Clear the Way For the U.S.A.

By Tom Callahan

It is only for two weeks every four years that most sports fans in the U.S. pay attention to international snowball fights. So even though he was a speed-skating idol in Amsterdam long before 1980, Eric Heiden of the Golden Skates was an astounding discovery at home. One charm of the Winter Olympics is the inexpert opinion, maybe not completely mistaken, that the athletes in these neglected sports come close to some lost ideal, possibly even amateurism. Against a bright backdrop of ignored ski jumpers trying to fly with Finns, and irrepressible luge racers careering down icy troughs, young hockey players good enough to beat the U.S.S.R. can be taken for children, even after they disperse and report directly to the National Hockey League.

Well, innocence may be catching up with America, because the U.S. is certainly gaining on the cold world. The team of 120 athletes headed for Sarajevo is flush with champions, and not only skaters this time, although there is a bumper haul of those, but skiers too. Count them, seven current or recent world titleholders: Alpine Skiers Phil Mahre, Steve Mahre and Tamara McKinney, Figure Skaters Scott Hamilton, Rosalynn Sumners and Elaine Zayak, and Nordic Cross-Country Skier Bill Koch. Once the American public finds out that there is also a Nordic combined event and that it involves a 70-meter leap one day along with a 15-km mush the next, who will believe that just about the best in the world at the moment is someone from Colorado named Kerry Lynch? Vermonter Jeff Hastings, one of those ski-jumping birdmen only casually acquainted with gravity, won a World Cup event in December at Lake Placid. Not only are hopes high, but the cause for hope is real and a bit exhilarating (see following stories).

In Phil Mahre and McKinney, the U.S. boasts both overall 1983 World Cup champions in Alpine skiing, an astonishing double in a sport that has been essentially the property of Western Europe. As of four years ago, Marilyn Cochran's giant-slalom title in 1969 constituted the Americans' solitary accomplishment in any of the three World Cup disciplines: slalom, giant slalom and downhill racing. While winning three overall championships since 1980, Mahre has skied away with three individual World Cup titles, and his twin brother Steve is a past world champion in the giant slalom. While both Mahres have begun the young season poorly, Phil standing 62nd and Steve 45th on the World Cup charts, they appear undismayed. Finding the groove can be like reaching up and flicking on a switch. In any order, the Mahres are capable of finishing one-two in either of the slaloms. Actually, it was Steve who won a World Cup slalom race last week in Parpan, Switzerland, though a mix-up of bib numbers with his brother disqualified him. Phil imagines the reason that he is the greater success is "maybe just because Steve didn't want to be. I was more on course while he was still deciding how he felt about ski racing."

McKinney is the first American woman to win an overall World Cup, and is also the giant-slalom champion. This season has likewise started slowly for her (seventh place), but last week in Maribor, Yugoslavia, McKinney followed Swiss Rival Erika Hess by just six-hundredths of a second, more than a good sign. "In the summer there was not much snow," McKinney says, "and I felt like I was training all the time. I think I got worn down by it." The trainer of the women's team, John Atkins, says, "If we put in the same amount of work as the Europeans, we would not have a prayer. We have to work harder, sweat more and cowboy it out. More and more, the elegant, pretty skiing doesn't make it. What wins is the slam and bash and amazing recoveries. When you have 90 women with pretty much the same ability at the top of a hillside, the ones who are going to make it down first are those who take the risks without thinking about it."

Joining McKinney among the well bruised are Christin Cooper, a slalom and giant-slalom specialist who sometimes outshines Tamara, and Downhiller Maria Maricich. If Veteran Cindy Nelson is recovered from a knee injury, she is strong across the board.

The men may have found themselves a downhiller. Last week at Wengen, Switzerland, Bill Johnson scored the first World Cup victory ever by an American man in a downhill, despite screeching off course on one ski almost into the woods (talk about slam, dash and amazing recoveries). Austrian Franz Klammer was annoyed. If the Americans are going to start winning downhills, truly nothing is sacred any more.

U.S. figure skaters usually invest all their hopes in one particular woman and, lately, no special man, but this time there are two eminent females, 1983 World Champion Rosalynn Sumners and 1982 World Champion Elaine Zayak, as well as the world's best male skater for the past three years, Scott Hamilton. A compact strongman, Hamilton should be the royal presence in these games and is thought to have a Heiden's lock on the first U.S. men's singles gold medal since David Jenkins won in 1960.

American women regard the singles figure-skating competition the way the Austrians do the downhill.

In the land of Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Carol Heiss and Tenley Albright, the silver-medal performance by Linda Fratianne at Lake Placid four years ago was considered a slip-up (the gold went to East German Anett Potzsch). But it is not standard for U.S. women to be fighting among themselves the way they are now; so evenly, that is. Sumners beat Zayak in the 1982 nationals, only to have Zayak rebound a few weeks later at the Worlds, and a sequined hair-pull has been in progress ever since.

At last week's U.S. championships in Salt Lake City, after Hamilton had skated to victory with immaculate control, the competition among the women took a toll. Sumners won, though not impressively, and an obviously tired Zayak fell twice during her free-skating exhibition, winding up third behind promising Tiffany Chin, 16, of San Diego.

Figure skating actually predates the Winter Games as an Olympic sport. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived brotherhood in 1896, he forgot to take temperature into account. Figure skating first appeared at the Summer Games in 1908, and brought hockey along in 1920. It was not until four years later that Nordic skiing, speed skating and bobsledding joined them for the first winter pageant, the others straggling in later, the biathlon (skiing riflemen) not until 1960, the luge 1964. But the premiere event is still the first: figure skating.

Considering that their sport, or art, is based on stability, skaters' emotions seem as fragile as snowflakes. Many of the participants appear as softly vulnerable as the star-crossed couple of Lake Placid, Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia. Something at the base of this light and lovely sport is dark and disturbing. At tender ages, children by the pair are instructed how to hold on to each other as intimately as a man and woman, to hang on for dear life and try not to fall. When dropped, they shatter. Olympic athletes in almost all of the various sports heed nutritionists and other modern helpers, but the figure skaters make the best use of psychologists.

The American pair, Peter and Kitty Carruthers, have a chance to win a medal. If Ice Dancer Michael Seibert has fully recovered from mononucleosis, he and Partner Judy Blumberg could do better than that. Ice dancing is less dangerous (no throwing one's partner) but requires as much practice, more than Seibert's illness has permitted. In an intriguing adaptation of Professor Harold Hill's "think" system, Seibert and Blumberg have been practicing in their minds. "Sounds crazy," she says, "but it works." At Salt Lake City, his stamina was fine, and their winning performance was beautiful.

The Olympians with the hardest act to follow, of course, are the hockey players. A committee of coaches, National Hockey League scouts and other experts began the selection process by composing a list of the 80 top amateur players (some 30 of them N.H.L. draftees). They were evaluated in competitions at the National Sports Festival in each of the off years, and last July a team of 27 was selected largely by Coach Lou Vairo, a jovial former shinny player from that hockey hotbed Brooklyn. The star of the team, the center of "the Diaper Line," is Pat LaFontaine, 18, the No. 1 draft choice of the New York Islanders.

Before ever contemplating a rematch with the Soviets, the U.S. hockey team must contend with the Czechs, the Canadians and the Finns, all seeded higher. Without the warmth of home ice and the chants of jolly jingoists, the Americans may require more than a miracle this time. "They're going to need all the breaks that we got, and more," says Herb Brooks, who coached the gold-medal team. "We had a lot of lucky bounces, and everything seemed to fall into place at the right time."

The Olympic hockey team is handsomely endowed by five major sponsors (Miller beer, Sasson clothes, Isuzu Motors, Bristol-Myers and Chock Full O' Nuts coffee) plus gate and television receipts from its 65-game exhibition tour; one televised match with the Soviet All-Stars in Lake Placid provided $500,000 of the $1.3 million budget, about a tenth of which is funded by the U.S. Olympic Committee. The ski team has 23 sponsors (including Oscar de la Renta, Texas Instruments, Subaru) and a $4.5 million budget. The "amateur" skiers can strike rich endorsement deals as long as the money is paid through the team "for expenses."

Meanwhile, subsisting pretty much on their U.S.O.C. allowances, the biathletes (annual team allotment: $60,000) buy most of their own bullets and the luge racers ($90,000) their own sleds. The cost of a sled is between $800 and $1,000, and literally anyone who could demonstrate the ability to get from the top to the bottom without mortal injury was eligible to enter pre-Olympic competition; there are ten places on the Olympic team (seven men and three women, no doubles competition among women). Finishing twelfth in the Olympics still qualifies as a triumph for an American sliding downhill feet first on a Flexible Flyer.

The U.S. won five bobsledding gold medals during the '20s, '30s and '40s, but the bitter bobsledders' joke is that some of those crates are getting pretty old. To this enterprise, the U.S.O.C. chips in about $100,000 annually, and Corporate Sponsor Lederle Laboratories helps somewhat. But the equipment afforded is far from the best on the mountain. Not just holding down the bobsleds, but holding them down for the count, those good old boys from Saranac Lake, Plattsburgh and Keene Valley in upstate New York are still just about the best bobsledders in the Adirondacks and not quite the worst in the world.

On the alltime winter medal list, Americans stand third (36 gold, 44 silver, 29 bronze: 109) to Norway (50, 54, 45: 152) and the U.S.S.R. (59, 40, 41: 140). There is a rosy hope of adding 15 at Sarajevo, if that should be a huge concern. Cross-Country Skier Koch wishes the media would emulate the solitude of his sport or at least consider the Olympic ideal. "If 100 people enter a race," he says, "that means there have to be 99 losers. The worst thing that you can teach chil dren is that so many of them will be losers. Because then they won't even try. It's the striving, the attempt, the fight, that's the Important thing." Lynn Spencer-Galanes, half of a husband-wife U.S. Nordic-skiing couple, says, "Nobody knows for sure how much effort really goes into it. Even coaches."

As for financial profit, the marketability of a brand name showing on a ski propped over an Olympic champion's heart is obvious. And an ice show hardly knows what to call a star if she has won nothing more than a silver medal. Fratianne, who performs for Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom on Ice, says, "It's kind of the difference between being rich and really rich. Maybe it cost me some money, but all I can say is, now I can live happily ever after."

A hockey player might conceivably raise his price on the basis of one heroic fortnight. Mike Eruzione, the bridge painter and minor leaguer who retrieved his amateur status to captain the 1980 team, has made something of a cottage industry out of these moments. There was a quick Coke commercial for Jim Craig, the goalie everyone wrapped in a flag, but the flavor did not last. American Express has just revived the 1980 team:

"Do you know us?"

Heiden, who swept five speed-skating gold medals, chose not to capitalize beyond a few polite nods here and there. His sport is as obscure as ever. Even though the U.S. has won 16 speed-skating gold medals, including the first one, by Charles Jewtraw in 1924, few Americans are stirred by so much gliding and arm swinging. Terry McDermott, the skating barber of 1964, and Sheila Young, a highlight of 1976, came around (and around) without cutting any lasting ice.

Now Heiden, the greatest speed skater in history--and an American--has flashed through without leaving a trace. Dianne Holum, the coach of the 18-member speed-skating team, a four-time Olympic medalist herself, laments, "You would hope that after Eric's success the sport would grow. The disappointment is the realization now that it will never happen." The Olympic speed-skating team is in some disarray, quarreling over coaching methods. Several of the male skaters continue to follow defrocked Coach Bob Corby, who offended some of the women by his concern for their weight. Furnished $500,000 by the U.S.O.C., the speed skaters did not expect a corporate sponsor, and they have none. One thing about speed skaters, though, when they tumble and go sliding into the wall, they always dust off their bottoms and finish the course. Mary Docter and Erik Hendriksen are America's best, but a medal for either will be cause to rejoice.

In age, America's team members range from 17 to 35, and their occupations are varied: carpenter, state trooper, insurance agent, Navy frogman. Naturally, there are also a lot of semiprofessional amateurs.

Men and women alike, they will come to Yugoslavia dressed as cowboys, in white stetsons, fleece-lined shepherds' coats, boots and jeans. This is roughly the same rig the U.S. wore to the opening ceremonies four years ago. The American imagination must know some other variation of bundling up.

But then, the Russians will probably wear the same sealskin furs and resemble happy brown bears again. Olympic Games open and close with parades. The first is always glorious, and the last is usually a little sad. At U.S. sports events, the national anthem is commonly played and generally ignored. But every four years people strain to hear it, and not only does the melody seem improved, but the meaning is clearer in the Alpine air. It is fun to sing to the mountaintops. --By Tom Callahan. Reported by Jamie Murphy/New York and B.J. Phillips with the U.S. figure-skating team, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jamie Murphy, B.J. Phillips