Sticking a ski pole into the ground for leverage and vaulting a couple of meters forward to the accompaniment of rock music from a boom box. Wiggling back and forth on skis around a series of powdery bumps, periodically climbing these hillocks to leap off, flinging one's limbs spread eagle for a nanosecond or thrusting one's hindquarters left and right during a fleeting free fall. Skating at breakneck pace in a roller-derby throng around the perimeter of a hockey-size rink. Scuttling along a sheet of ice, brushing away bumps with a broom to clear the path of a flat, slow-moving stone. Or ducking one's head, bracing one's breakables and trying to hurtle faster than a sports car down a short stretch of sheer slope, sans turns, sans twists and sans breathing.
Hearty, vigorous, genial and suitably spandexed these activities all are. But are they really sports worthy of the Winter Olympics? Do ski ballet and aerials and moguls, short-track skating, curling and speed skiing display the requisite patina of frostbitten history and frigid heritage? Do they evoke the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that is Nome?
The answer to that question is a resounding "absolutely" from fans and a resonant harrumph from keepers of the flame. Spectators in Albertville have been cheering for the newcomer sports, in part because several French competitors have been medalists or contenders. But elsewhere, TV viewers have been granted only modest exposure and minimal instruction. What they have been most likely to sense is an aura of novelty and rebellion.
The half a dozen start-up sports this year include two debuting as medal events: free-style skiing over bumps, or "moguls," and short-track speed skating. Four others are being classed as "demonstration" sports -- a shadowland category, bestowing medals that are not real medals -- that will be dropped altogether after this year. It is up or out: they must become medal sports or disappear from the Games.
The decision on their fate, which will rest with the International Olympic Committee, is of vital significance to the pride and profit of each parvenu sport's participants, impresarios, bureaucrats and merchandisers. Getting a sport recognized takes years of lobbying and piles of documents. Moments after he won the first ever moguls skiing gold medal, Edgar Grospiron of France shifted from exultation to exhortation. "After this," he told the press last week, "we will have to continue to work hard so that the other free-style skiing disciplines, ballet and aerials, also become medal events."
Mogul skiing, in which Donna Weinbrecht of New Jersey earned the women's gold medal last week, is dramatic. It involves slaloming among scores of boneshaking bumps down a straight 820-ft. course while completing two jumps, striving for both style and speed. Its curse, like that of so many Winter Olympics sports old and new, is that it involves subjective judging. That inevitably means at least a suspicion of politics -- of favoring the stalwarts, whatever their performance on the day, over outsiders who may rise to one particular occasion.