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The cost of gold has skyrocketed too, but Tiffany, the New York jeweler commissioned to design and strike medals for the Games, agreed to supply them at 1978 prices. The designers hit a snag, however, when they submitted their sketches: the Lake Placid Organizing Committee responded with a veto. The reason: the medals' obverse side showed the rolling Adirondack Mountains, but not the peak where one of the committee members owned a farm. The medals were redesigned and the mountains were shifted. The medal winners of 1980 will always have a view of one committeeman's homesite.
To win those medals, the athletes must meet, in all-out competition against the world's best, the Olympic challenge: higher, swifter, farther.
U.S. athletes have long excelled during the Summer Games, especially in track and swimming events. But in a nation where winter sports are an expensive leisure activity, not a passion or a way of life as they are in Eastern and Western Europe, Olympic medals have always proved elusive or costly or both.
The families of figure skaters often find the $20,000-a-year cost of renting rinks and hiring coaches a crushing expense. From their mid-teens, skiers and speed skaters live nearly half of each year as expatriates, training and racing in Europe because facilities or competitors are not up to par in the U.S. Unheralded by their countrymen, they are idolized abroad, where youngsters collect their pictures on bubble-gum cards and the monied denizens of Alpine resorts ask for their autographs. A U.S. sports fan who can routinely tick off the starting outfield of the Kansas City Royals would be hard pressed to recognize America's heavy hitters at the Winter Olympics. Yet despite these drawbacks, a new generation of talented and dedicated U.S. athletes has emerged to perform to Olympic standards in the demanding and treacherous Winter Games.
ERIC AND BETH HEIDEN. In the final weeks before the Olympics, the U.S. Speed Skating Team established a training camp in Davos, Switzerland. There, on one of the world's fastest speed-skating rinks, they churned through one exhausting workout after another, honing the technique and building the stamina required for what may be the most physically demanding of all sports. Few living things can travel a mile faster than the men and women who, hunched over their skates like broken-backed dolls, swoop around an oval of ice at more than 30 m.p.h. Each stroke is a study in precision, an intricately choreographed transfer of power from body to blade.
At Davos, the Heidens drew knowing and admiring crowds. With good reason: in the long history of their sport, only Eric has been deemed capable of winning the gold in all five men's events, ranging from the lightning-fast 500-meter sprint, through the middle distances of 1,000 and 1,500 meters and on to the grueling 5,000-and 10,000-meter endurance races. His younger sister Beth is favored in two of the four women's events. Said a Dutch father, his hand resting lightly on his son's head to guide the boy's eyes toward the Davos rink: "I tell my son, 'Look at them. Look at the Heidens, so you can say you have seen the best.' "
At 21, Eric Heiden is the first man ever to win both the World Sprints and