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In the Swiss Alps this week, on the slopes of the highest (6,000 feet) major valley in Europe, the snow lay five feet deep. It was dry and powdery on top, packed solid beneath, ideal for skiing. Above towered the two mountain giants, Languard and Julier, up to their waists in dark green firs. On a terrace, its streets white-carpeted with snow, lay the famed resort town of St. Moritz, a chockablock jumble of low, square houses and great, ugly, expensive hotels. Villagers, doing their day's marketing, dodged visiting skiers in the streets. Crowded little St. Moritz (pop. 2,500) had set up 4,000 extra beds, which would not be nearly enough. For St. Moritz this week is the scene of the fifth winter Olympics, the first since 1936.
At the swank Palace Hotel, untitled rich and titled rich & poor had their choice of more varieties of scotch than could be had in all Paris. Celebrity-hunters had their pick of ex-King Peter and Alexandra of Yugoslavia, any number of princes and dukes, Britain's famed Jockey Gordon Richards, or Paulette Goddard.
Sport fans had their choice of 19 events, in which contestants from 31 nations would risk their necks and their reputations on skates, ski jumps and the perilous Cresta Run toboggan course. The experts were betting on Switzerland to win its first winter Olympics (Norway has won three, the U.S. one). More people would see the ice hockey and figure skating than anything else: a guest could watch them from his hotel balcony, highball in hand.
At 10 o'clock Friday morning, 2,000 competitors will assemble before the gates of the Kulm Hotel, march three by three to the stadium and there in chorus repeat the Olympic oath: "We swear we come to the Olympic games . . . in a chivalrous spirit for the honor of our countries and the glory of sport."
The same oath had often before been honored more in the breach than in the observance, and there were some in St. Moritz who thought the 1948 Olympic games would be the last. It was not simply the old sneering gossip about which amateur got paid how much, or the sometimes unequal struggle between sportsmanship and competitive spirit, intensified by national rivalries. There was a deeper and grimmer game afoot: for some "iron cur tain" countries, like Rumania and Yugoslavia, competition had become almost a matter of life & death; some athletes were nervous about going back home if they didn't perform up to snuff. Soviet Russia sent no competitors, only a vigilante squad of ten observers.
If this were indeed to be the last Olympics, the world would lose something as old as the 8th Century B.C.* and as ever-new and refreshing as the ambitions of the 19-year-old Canadian girl who was the cynosure of St. Moritz this week.