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Tickner came to serious skating at an age when most coaches felt he was too old to reach world-class standards: during his freshman year in college. He had to go back to work on his compulsory figures, those painstaking loops and turns that judges squat to scrutinize like the Rosetta stone. He has never caught up with the class; school figures remain his weakest point. But naysayers who insist that the double lutzes and triple salchows are jumps that have to be grooved into muscle memory before a boy is old enough to shave have been proved wrong: a typical Tickner free-skating program contains just as many crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics as any on the skating scene.
HOCKEY. For Lake Placid, the U.S. Olympic Hockey Association decided to get its act together and take it on the road. Last summer a 26-man team was culled from the country's hockey hotbeds (16 from Minnesota, six from Massachusetts, two each from Michigan and Wisconsin), then sent off on a grueling, 61 -game schedule (the National Hockey League regular season schedule is only 80 games). Coach Herb Brooks' team is a long shot, especially in the face of a superb Soviet squad, for the first hockey gold medal since the 1960 team pulled its stunning upset in the Squaw Valley Games (see box page 83). But the team could surprise everyone with its hybrid style, matching traditional North American aggressiveness with European finesse. ("Sophisticated pond hockey," Brooks calls it.) Against a variety of college, N.H.L. and foreign national teams, the Americans have so far won 41 games, tied three and lost just 15.
The U.S. has achieved most of its glory during past Winter Games on the ice. Df the 24 gold medals awarded to singles figure skaters in the twelve Olympic Winter Games, eight have been won by Americans. From Dick Button to Dorothy Hamill, American skaters have not only dominated, they have defined the standards of the sport. The entire U.S. figure-skating team was killed in a plane crash in Belgium in 1961, yet the program was strong enough to produce a gold medalist, Peggy Fleming, by 1968.
The speed skaters have done even better, collecting 32 of the 94 medals won by Americans in all the Winter Olympics. They have also won more than one-third of all American gold medals—eleven of 30.
Yet with something like 14 million skiers in the U.S., Americans have won just 13 medals, four of them golds, out of a possible 135 in the Olympic downhill, slalom and giant slalom and just one of 168 in cross-country events. No American man has ever won a gold medal in skiing. In the downhill and giant slalom, no American man has ever won a medal of any kind.
The poor performance in skiing is one of the biggest mysteries—and greatest disappointments—in American sport. Lack of support was a valid reason in the early '60s, when the American team would fly to Europe on one-way tickets, ski the winter circuit, then scrounge airfare home. Now the U.S. Ski Team operates on an annual budget of $2.2 million (compared with $275,000 for the U.S. Speed Skating Team); American skiers have access to equipment and technicians as good as any n the world. Says Team Director Bill