the eternal winds. It was a time to be philosophical; at least no one was shooting at them. In Sarajevo, members of a student volunteer brigade goofed and joked as they worked without undue haste at shoveling snow from the center of Kosevo Stadium. Mirjan Jarovije-vic, 15, a student at the Yaroslav Cernyi technical school, took the arrival of a visitor as a splendid opportunity to lean on his shovel and sneak a smoke. He said he had been chosen for the work detail because he was so smart that he would not fall behind in school. His volunteer supervisor, Muharen Corba, 27, was smart too. Good-naturedly he yelled at Mirjan and his friends, who were throwing snowballs and pushing each other in wheelbarrows, to get on with the job. More noise, more snowballs and cheeky adolescent goofing, and then the job of getting ready for visitors resumed.

Until recently, the citizens of Sarajevo did not realize that they lacked a bob and luge run--in fact such a marvel did not exist in all of Yugoslavia--but now they have one, on the wooded slopes of 1,629-meter Mount Trebevic, one of the big, round-shouldered hills that guard Sarajevo on three sides. There is also a fine new indoor skating complex, an assertively modern structure with brown, smoked reflecting glass in the entryways and windows and, in the manner of the Pompidou Center in Paris, intentionally exposed ventilation pipes visible outside. Near by, a big, new outdoor speed-skating oval is boldly supported by 400 concrete pillars above a storage cover for snowplows and TV equipment.

Does this quantity of building and preparing mean that if the snow stays intact, all the remaining problems can be solved by an elevator repairman and a courageous exterminator? Of course not.

The Sarajevo airport, for instance, is absurd. Fog rolls in almost every day just in time to delay or cancel the plane from Belgrade. A radar landing system was installed recently, but pilots who have managed to reach the city say that it often does not work. Landing-strip lights wink out during the nation's power brownouts. Trains sound like a good idea, but one New York visitor learned to his bafflement that it is not possible while still outside Yugoslavia to book a first-class train seat for a journey within Yugoslavia--Zagreb to Sarajevo, for example.

Transportation problems will not be over for those who actually make it to Sarajevo, because the narrow, bumpy roads out to the distant Alpine and cross-country events were overstrained during last year's trials.

Some snow-removal equipment has been brought from Austria and Switzerland, but a big dump of snow could shatter even the Olympic omnilingual outdoor cursing record set four years ago at Lake Placid, during a work stoppage by bus drivers hired for the Games. Transportation of live spectators is admittedly not a high-priority matter. Any Winter Olympics is and should be a TV spectacle.

If you have great luck or clout, you may get a couple of the few non-press and non-big-shot seats at a hockey game or a figure-skating competition, but there is just no way to watch more than a fragment of a ski race in person. Ski jumping is splendid for eyeball-viewing--all those figures flying through the air--but the races are hopeless. Flat or steep, it does not matter; you pick a good turn and watch the bodies come over the hill or out of the trees, zip, zip. Did you see Bill Koch or Phil Mahre make his move? Not a chance, unless you were back at the hotel watching on the tube.

Thus even for those who attend, much of Sarajevo will be what it is for the rest of the world: a channel number on a TV dial.

Look out of your hotel window and see minarets from the days of Muslim rule, or great silent stands of pine; turn on the box and see minarets, pines, skiers and Jim McKay. For the athletes, this turbulent and beautiful place cannot be allowed to become more than a peripheral strangeness, to be shut out with ease or with difficulty, according to temperament. For the skaters, ice is ice, if it is cooled to the right temperature and the East European judges are not too hostile. For the skiers, the runs are slightly tamer than World Cup racecourses usually are, but this is true for any Olympics; you cannot have the inexperienced skiers who show up to race every four years (Turks, Greeks and Chinese are entered) kill themselves on downhill runs like the frightening Hahnenkamm at Kitzbiihel. Winds are notoriously bad here, and after wind caused the cancellation of the women's giant slalom at last year's trials, big storm fences were ordered for the racecourses.

They may or may not help against gales fully capable of holding ski-lift chairs out parallel to the ground, like wash on a line.

Otherwise, snow is snow.

Being chosen to hold the Olympics is important to Yugoslavs, and not because they are fanatical skating and skiing fans.

Watching soccer is the big sport here, and smoking in cafes and schmoozing about soccer are the big winter sports. It is true that Bojan Krizaj, the flashy blond who finished fourth at Lake Placid in the giant slalom, is something of a hero, and that no one can be found who does not expect him to win a gold medal. That would be nice, in the local view, but if Krizaj succeeds, he will not get a hotel of his own, as Austrian ski heroes do. This is Bosnia, after all, and Krizaj is a miserable Slovenian.

Such fierce factional currents, swirling among the country's six highly independent republics, two autonomous provinces, three mutually antagonistic religions (Muslim, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox) and five quarrelsome language groups (Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Albanian and Hungarian), are usually cited as Yugoslavia's incurable weakness. Undeniable, but surviving such a weakness thus far has surely made surviving between East and West seem relatively simple. Since Tito was expelled from the Cominform in 1948 for refusing to bend to Stalin's will, Yugoslavs have boasted that they are answerable to no one. Including themselves, it has often seemed. Contradictions are seen everywhere; the Communist Party rules without opposition, but a clever entrepreneur can become a millionaire. The secret police "control practically all social life," as the famed dissident Milovan Djilas recently told TIME, but criticism of a fairly caustic kind is often permitted in the press.

What everyone agrees on is that the economy is troubled, with a debt of $20 billion to Western banks and an inflation rate that is edging toward 50%, and with good wine sometimes in steadier supply than items like coffee. An austerity program instituted by Prime Minister Milka Planinc, sometimes known as the Margaret Thatcher of Yugoslavia, may help. But a source of dollars is needed, and that, not very mysteriously, is where the Olympic Games come in. ABC's big payment, and such corporate dollops as Coca-Cola's $3 million (for the right to be called the official 1984 Olympic soft drink), will cover virtually all the costs, which is much more satisfactory than borrowing from the International Monetary Fund. When the last downhiller sags over his poles and the Olympic torch goes out, Sarajevo will have a new, salable and debt-free winter resort to attract foreign tourists, who so far know only the summer beaches around Dubrovnik. Nobody ever said that the Bosnians lacked shrewdness. -- By John Skow.

Reported by John Moody/Sarajevo

With reporting by John Moody