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Linda was ready. Her mother had lit some candles in church and stuck to other rituals as well. She believes it is bad luck to watch her daughter's free-skating program. "I stand in the back and visualize her program and try to send her all the vibes I can," Virginia Fratianne told TIME Reporter-Researcher Peter Ainslie. At the U.S. nationals in Atlanta last month, she violated the rule after Linda had succeeded on the difficult combination jump that opens her program. "I said, 'O.K., that's over.' And when I came out to watch the rest, she fell twice in twelve seconds."
In the finals, Fratianne not only did not fall, she skated superbly. Even so, she was unable to make up the ground she had lost in the compulsory figures. Linda won the silver; the gold went to East Germany's Poetzsch.
As the Games drew to an end, an East European official shrewdly noted: "The only amateurs are the people who organized them." An Italian reporter called the 1980 Winter Olympics the second worst assignment in the 20th century—the worst being World War II. There were other problems. Prices in Lake Placid were pumped up high enough to tatter the social contract: the $2 hot dog and the scalper's $100 hockey ticket. Some of the North Country Boys, as they liked to call themselves, showed they could hustle a buck like city slickers.
All too true, but Lake Placid will really be remembered for much, much more. There was a curious charm to the Games: the prison-to-be that served as an Olympic Village and that came to be admired by skeptical athletes; the small-town high school that was turned into a press center; the fact that passers-by on Main Street had only to peek through a fence—for free —to watch some of the finest speed skating in the history of the sport. Trading in the multicolored pins of the participating nations became a local fad and then a frenzy; among the most sought-after were the Soviets . There was the miracle of the man-made snow, which was admired by most of the skiers. One Lake Placid official admitted that sure, the transportation had been a mess, but then he proudly recounted how European skiing representatives had complimented the locals on the superb organization of the alpine races.
The Games were filled with moments of warmth. The American crowd, despite its deep disappointment at the forced withdrawal of the favored U.S. pairs figure skaters Tai Babilonia and the injured Randy Gardner, applauding the two smiling Soviet figure-skating gold medalists, Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev. The nightly Gemutlichkeit at Austria House, a fragment of Europe transplanted to the frozen shores of Mirror Lake. The welcoming hands that rubbed feeling back into the cheeks of the women downhillers who had just braved bone-chilling temperatures in their daredevil runs down Whiteface. The consoling words that Giant Slalom Winner Hanni Wenzel whispered to France's Fabienne Serrat, who was weeping because she had missed the bronze by one hundredth of a second.