For the 13th Winter Olympics, the U.S. has dazzling athletes, high hopes
Amid the crumbling columns and pediments in the ancient city of Olympia, a shaft of sunlight glanced off a reflector one day last week and set fire to a slender torch. Next week, after a 5,000-mile flight from the Peloponnesian Peninsula to Athens to the U.S., and a 780-mile relay run from the Virginia Tidewater to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, the Olympic flame will ignite a huge torch on a pedestal at the Lake Placid High School. With that, the 13th Olympic Winter Games "will be officially under way. In 1932, tiny Lake Placid (pop. 3,300) played host to the first Olympic Games ever held on American soil. Nearly five decades later, the same village, now even smaller (pop. 2,997), is bracing for what could prove to be, if events take the darkest of turns, the final true Olympics. The sad truth is that the political pressures that have always borne so heavily on the Olympic Games today threaten to open an irreparable schism in world sport (see ESSAY).
Whatever the fate of this summer's Moscow Games, the winter competition seems secure. All told, 37 countries will send athletes to the Games: the downhill demons and slalom masters from Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and France; the hockey magicians from the Soviet Union, Canada, Czechoslovakia and Sweden; the spectacular speed skaters from East Germany and the U.S.S.R.; high-flying figure skaters from Britain and Russia; the ski jumpers from any country with athletes crazy and courageous enough to think they can hurtle off a 257-ft. tower and land without breaking every bone in their bodies. And in most of the major events, for the first time ever, there will be Americans with at least a well-founded dream of winning Olympic medals —bronze, silver and, yes, gold.
The athletes will be competing in a winter playground that has been groomed with the help of $178 million in federal, state and local funds. The money went to build better roads, dormitories, communication systems and, not just incidentally, ski slopes, bobsled runs and skating rinks. Because of the tragedy at Munich in 1972, where eleven Israeli competitors and coaches died in the wake of an attack by Palestinian terrorists, security has been a paramount consideration. That meant building an Olympic Village seven miles from Lake Placid, accessible to vehicles only via a narrow forest road and surrounded by double chain-link fences 12 ft. high that send out an alarm at the slightest touch. With its narrow-windowed dormitories, the village bears an unfortunate resemblance to a prison; it will, indeed, become a minimum-security federal pen after the Games.
For all the construction, and despite the fact that some 50,000 people are expected to swarm into Lake Placid during every day of competition, the 1980 Games involved no large-scale dislocation of the town's citizens, as happened in Montreal during the 1976 Summer Games. To be sure, a certain amount of displacement has occurred. A young clerk for the Lake Placid Organizing Committee was bumped from her $300-a-month apartment so that the landlord could rent it during February to wealthy snow bunnies for $4,000. Another story making the rounds has houses being purchased for $75,000 and rented for half that figure for the 13-day duration of the Games.