Beyond the O Words

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Most viewers tuning in to the Winter Olympics will be limited to a vocabulary of three small o words: "ooh" for any soaring feat after which the athlete remains in an upright position, "oops" for ungainly plops onto ice or snow and "ouch" for the spectacular disasters. Couch-cozy spectators are likely to remain otherwise speechless at the subtleties of winter sports. They will not be helped by the glossolalia that accompanies the coverage of the Games, including such fascinating but baffling terms as Axels and Lutzes, telemark and super-Gs. Enlightened appreciation will also be hindered by Zen-like axioms ("the fastest way to ski cross-country is to skate") and nonsensical riddles ("What sport has contestants who practice black magic and wait their turns in a morgue?"). As a guide for the perplexed, TIME has gathered a number of these mysteries and provided solutions to them. Welcome to the land beyond ooh, oops and ouch.

The first riddle: What comes first, a figure skater's performance or reputation? Put another way, Are judges chicken to have egg on their faces? During the long and short programs, they put great weight on the reputation of a contestant. A neophyte skater may turn in a string of leaps and spins more dazzling than Katarina Witt's smile and still get lower marks than the reigning queen of the rink. The practice cuts across political affiliations. A Soviet judge will give a prominent American higher marks than a fledgling Russian who skates a comparable program. And vice versa. No matter how talented, all newcomers are always a little less than equal. To paraphrase Proverbs 22: 1, a good name is better than gold. Or in this instance, as good as gold.

Then there is the curious case of the judges who do not really matter. In ski jumping, judges can award as many as 20 points for a perfect jump, watching out for such sins of style as bent knees, curved backs, unsteadiness and crossed skis. They also look askance at failure to land with one ski in front of the other, knees flexed, hips bent and arms straight out at the sides -- the so-called telemark position, named after a region in Norway where the sport originated. The final score on a jump is made up of distance plus style points, but somehow the longest jumpers must always have the best style. In the end, the sport is mostly one of superlatives: whoever jumps farthest wins.

The positions athletes take while competing often look mystifyingly ungainly, but there are usually practical reasons. Aerodynamic considerations have led ski jumpers to hold their arms at their sides to form an airfoil, getting as much updraft as possible after takeoff from the slope. Downhill racers crouch with their chests to their knees, assuming a near fetal position to cut wind resistance. In luge, sliders lying on their backs and steering with their feet minimize resistance by keeping their limbs aligned and body flat.

Sleek principles of physics characterize most of these techniques. But sometimes down and dirty gets the job done faster. For years the accepted style in cross-country skiing was an elegant parallel gliding across snow. In 1982, however, 1976 Olympic Nordic Skiing Silver Medalist Bill Koch popularized a crisscross technique, literally "skating" on skis. The new, swifter style revolutionized the sport. Despite attempts by purists to ban skating entirely, the method will be allowed in half of Calgary's cross- country events.

The babel of esoteric sports terms can be misleadingly familiar -- sometimes morbidly so. The building at the top of a luge run is known as the "morgue," for the icy silence that haunts it as contestants nervously wait their turn. Sliders also use "black magic," the term for the secret way each has of sharpening and preparing the blades of his sled for a race. For example, heating the blades can increase a sled's speed. That kind of magic is illegal.

Other terms have their roots in the names of people. An Axel is a leap plus 1 1/2 revolutions forward in the direction one is skating. Named for Axel Paulsen, a 19th century Norwegian skater, it is one of the most difficult moves in the sport. A leap rotating in the opposite direction from the approach is called a Lutz, after its turn-of-the-century originator, Alois Lutz. Popular belief ascribes a literary root to the rambunctious ice hockey puck, tracing the name back to Puck, the mischievous spirit in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Unfooled mortals trace the word back to a form of the verb poke. But why quarrel? The sport needs all the romance it can get.

Finally, there are events that are as much a mystery to insiders as they are to outsiders. Among them is the super-G (that's the super giant slalom, but you knew that). The new Alpine skiing event is meant to combine the precision of slalom and the speed of downhill racing. Unfortunately, no one seems to know the proper combination. Says 1984 Slalom Gold Medalist Phil Mahre: "When a downhill coach sets a super-G course, it's very fast and very straight. When a slalom coach sets the course, it's very technical and has a lot of turns. Nobody really knows what a super-G is."

In case of such confusion, it is advisable to turn down the volume on the television set and stick to ooh, oops and ouch.

With reporting by Brian Cazeneuve/Calgary