Word: skying
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After Italian skiers Josef Polig and Gianfranco Martin finished 1-2 in the Alpine combined event, bumping a fourth-place Frenchman from the medal stand, French ski officials tried to have them disqualified on the grounds that the advertising on the winners' jackets was too large. Olympic officials declined to intervene, declaring, "Medals are won on the ground, not in offices...
Sticking a ski pole into the ground for leverage and vaulting a couple of meters forward to the accompaniment of rock music from a boom box. Wiggling back and forth on skis around a series of powdery bumps, periodically climbing these hillocks to leap off, flinging one's limbs spread eagle for a nanosecond or thrusting one's hindquarters left and right during a fleeting free fall. Skating at breakneck pace in a roller-derby throng around the perimeter of a hockey-size rink. Scuttling along a sheet of ice, brushing away bumps with a broom to clear the path...
Hearty, vigorous, genial and suitably spandexed these activities all are. But are they really sports worthy of the Winter Olympics? Do ski ballet and aerials and moguls, short-track skating, curling and speed skiing display the requisite patina of frostbitten history and frigid heritage? Do they evoke the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that is Nome...
...greatest perhaps were the unchoreographed wonders: the members of the Unified Team, from the famously ununified former Soviet Union, marching under the five-ring Olympic banner; the groups of athletes gleefully waving under the unfamiliar flags of Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia; the lonely skier from Senegal; and the ski-capped twosome from Bermuda, shuffling behind a man in blazer and (c-c-c-could it be?) eponymous shorts. Three days earlier, the show's dancers and clowns had been kids in duffel coats and anoraks, many of them threatening to strike on the grounds that their beds were too small...
Despite such doubts, Olympic boosters are in high gear. Albertville has printed glossy tourist brochures in four languages. Ski resorts are blanketed with garish billboards promoting Coca-Cola's Olympic sponsorship. Farmers' co- ops have stocked up on pine-tree honey in anticipation of record sales. Luxury hotels are booked solid with wealthy businessmen on promotional junkets. And in Albertville's Hall of Ice ("Don't call it a skating rink!"), volunteer tour guide Andre Cabot explains, "There's a grandeur to the Olympics. When it's all over, we'll say, 'How did we do it?' " A little Savoie...