(3 of 10)
Private cars were banned within a 15-mile radius of Lake Placid, and an elaborate bus system was devised to shuttle some 25,000 spectators per day to outlying parking areas. It did not work. Hundreds were stranded for hours in the subfreezing cold, miles from events, motels or parking lots. To help out where needed, the committee set up a cadre of volunteers from the surrounding area. Garbed in bright blue snowsuits with yellow trim, they did their earnest best to make visitors feel welcome. The state police took their responsibilities so seriously that they hauled away an illegally parked car belonging to Art Devlin, vice president of the Lake Placid Organizing Committee, and another belonging to the FBI. Indeed, the citizens sometimes out-organized themselves. The mother of American Speed Skater Leah Poulos Mueller, who has sharpened her daughter's skates through 20 years of competition and two earlier Olympics, found herself banned from facilities at the rink, but a Lake Placid teenager let out of school for the grand holiday could wander in and stare at the stars.
Security, understandably, remained a serious concern. The Village and the surrounding areas of competition bristled with small arms—not the ubiquitous submachine guns manned by guards that were so startling at Innsbruck four years ago (a legacy of the massacre of Israelis in Munich in 1972) but an immense arsenal of handguns. Even the security men working for the state's environmental-conservation department office carried pistols.
But Lake Placid has no sinister air about it, nor could it have; it is not that kind of place. The opening ceremonies were small-town and goodhearted, vaguely resembling a high school football halftime show with unlikely overreachings in the direction of Super Bowl kitsch. A crowd of 22,000—slightly less than capacity, because some ticket holders were stranded without transportation—gathered in the stands at the old Lake Placid horse-show grounds to meet the athletes. The Canadians, the eighth team to march into the stadium behind their colors, brought a deep roar of thanks and a standing ovation from Americans remembering the Canadian diplomats who smuggled six U.S. hostages out of Tehran last month. The Soviets were received tepidly but politely; when a man in the stands shouted "Afghanistan, Bananistan, get your ass out of Kabul!," he was quickly shushed by fellow spectators.
Vice President Walter Mondale proclaimed the Games open, and a jogging psychiatrist from Tucson lit the Olympic flame. Like a county fair run mildly amuck, the ceremonies then erupted with a swarm of released doves and helium-filled balloons, followed by the gentle flyby of two dozen immense hot-air balloons. It was fun, and the display left the crowd in an ebullient and expectant mood. As the spectators filed out, members of the American ski team were climbing onto one of the buses that had brought them from the Olympic Village. "Right on!" someone in the crowd cheered at the team. The American kids grinned back.