Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 12, 1994 TAG: 9402120172
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK McDONALD DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: LILLEHAMMER, NORWAY LENGTH: Medium
Sixty-nine nations will troop their colors during the opening ceremonies, and 1,988 athletes will take part in the Games.
With 162 athletes, the U.S. team will be the largest by far, and the Americans will be wearing their boots and Stetsons to today's festivities.
The home team, Norway, has a roster of 94 athletes and almost certainly will be among the top medal-winning nations. On a per-capita basis, the Norwegians could well be No. 1 by the end of Day 16.
Appropriately, a Norwegian will get the first standing ovation of the 1994 Winter Games - if he can stand up.
Stein Gruben will sail off the ski jump with the Olympic flame in hand.
His heart, undoubtedly, will be in his throat. Gruben is a replacement for Ole Fidjestol, the original flame-bearer who was hospitalized Thursday after crashing on his first practice jump.
And if Gruben also flames out?
"We have plans for everything," says Bentein Baardson, producer for the ceremonies.
Those plans include trolls and Vikings, a good-size herd of reindeer, a couple hundred folk dancers, a thousand children and one king.
His Royal Highness Harald V will make an appearance today, and the masters of ceremonies will be actress Liv Ullmann and scientist Thor ("Kon-Tiki") Heyerdahl.
But they fit, somehow, at these Olympics. There already is a folksiness to the '94 Games, a simplicity and scale that has been lacking at recent Olympiads.
Two years ago, the Games were based in Albertville, France, a flyspeck truck-stop of a town, with most of the venues spread all over the Alps.
The 1988 Games in Calgary, Alberta, had plenty of drama and a rowdy frontier charm, but there was virtually no snow.
That definitely will not be the case in Lillehammer: The region is one good dusting away from setting a record for snow.
The snow and the cold are great levelers, of course, and they make the very nature of a Winter Games wholly different from a Summer Olympics. Things are on a more human scale. There's less pretension, less excess.
There's no Dream Team, for example, living in $900-a-night hotel suites. Instead, we have the Norwegian army, in the spirit of an environmentally correct Olympics, deploying its soldiers to pick up all the lead bullets fired at the biathlon range.
No corporate yachts, and no lines of limousines idling at every curb. Almost all private cars have been banned from the Olympic region during the 16 days of the Games and an electric-powered Zamboni is being used - no propane, no diesel - to resurface the ice at the skating and hockey venues.
But the best metaphor for the Lillehammer Games might be the trusty Norwegian "spark."
The model of simplicity and utility, a spark is a kind of cobbled-together sled that is the preferred mode of transportation along the snowy village streets here. It looks rather like a geriatric walker, with a wicker shopping basket stuck on the front and sled-runners welded on the bottom.
Up and down the Storgata, the principal walkway through Lillehammer, everybody clumps around in oversize boots and overstuffed parkas. Their ski hats give them couch-hair, tourists and gold medalists alike. Their noses run. Their lips get chapped. They slip and fall on the ice.
It's really a kind of frost-bitten human comedy, with usually harried folks managing to find an extra 10 minutes to stop for a quick aquavit or to wrap their hands around a steaming cup of "varm sjokolade."
They might stop to notice the ridge of pines up at Hunderfosssen, site of the bobsled and luge runs. They might ski the trails of the Birkerbeiner course, home to the cross-country and biathlon events. They might wait to spot a Nancy Kerrigan, but they'll be just as satisfied with an Italian slalom star or a Finnish ski-jumper.
At every Games there are oddities, and even though Olympic organizers are trying to keep the snow-plow skiers and "Eddie the Eagle" ski-jumpers out of the Games, Lillehammer has its share of, well, eccentricities: There's the cross-country skier from Fiji, a figure skater from Israel, the luger from Bermuda and, yes, back again, the Jamaican bobsled teams.
But the more things remain the same, the more they change. Two years ago in Albertville, it was Plus Vite, Plus Haut, Plus Fort.
Now, for the next 16 days here in Lillehammer, the Olympic motto is rendered as Hurtigere, Lengere, Sterkere.
Faster, higher, stronger.
And maybe better.
by CNB