Word: nordics
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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
...Sarajevo is flush with champions, and not only skaters this time, although there is a bumper haul of those, but skiers too. Count them, seven current or recent world titleholders: Alpine Skiers Phil Mahre, Steve Mahre and Tamara McKinney, Figure Skaters Scott Hamilton, Rosalynn Sumners and Elaine Zayak, and Nordic Cross-Country Skier Bill Koch. Once the American public finds out that there is also a Nordic combined event and that it involves a 70-meter leap one day along with a 15-km mush the next, who will believe that just about the best in the world...
...actually predates the Winter Games as an Olympic sport. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived brotherhood in 1896, he forgot to take temperature into account. Figure skating first appeared at the Summer Games in 1908, and brought hockey along in 1920. It was not until four years later that Nordic skiing, speed skating and bobsledding joined them for the first winter pageant, the others straggling in later, the biathlon (skiing riflemen) not until 1960, the luge 1964. But the premiere event is still the first: figure skating...
...losers. The worst thing that you can teach chil dren is that so many of them will be losers. Because then they won't even try. It's the striving, the attempt, the fight, that's the Important thing." Lynn Spencer-Galanes, half of a husband-wife U.S. Nordic-skiing couple, says, "Nobody knows for sure how much effort really goes into it. Even coaches...
...press center, a dozen restaurants, and some 15 inns for an expected 30,000 tourists, from whom the organizers hope to net $50 million. Besides the 2,000-capacity Mojmilo Olympic Village, which is a series of high-rise apartment buildings, a special hotel for competitors in the Nordic events was built cantilevered on the face of the mountain. Athletes with icicles in their beards will begin to report there in January, the better to muffle the shock of the Sarajevo winter...