A Stunning Show, After All
Heiden 's golden hoard and a hockey upset highlight the Lake Placid Games
The hoisting of the five-ringed Olympic flag supposedly internationalizes a site, enfolding it in the pristine and timeless kingdom of sport. But the Winter Games at Lake Placid seemed to bear a distinctly American stamp, from the incredible hoard of gold in speed skating to the site itself, a pleasant little mountain town swamped by the world. The Games provided a kind of ritual relief during a troubled American moment, supplanting cold war fears with cheers for an ice hockey upset. Like all Olympics, the 13th Winter Games left a gallery of bright images on the retina:
> The American hockey team exploding with jubilation after beating the seemingly invincible Soviets, 4-3, in one of the most astonishing upsets in Olympic history, and then exploding again after defeating the scrappy Finns, 4-2, for a gold medal.
> Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark snaking through the slalom gates with seemingly offhanded genius.
> America's Phil Mahre, skiing with four screws and a metal plate in an ankle he had shattered just a year ago on the same mountain, winning a silver in the slalom, trailing only the mighty Stenmark.
> Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proell working the women's downhill course with the no-nonsense smacking-and-caressing style of a baker kneading dough.
> East Germany's four-man bobsled team rattling down the refrigerated run on Mount Van Hoevenberg in 59.86 sec., breaking the one-minute barrier for the first time ever, then breaking it again the next day, in 59.73 sec.
> Alexander Tikhonov's teammates hurling him in the air after his smooth skiing and deadeye shooting helped them win the four-man biathlon relay. For the Soviet army major, it was an unprecedented fourth gold in four Winter Olympics.
The two weeks were filled with stunning performances, but two were truly memorable. The underdog U.S. hockey team conquered all with its boundless enthusiasm, typically playing its best and scoring the goal that put the game against the Finns on ice when it was shorthanded because of penalties. Afterward, President Carter phoned Coach Herb Brooks to say: "We were trying to do business, and nobody could. We were watching TV with one eye and Iran and the economy with the other." But even the thrilling hockey victory could not overshadow the accomplishments of a young and unassuming speed skater from the Midwest. Perhaps the most vivid single image of the 1980 Winter Games was the sight of Eric Heiden's heroically muscled thighs molded in a skating skin of gold as he stroked his way to five Olympic golds, five Olympic records and one world record. Nothing in Olympic history rivals that performance.
For chauvinists and chroniclers, the race for medals was hardly a race: the East Germans and Soviets, as usual, scooped up medals by the fistful. But thanks to Heiden and the hockey team, the U.S. did remarkably well: six golds, to nine for the East Germans and ten for the Soviets. On a per capita basis, however, the hands-down winner of the Lake Placid Games was tiny Liechtenstein (pop. 24,000); the brother-and-sister skiing act of Andreas and Hanni Wenzel whisked to two golds and two silvers.
It is a good thing the Lake Placid Games were so athletically dramatic, because not since Napoleon's armies withdrew in frostbitten disarray from Russia have crowds in winter been handled in quite such fashion. Thousands who had made their expensive way to Lake Placid stared numbly down empty roads, waiting for buses in the Adirondack cold. The Rev. Bernard Fell, local chairman for the Games, was so frustrated by the wayward buses that at one point he actually suggested, somewhat facetiously, banning all spectators from the events so as not to overtax the transport system.
But in the end, the foul-ups seemed merely part of the freight to be paid for bringing the vast apparatus of a modern Olympics to a tiny upstate New York village. The skill of the athletes and their eagerness to excel made the Games exactly what all had hoped they would be: a splendid spectacle.
Nowhere was there more splendid evidence of that skill and desire than on the 400-meter skating oval. It was there that Eric Heiden, with his smooth, ferocious scissor steps, his trunk crouched double, long skate blades tearing minute excavations in the ice, stroked toward an astonishing procession of gold medals.
Heiden spent 25 min. 19.07 sec. at Lake Placid elevating himself to the company of the greatest Olympic athletes who ever lived. Along the way he kept shaving whole seconds off the existing Olympic records--in a sport where hundredths of a second can be crucial. In the 500-meter race, he cut 1.14 sec. from the Olympic mark; in the 1,000-meter, 4.14 sec.; in the 1,500-meter, 3.94 sec.; in the 5,000-meter, an incredible 22.19 sec.; in the 10,000-meter, 22.46 sec. (for good measure, he broke the world record for this grueling event by 6.2 sec.).
Heiden alone won more gold medals than any American team in any Winter Games since 1932, when the U.S. took six. No man had ever won more than three gold medals in a Winter Olympics, no woman more than four (Soviet Speed Skater Lydia Skoblikcva in 1964). The record holder for gold medals, winter or summer, is U.S. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven in 1972. But three were for relays, and he was racing over short distances--100 and 200 meters.
What makes Eric's achievement all the more awesome is that he won at every distance, from the sprinter's 500 meters to the endurance man's 10,000 meters. It is this span that sets Heiden's feat apart from other great Olympic performances: Czechoslovakia's Emil Zatopek winning not only the 5,000-and 10,000-meter runs but also the marathon in 1952; Finland's Paavo Nurmi taking the 1,500-and 5,000-meter runs and the 10,000-meter cross-country in 1924.
Said Norwegian Skating Coach Sten Stenson: "In Norway, we say that if you can be good in the 5,000 and 10,000, you can't do the 500. But Eric can do it. We have no idea how to train to take him. We just hope he retires." "What Heiden is doing," said U.S. Marathon Star Bill Rodgers as Eric's medals piled up, "is comparable to a guy winning everything from the 400 meters to the 10,000 meters in track. There may be guys who can do 5,000 and 10,000 meters, but to do this--my God! Equating it to running, it is doing the impossible." Said Bob Mathias, winner of the Olympic decathlon in 1948 and 1952: "It's spectacular. He has to have the sprinter's ability, plus the lung capacity and the stamina for the longer distances. He is just a super athlete."
At 6 ft. 1 in., 185 lbs., Heiden is certainly one of the best-conditioned athletes in the world. Sometimes he bicycles 100 miles a day to build endurance, bending low over the handlebars and drilling his body to keep that horrific skater's crouch. He lifts weights, he duck-walks for miles, he rollerskates, he spends hours each week sliding back and forth in stocking feet across a 10-ft. formica-covered slideboard, an exercise that mimics the speed skater's side-to-side stroking of the ice. After eight years of such routines, Heiden's thighs are oak thick in circumference: 29 in. each.
Even with such conditioning, the speed skater endures considerable pain. Before a 10,000-meter race has ended, Heiden says with feeling, "you think you'd give your life to be able to stand up. Your back is killing you so much you'd do anything to get out of that crouch." Each race has distinctive elements of suffering. The 1,500-meter, for example: "When it's over, you cough up fluid from your lungs for a couple of days afterward. The 1,500-meter hack, we call it. I like the 1,500-meter the most, but I've got to prepare for the pain. The only way you can win it is by suffering a lot."
In addition to his strength, discipline and sheer natural speed, Heiden has another edge: he is a shrewd competitor. Speaking of the 10,000, his final test, he told TIME Associate Editor B.J. Phillips last week: "It is a strategy race. You have your intervals [planned times for each lap] and you try to keep to them but, within that, there are things you can do to work on the other guy. You can try to get behind him for a few moments and let him break the wind for you, like race-car drivers do. Or you can pick up your speed for a lap or two and make him think he's dying, maybe get him a little panicked. And you've got to watch out he doesn't do the same things to you."
When the skaters warmed up for the 10,000-meter race that would be Heiden's chance for a fifth gold medal, the arena was jammed with spectators. Along Main Street, fans who had not been able to get tickets climbed homemade ladders in order to peer over the fencing. Heiden stayed in perfect form. "He's not a beauty skater, he's a strength skater," says Leah Poulos Mueller, an American speed skater who won silvers in the women's 500- and 1,000-meter races. Yet in the end Heiden's strength was beautiful to watch. As he raced, Heiden precisely placed one blade just four or five inches in front of the other, pushed out at a 45DEG angle and then screwed his blade into the ice for power by rolling from the outside to the inside edge.
In the last four 400-meter laps, Heiden was magnificent. Despite the growing pain, he skated each lap in exactly 35.2 sec. Finishing in 14:28.13, he was so tired that he could not even lift his head on his victory lap, let alone acknowledge the cheers.
With one of the great performances in Olympic history behind him, Heiden plans a sort of post-Olympic idyl of "goofing off"--racing bicycles in Florida, then camping and traveling in the western U.S., passing up his killer drills for the first time in years. "It's been so long since I've had a lot of free time, no training, no meets. Now I can do what I want to do." Eventually, he expects to go into sports medicine, possibly as an orthopedic surgeon like his father. He will spend next year studying at a sports medicine institute in Norway, where he has a Norwegian girlfriend.
"After I come back," says Eric, "I may do some endorsements, if people are still in me. People forget awfully fast. I remember in 1977 after I won the world championships. The man who held the title before me was skating around the rink and nobody recognized him. I came out and was mobbed. Popularity drops pretty quick after you stop being on top. Things will cool off for me, and that's the way I want it." How would he like to be remembered? "The way I am. Just me, Eric Heiden."
Eric's celebrity left his little sister, Beth, 20, in a bittersweet state. She had been swept along in her brother's wake, and some said she could take four golds. The expectations were much too high and put far too much pressure on her. Although she had won the World Championship in 1979, some of her rivals were then still rounding into top form. They were ready for Lake Placid, and Beth finished seventh in the 500, fifth in the 1,000 and seventh in the 1,500 meters. It was an excellent showing, but some newsmen treated her like a failure.
Beth had a good excuse, but did not use it: her left ankle had been injured a month ago much more seriously than outsiders suspected. When she began to favor the leg, the other ankle flared up, and her main strength--the efficiency of her strokes--was impaired. For all that, Beth finally won a bronze medal in the 3,000 and would have been the all-round women's skating champion if the events had been judged collectively, as they are in the world championships. Still, her medal brought tears of anguish as well as joy. At her press conference, she said: "I'm happiest when I skate for myself. But this year I feel I have to skate for the press. The hell with you guys."
If the Winter Olympics turned Eric Heiden into a golden apotheosis to Americans, the Swedes had long since made a national hero of Ingemar Stenmark, an eerily perfect slalom racer who is as popular at home as Bjorn Borg, the tennis champion. At 23, Stenmark has won the World Cup three times. Before Lake Placid, he had taken 14 World Cup giant slalom races in a row while competing against the best racers in the world--a record as awesome in its own way as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941. In some ways, Stenmark is the Alpine equivalent of DiMaggio. He has the same gift for doing the impossible in an unhurried, almost languid, offhandedly elegant manner. Declares Austria's Coach Karl Kahr: "He has that special feeling. Certainly, training is part of it, but it's also a gift--like the ability to learn a foreign language."
Stenmark only rarely competes in the downhill; its headlong plunge does not appeal to his sense of precision. He is strictly a specialist in the slalom and the giant slalom, fascinated by their intricate swoops and switchbacks. At Innsbruck four years ago, Stenmark fell in the slalom and had to content himself with a bronze in the giant slalom. He came to Lake Placid determined to take the big prize that had escaped him, a gold medal.
Thousands climbed up Whiteface Mountain to watch Stenmark in the first of two runs in the giant slalom. At the countdown, Stenmark poled powerfully out of the start house and into the first few tightly set gates. He was minutely off on the turns at first, then settled into the swoopingly rhythmic gate-to-gate dance that makes his style instantly recognizable. Just at the penultimate gate, Stenmark slid down so low on his right ski that his body was canted almost parallel to the snow. For an instant, it looked as though his try for gold would vanish in a white detonation of arms and legs and skis. Instead, Stenmark simply reached down and pushed himself up with his right hand. But the near fall slowed him just enough to leave him in third place, behind Liechtenstein's Andreas Wenzel and Austria's Hans Enn.
There is in Stenmark a certain wintry remoteness that recalls another perfectionist of Scandinavian blood, Charles Lindbergh. After that first run, Stenmark irritably fended off reporters, as he almost always does. "Questions, bloody questions," he muttered, and turned away.
Something about the second run of the giant slalom seems to evoke all of Stenmark's skills and desire. Once, he ranked 23rd after the initial round and still managed to win, since first place is decided by the combined times of the two runs. On the second run down Whiteface, Stenmark swept down the course in a style close to perfection. His timing, his anticipation of the gates, his relaxed air, gave the run a preternatural grace. A cat can slink across a dressertop dense with perfume bottles and barely brush them with its fur; Stenmark went through 55 gates like that. Near one of the final gates, his skis chattered into a left turn and slid slightly. He corrected, and shot home to a gold medal, more than a second faster than Wenzel. The bronze went to Austria's Enn.
Three days later, Stenmark skied the shorter slalom course with such artistry that he won his second gold medal, plucking it away from Phil Mahre, 22, probably the finest male skier the U.S. has ever produced. After his ankle injury on the same Whiteface course a year ago, Mahre began skiing toward a surprising comeback. In his first race in Europe this winter, he did well enough to earn World Cup points. Said Team Director Bill Marolt: "Who could have believed he could do it in his first race? God, what an athlete!"
Mahre is a strong and bold competitor. His first run down Whiteface last week was a brilliant attack--nothing held back, no ghosts, no fear, just a great technical skier slicing through the gates on a line as pure and fast as the mountain would allow. Leading after that first run, he was hardly out of the start house on the second when a bouncing gate pole dropped across his skis, slowing him for an instant, upsetting his concentration, almost making him fall. The damage was done; the imperturbable Stenmark overtook Mahre in the second run and snared the gold by half a second. Still, Mahre's silver made him only the third American man ever to win an Olympic alpine skiing medal of any kind. (Billy Kidd took a silver and Jimmy Heuga a bronze in the slalom at Innsbruck in 1964, the only other medalists.) Mahre went over and congratulated Stenmark, and then the two super skiers, who used to train together, sat side by side in the sun like old friends and watched the rest of the competition.
While Stenmark was being Stenmark, Europe's top women racers were putting on a spectacular show of their own on Whiteface Mountain. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proell had also come to Lake Placid with a point to prove. Like Stenmark, she held the record for World Cup career victories (61 for her, 46 for him) and, like Stenmark, she had never won an Olympic gold medal. At Sapporo in 1972, when she was 18, she had been forced to settle for two silvers, and she missed Innsbruck in 1976 because she was at home in Kleinarl, Austria, nursing her father, a Tyrolean farmer, in his terminal illness. She came to Lake Placid, at age 26, knowing it was her last chance for gold.
"Moser-Proell," says former U.S. Ski Team Director Hank Tauber, "is the toughest woman athlete I have ever met." She is a calm, concentrated woman with fiercely appraising ice-blue eyes who carries a solidly efficient 147 lbs. on a 5-ft. 7-in. frame. At the downtown Lake Placid house rented for the women's team by the Austrian Ski Federation, all talk about gold medals was banned. Moser-Proell spent the evening before the women's downhill crocheting a red tablecloth--possibly something for the Cafe Annemarie that she runs with her husband Herbert in the off-season at Kleinarl.
At Whiteface next morning, the temperature was zero and the wind-chill factor made it feel like --50DEG. Team assistants used a hair dryer to keep Annemarie's boots warm and flexible in the small start house atop the 2,698-meter downhill run. Her face was coated with an anti-frostbite cream. Sewn inside her uniform was a photograph of her father.
Skiing in sixth position, Moser-Proell charged the course hard, risking everything in the tight, steep, slippery turns on the top of the run. She crouched into an aerodynamic tuck where no one else dared. It was a display of intimidating control, and it gave Moser-Proell a gold medal as well as a slight case of frostbite.
Behind Annemarie to take the silver came Liechtenstein's Hanni Wenzel, 23, the stocky older sister of Andreas, 21. In the women's giant slalom, Hanni and Annemarie reversed their positions, and then some. Hanni worked down the course in smooth and easy runs to take the gold, with West Germany's Irene Epple winning the silver and France's Perrine Pelen the bronze. Annemarie, who does not care much for the giant slalom, finished sixth.
Two days later, Moser-Proell took a spill on the steep upper portion of the shorter women's slalom in the first run and was eliminated. Hanni stayed upright and swept to her second gold by a commanding margin of nearly 1.5 sec. With two golds and a silver in the three alpine events, she matched the smashing performance of West Germany's Rosi Mittermaier in the 1976 Winter Games at Innsbruck.
No moment was sweeter for the Americans than the last instant in the 4-3 hockey victory over the Soviets. The berserk din in the Olympic arena must have been dimly audible at the Canadian border 50 miles away. Anyone on the International Olympic Committee who thought that politics has nothing to do with the Games should have sampled the crowd's ear-splitting roar: "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" The feisty young American players began by raising their sticks toward the rafters in an eruption of glad amazement, and ended by arcing them into the cheering crowd for souvenirs.
If it was a bit foolish, even sad, to savor the victory as an act of geopolitical symbolism, Americans nonetheless had a right to be proud of their boys. A pond-hockey pickup crew of collegians, they had knocked off an athletic machine assembled from the best that the Soviet army and the Moscow Dynamo could produce--the best team in the world, professional or amateur. Basically the same Soviet outfit trounced the National Hockey League All-Stars at Madison Square Garden last year. The Soviets have won the title in every Olympics since 1964; the Americans last took the gold 20 years ago in Squaw Valley.
This year's U.S. team, assembled by Coach Herb Brooks from cold-weather colleges in places like Massachusetts and Minnesota, were occasionally ragged, but as tough and willing as a neighborhood mutt. Just a few days before Lake Placid, they had lost to the Soviets, 10-3, in an exhibition game in Madison Square Garden. But at the end of the first period last Friday, the Americans left the ice with a 2-2 tie, thanks to a last-second goal scored by Mark Johnson from the University of Wisconsin. When the Soviets returned from intermission, they came out playing as if they had had intimations of Siberia. Their slam-bang forechecking kept the Americans from penetrating much beyond center ice. The game got brawlingly physical. Trailing 3-2 as the final period started, the Americans started skating better and controlling the puck with more authority. Thrown offstride, the Soviets were unable to set up then-intricate plays or pass cross-ice.
A penalty for high-sticking gave the U.S. a man advantage and Johnson rammed in his second goal, with an assist from Boston University's Dave Silk, to tie the game. Just 81 sec. later, Mike Eruzione, the team captain, drove home a rebound for what proved to be the winning goal. Across the American night, millions of living rooms and bars reverberated with a noise of deep satisfaction, and President Carter invited the whole team to the White House, along with the rest of the U.S. Olympians, for lunch.
In figure skating, there were occasional dazzling moments, but much of it was disappointing. At Lake Placid, the ice belonged to Heiden and the hockey players.
Reigning Men's World Champion Vladimir Kovalev of the Soviet Union dropped out of the singles figure-skating competition, supposedly disabled by flu. The best American hope, Charlie Tickner, 26, is normally a stylish and energetic skater, but all week he seemed curiously flat. In the free-skating competition, he suffered some awkward technical problems with a triple jump, but his main difficulty seemed to involve something spiritual: he rarely displayed any of the fire and joy he has given his skating in recent years.
Tickner did take the bronze, but the men's gold went to Britain's Robin Cousins, 22, who brought to Placid the elegant and fluid style that had won him his first European championship several weeks earlier. But even he did not skate with his usual relaxed confidence. He faltered on one of the triple jumps in his undemanding program; his gold medal was a triumph of style over substance.
The silver went to East Germany's Jan Hoffmann, who made no mistakes in his athletic free-skating program but left the overall impression of an expertly twirling oak tree. Many of the figure skaters, in fact, seemed to be phoning in their performances from Albany. That was not so of Americans David Santee, 22, who had made a fetish out of the movie boxer Rocky, and tiny Scott Hamilton, 21, who ricocheted around the arena like an exuberant puppy. The two gave the men's competition badly needed shots of enthusiasm; they placed fourth and fifth.
The best U.S. hope for a U.S. figure skating gold medal after Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner dropped out was Linda Fratianne, 19, but she got off to a shaky start, finishing third in the compulsory figures. Fratianne complained that West Germany's Dagmar Lurz, who finished second, had been rated too high. "I went out and saw her third figure and the second circle of her loop was short, fat and off-axis," said Linda. Her coach, Frank Carroll, said irritably that "the judges always put Dagmar in there as a buffer between Linda and East Germany's Anett Poetzsch, so that Linda has to come from behind to win." A two-time world and four-time U.S. champion, Fratianne is an excellent but vaguely apprehensive skater; she has only rarely been able to disperse the little cloud of worry that hovers over her performances. She had come to Lake Placid as the favorite, but now she had to beat both Poetzsch and Lurz.
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.
Unless the turmoil over this summer's Moscow Games succeeds in destroying the Olympics altogether, some of the athletes who were at Lake Placid will meet again at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, four years from now. But most athletes have a competitive prime that does not last much longer than a cherry blossom, and for them there will be no more Games. Some left Lake Placid with medals and glory. Some came away with nothing more than the memory of having competed. Yet in a sense, that is everything. Beth Heiden, fighting back tears after her last race because, even though she had performed superbly, too many people had expected too much of her, put it pretty well. ''You probably heard that slogan about participation is more important. Well, I believe in it."
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