Coming In from the Cold

By Pico Iyer

Suddenly the confrontation's over. The two great rivals of the postwar era -- America and the Soviet Union -- are more or less friends. East and West Germany are one. Even North and South Korea have signed a treaty of reconciliation. Yes, much of the world remains as fractious as ever: the Khmer Rouge has followed Prince Sihanouk back to the haunted palaces of Cambodia, and Iraq occupies the place on the blacklist formerly reserved for its % archenemy Iran. But in a world where even South Africa is again part of the Olympic family, it may seem that the Olympic Games of 1992 are the first Games for a while that many are not regarding as the last.

It is tempting, then, to call the coming Olympics the first post-cold war Games. For two decades at least, the superpowers in particular -- the main players in the East-West struggle -- have looked on the Olympics as a way to show off their systems to the world: an extension of war by other means. Off the field, this led to constant bobbing and feinting before and during the 1980 and '84 Games in Moscow and Los Angeles. On the field, it meant the contest between nations became a competition between systems: the East Bloc called upon the efficiency and single-mindedness of its cradle-to-grave training programs; the West countered with the fruits of affluence and freedom. The Olympics were the one battleground on which the two enemies could meet and have it out. And the highlights of these Games, for many, have been the Soviet Union's stunning, last-second defeat of the U.S. basketball team in 1972, and the victory of a ragtag collection of American collegians over the mighty Soviet hockey machine in 1980.

The last Winter Games too provided a perfect illustration of the struggle: Katarina Witt, the self-styled "worker's hero" from Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany, vs. Debi Thomas, the all-American Stanford premed student. In the left corner, a communist figure skater who lived like a princess and had been trained since infancy to go for gold; in the right, a determined young black woman who had overcome hardship to chase her dream. In the middle, the opera both chose as accompaniment was Bizet's tale of the working-class heroine, Carmen. Who could not see their rivalry as a war of the worlds -- especially in a sport where medals are decided by judges and where whispers persisted that East Bloc judges favored East Bloc athletes and Western judges Western? In the end, though, as soon as the champions took the ice, all such issues became irrelevant: what held the world spellbound was an age-old contest of coquetry against industry, art against craft, style, in a sense, against sincerity.

The Winter Games, in any case, have always been the Cinderella Games, the odd Games out; a poor sister, it sometimes seems, to the sun-splashed dazzle of the Summer Games. Barcelona this year has Gaudi, Miro, Isozaki; Albertville has mostly an industrial town that sounds as if it were named after the Crown Prince of Monaco (a member of the Monegasque bobsled team). The Winter Games are chill, Nordic, taciturn -- redolent of Ingmar Bergman and dark Decembers. Instead of sprints and dives, they offer double Axels (not what you find on the bottom of your Peugeot) and luges (which one American Congressman took to be something to eat).

The Winter Games are to that extent the eccentrics' Games, where athletes jump when they skate, and skate when they ski, and ski when they jump. Apart from the epochal Witt-Thomas confrontation in Calgary in 1988, what many people remember about recent Games are the Jamaican bobsled team, the skier from Senegal, the Taiwanese brothers who formed a bobsled crew and a 24-year- old English plasterer who put on his uniform and became "Eddie the Eagle" Edwards, an almost world-class ski jumper. This year the captain of the U.S. curling team is 55, and his teammates are his son, his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law's son. The Winter Games are for anomalies and curiosities: children everywhere dream of running faster, jumping higher and swimming better than their friends. But of shooting down an icy slope at 70 m.p.h. on their backs? Or skiing as fast as they can around some loops, then stopping and shooting at a target while lying on the ground? Or curling?

That is the abiding charm of the Olympics: in an age of made-for-TV political campaigns and prepackaged beauty contests, they are almost the only universally watched events that seem decidedly unpredictable. And in that sense the Games have not changed at all. Yes, it is true that geopolitics has produced almost as many miracles as sports since the last time the world met under the five Olympic rings; a bipolar world is now multicultural. But John le Carre, the poet laureate of the cold war, has not seen fit to lay down his pen. He recognizes, it seems, that the real cold war has always been internal and that inside the heart the walls have not come down, and one side is still fighting the other. The opponents the athletes will face are the same as ever: the climate, the crowd, the knot in the stomach. Even the rule makers: one of the most eagerly awaited contests this year will pit France's ice-dancing Duchesnays -- hometown favorites -- against the limiting regulations of their sport. But that, in a sense, is what the Olympics have always been about: not rules, really, but exceptions.