Absolutely everybody I know inevitably asks me exactly the same thing. “Aren’t you thrilled to be going to the Olympics?” And when I demurred even briefly, hesitant to puncture their fantasies that attach to my job, they answered the question for themselves with unwavering conviction. “Well, of course you are,” they’d say, before capping our exchange with a little Lou Gehrigism. “You are the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Perhaps. Through three previous Winter Olympic sojourns, I have witnessed more thrills and chills (more about the chills later) than any mope like me deserves. I saw Dan Jansen, a millimeter from the fall that would saddle him with the label of biggest choker in sports history, right himself and finish his career an Olympic champion. I saw Surya Bonaly land a backflip in the face of Japanese skating star Midori Ito and rattle her so badly that Kristi Yamaguchi breezed to the gold medal. I saw Bonnie Blair toe the line; long before America’s love affair with our World Cup women transformed our notions about female athletes, I understood that Blair was the toughest competitor I had ever witnessed.
I saw Herman Maier rise up from the most frightening crash imaginable–a long soaring freefall into a brutal splat and then an endless roll through two sets of restraining fences–and come back only days later to win gold. I celebrated with the Japanese when their speed-skating idol captured the nation’s first-ever gold. And I stood with 400 other journalists, packed so tightly we could barely breathe, on a makeshift platform to get a first glimpse of Tonya and Nancy staring daggers at each other at a skating practice in Lillehammer.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
And if watching figure-skating soap operas or great sporting events was all that my job at the Winter Olympics entailed, my joy would be boundless. But let me share some little-known facts about the Winter Games that may shed a little light on my muted enthusiam. First of all, it’s coooooooold! I’m not talking that brief chill when you get out of your car and stroll into your home. A Winter Games is equivalent to spending three weeks standing on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, where the wind–“the hawk,” as Lou Rawls labeled it–dismembers your body and numbs your spirit. And right now Salt Lake is experiencing “inversion,” a high-pressure system that traps fog between the mountains. It brings with it a wet, bone piercing chill that has local officials warning spectators to upgrade their protective gear.
As TV spectators, you primarily remember the finishes of events. We tend to remember the starts. And the start often starts early. Like for the downhill, when you rise at 4 a.m. to beat the crowd, which will transform a 40-minute highway jaunt up the mountain into a two-hour bumper-to-bumper crawl. Once at the base of the slope, you jockey for position, peering up at the mountain through the blinding white or the dense fog. And all the time you’re desperately mainlining coffee in a futile attempt to stay warm. Finally, after three anesthetizing hours in which you learn some terrific Austrian curse words, a guy emerges from a steamy hut and announces that there isn’t enough visibility on the course to assure the skiers’ safety: let’s try again tomorrow.
The cold is bad, but hardly the worst of what looms here. That’s when you start shivering and this time you’re indoors, that dreaded moment when you realize you have succumbed to serious illness. As one USOC wag informed the press in a tongue-in-cheek memo last week, the question isn’t whether you’re going to get sick, it’s how soon and how sick. After all, the media center is a windowless cavern where the flus of 100 nations mingle and mutate. Pretty soon a cough has the same effect as a machine-gun burst in a war zone, sending everyone in the vicinity diving for cover. The lucky escape with no worse than a hacking cough, a raw throat and a steady mucous drip. But there are always casualties, some poor lug carted off to the hospital, looking like he took a sharp elbow from Apolo Ohno hellbent for gold on the last turn of a race.
I was, frankly, also concerned about the availability of certain medicines essential to combat the Olympic grippe. Namely those that you self-prescribe, a couple shots with dinner and maybe a shot before bedtime. But Salt Lake Olympics chief Mitt Romney has made good on his pledge to make liquor readily available, despite the multitude of restrictions that Mormon leadership normally enforces on this community. But Romney is well aware that the wrath of the international press could obscure the critical message that Salt Lake is a burgeoning international community of growing sophistication. So booze is bountiful, if you don’t consider a martini with one ounce of gin false advertising or a hotel minibar with no liquor in it an oxymoron. Still, waiting on my office desk upon my arrival was a membership application for the New Yorker Club, the Oyster Bar and Club Baci, more private clubs than would ever have me in my hometown. And our whole crew is anxious to sample a local microbrew, Polygamy Porter, which has the enticing slogan of “Why have just one?”
But all these concerns and anxieties contribute to a certain ambivalence and even a slight grumpiness before I arrive. But a funny thing always seems to happen once I burrow in. I wake up and peer out my window at the beautiful mountain landscape. The city is as clean as the slopes. And the locals are welcoming and friendly, almost frighteningly so to anyone raised on the social distances of the Eastern seaboard cities. When they ask “How ya’ doin’?” in the local dialect, it’s a shock to discover they expect an answer. Even the soldiers carrying automatic weapons say, “Have a nice day” after they finish inspecting your car. By the time the opening ceremonies hit their first note of high schmaltz, I will be fighting back tears. And when that flame erupts gloriously against the dark of the mountain backdrop, and I contemplate the world at play, not at war, I no doubt will tell myself, “I’m the luckiest guy on the face of the earth.”
