The Sweet Scene in Sarajevo

By Tom Callahan

On the eve, a promise of the "best Games" ever

The 1984 Puerto Rican Winter Olympic team, first in the annals of the country and last to the bottom of the luge run, consists of one well-rounded American named George Tucker, who is particularly well rounded in the seat, where the number of mended holes in his suit suggests that Tucker occasionally arrives at the finish line without his sled.

"I have about a 75% completion rate," he says. "That's good for a quarterback. It's not so good for a luge racer." Tucker was born in San Juan, where his father distributed motion pictures for RKO. He lived there five of his 36 years, but spent the larger part around Albany, N.Y., irregularly pursuing a doctorate in physics among other degrees of understanding. Introduced as "George Turkey" by the Yugoslav public address announcer, Tucker muses, "He knows more English than he lets on," and takes off on another practice slide down a jagged icicle that meanders like a teardrop through the piny woods on Trebevic Mountain. With the Sarajevo Games opening this week, rehearsal time is precious even for the lugers who have been at it more than the year Tucker has, and he is puffing as he returns to the start.

"When you crash, it takes a little longer to get back," he apologizes. "You have to retrieve your sled." In the '60s, before he weighed 210 lbs., when he was a pretty handy 6-ft. 1-in. basketball player, Tucker thought of trying out for the Puerto Rican Olympic basketball team. But dreams, like pounds, like years, slip by faster than luge racers flip from their sleds. Finally last year, he says, "I got the name of the president of the Puerto Rican Olympic Committee out of the New York Times. They sent me a beret. The rest of my opening ceremonies uniform is off the shelf." Now the dream is close enough so that Tucker can reach for it. Though even as he does, it will be behind him. "I'll carry the flag," he says brightly, but adds ruefully, "if I'm able to by then." Of the 49 teams there, the winter record by twelve, is there one that is more representative of the Olympic ideal than the Puerto Rican?

On top of old Bjelasnica, all covered with snow, workmen are hoisting a wheel to finish rigging a ski lift. The wind is fierce, and faces are glowing like crepes suzette. The snow blowing in the sunlight is as fine as dust. To lengthen the course a few meters, the downhill run begins inside a new restaurant adjacent to a weather station whose frozen antennas resemble the turrets and spires on an ice castle.

Out of the station emerge a gruff man, probably the caretaker, and his toothless wife, whose single braid dangles two feet below the point of her kerchief. Also a daughter, her rosy face alight with mischief, and two dogs nearly as white as the snow. The man has the look of a lighthouse keeper whose island of solitude is being turned into a marina.

He is the only one around, though, who does not seem to share a vision of Sarajevo as a perennial winter playground, the expressed motive of the Olympic organizers. And as far as the mountains go, the picture is gleaming. But the city, usually deep in snow long before now, is mired in mud. Central Yugoslavia has melted practically into spring. On the Mount Igman plateau, where the cross-country skiers will stride and slide through the forest, their trail is streaked with patches of dire brown. A small battalion of soldiers is scattered in the woods prospecting for snow by the clump, hauling it out in what appear to be orange parachutes, dumping it down orange funnels, stomping it into the bad spots. They are sweating, if no one else is. "I can assure you, there is plenty of snow for the competition," says Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spanish president of the International Olympic Committee. "We expect this to be not one of the best, but the actual best of all the 14 Winter Games." Indeed, the facilities are handsome. Mike Moran, press director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, says, "The village is the nicest one, summer or winter, I've ever seen." In Lake Placid, N.Y., the Olympic Village of four years ago has been turned into a prison, a conversion that required little change in atmosphere. The athletes' quarters in Sarajevo have the mood of a small town, complete with landscaped square, where the flats are small but pleasant. The knotty-pine floors of various communal rumpus rooms (chess, billiards, video games, television, dancing) give the area a fragrance to compete with the common smell of burning brown coal permeating the countryside. At the sight of one game in particular, Americans are inclined to smile: a hockey machine worked by levers, with little U.S.A. men on one side and Soviets on the other. It does not take dinars or rubles, only quarters. Political hockey has been expanded way beyond two teams this time. The Finns anticipate that someone may object to Goalie Hannu Kamppuri's previous experience with the National Hockey League's Edmonton Oilers, so they are poised to challenge the eligibility of nine players from six nations. The Americans question the amateur status of four Canadians, who in turn are complaining retroactively about two of the most prominent U.S. players from 1980: Mike Eruzione and Ken Morrow. All of this high-sticking will be settled before the opening ceremonies, because the U.S. and Canada cannot wait that long to have at each other. They play the night before. Around the perimeter of the village, distant sentries are stationed, some sinking unobtrusively into the muck. Machine-gun-toting guards, so familiar now at world occasions, are omnipresent here, along with airport-style X-ray equipment. Moran says, "The athletes are hoping they don't have 'blanket detectors.' " Souvenir hunters are eyeing the covers. Bedding in Sarajevo is more brilliant than housing. But the homes are warm and the people are sweet. A woman in work clothes surprised by visitors while hanging her laundry (Yugoslav dry cleaning, it flutters everywhere) appears the next moment in a beautiful red dress to offer coffee and slivovitz. Boots are left on the stoop, and slippers wait inside the door. Her brother-in-law, a more or less symmetrical giant named Momo, pours the plum marvelous drink while a child grinds the coffee. Without understanding very much of what is said, the family enjoys the conversation of the guests, who go to bed singing and wake up holding their heads. Gray, brown and glum are the colors of the city, but the citizens are certainly more cheerful than the apartment projects in which many of them reside.

Children's kickball games spill over like laughter in the streets. By East European standards, goods are bountiful, and by Western standards, they are inexpensive. The air is foul, the water sparkling, the meals cheap, the service considerate. Along with the shiny gold pins that are always the most valued currency at the Olympics, people have been exchanging stories of local kindnesses. "When our flight connected in Zagreb," says Sandra Knapp of Indianapolis, "eight of us with the U.S.O.C. went to change money, and the banker made us all come to his office for cheese and brandy. The men are so gracious. I'll tell you what, women's lib hasn't hit here. I've never felt so feminine." However, the black-bearded driver Alex, while helping a British woman carry her groceries, says aside, "I would never do this for my wife." For all the little cars darting about the streets, occasionally having to swerve around a horse-drawn hay wagon or a cow, no women drivers have been spotted in a week. The dark worry of terrorism that has lately attended all Olympic gatherings seems somewhat lighter on the eve of the XIV Winter Games (remember, Yugoslavia confounded Hitler without much help). Four years ago, at Lake Placid and Moscow, then I.O.C. President Lord Killanin spoke defensively about the very future of the Olympics. The question was actually posed: Should there be Olympic Games? Anyone who still regarded these quadrennial sports feasts as havens from the troubles afflicting mankind had not been paying attention.

But a few years passed, and now Samaranch appears ebulliently at ease. Los Angeles had no rivals in bidding for the coming Summer Games, but Samaranch says that Brisbane, New Delhi, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Stockholm are fighting over 1992, and the entries are not closed yet. The Olympic spirit is hopeful again. If it would only snow.