Word: sarajevo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Have you noticed," asked Ahmed Karabegovic, secretary-general of the organizing committee for the Sarajevo Games, "that all of the stores in the city still have the Olympic emblem in the windows and that many men wear this Olympic tie?" He thrust forward a cravat with a snowflake and five rings woven into its design. "It is a small thing, but it is significant. Before, our city was known as a town of ashes, the place where a war began. Now it is a town of the Olympics and of friendship; much has changed...
...year after the closing ceremonies, Sarajevo clings to the Olympics with a tenacity that knows a turning point when one comes along. The Olympic emblems have not come down from store windows nor have the ties been retired to an appropriate bottom drawer because Sarajevo does not want to get over the Games. Reminiscence is everywhere. Hajrudin Cengic, president of the town assembly's executive council and city coordinator for the Olympics, loses his managerial demeanor to a faraway look: "There is not a single day that passes that I do not remember the Olympics. The city looked really gorgeous...
They are trying with all the heart and skill that wrought an Olympics here in the first place. When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Sarajevo in 1978, the town had a third-rate mountain with a few lifts for recreational skiers and no ice rink at all. They built two rinks and a bobsled run. They also cut a road up a mountain previously traversed only by Tito's Nazi-fighting partisans, and they built hotels, cross-country ski trails and a network of chair lifts to newly hacked-out downhill and slalom courses. They...
...surplus is being used to flog the tourist industry generated by the bonanza of Olympic publicity and the banishment of Princip's ghost. Sarajevo has devoted a $2 million fund solely to cementing the Olympic image by staging additional world-class sporting events--world speed-skating championships, European bobsled championships and the like--in hopes of attracting the fans and tourists who follow them. So far, the strategy is working. With round-trip air fare from New York and seven days in a hotel at the foot of Olympic ski runs costing just $680, the tourists are coming...
That prosperity and the unrelenting reach for the big time have not eroded the wonder either of the Games or of what they brought to Sarajevo. The children who moved into the apartments built to serve as the Olympic Village strap on their skates and wobble up and down the hard-packed snow on the sidewalks and streets. There are fantasies here just as surely as in Philadelphia. They say with pride, "In school, the other kids call us 'Olympians.' " A cab driver buzzes about town with his new CB radio turned up to catch a dispatcher's grating squawk...