NAGANO 1998	MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8
	Jump For Joy! Triumphant and proud, Nagano sustained a few bumps and spills. But in the final reckoning, the Games were a stirring display of the power of the human spirit By PICO IYER /NAGANO he Olympics are much like Titanic, the movie: a grand, old-fashioned blockbuster that stirs you in some primal, half-forgotten place, however vigilant your defenses, with simple human images of panic and delight and loss. And like Titanic, the ship: a huge, showy, zillion-dollar model of the family of man that, for all its state-of-the-art grandeur and planning, cannot outswerve a block of ice. The Games of Nagano couldn't outswerve a few disasters of their own, but as a living spectacle--sometimes horrifying, more often inspiring--the Olympics worked, as they always do. As a surprise U.S. silver medalist in the luge, Chris Thorpe, said of his surprise bronze-medalist teammates before the competition, "They don't have great lines, they don't have great form. They just fly." If medals were awarded for staging an Olympics, Nagano would doubtless receive a silver, the color of its snowfall; almost everything Japanese was delicate and accommodating except the weather, which turned skiers on their heads when it wasn't doing the same to schedules. In the end, however, true grit prevailed: the fastest man on skis, Austrian Hermann Maier ("Other Name: Das Monster," according to his official bio) confirmed his extraterrestrial status by getting up from a horrific crash and picking up two golds in four days; Germany's Katja Seizinger returned to form by winning two alpine golds in two days. South Koreans cheered North Korean short-track speed skaters, as North Koreans cheered South Korea to gold in that event. Even little Denmark claimed its first Winter medal ever, in curling--quite a feat for a nation that doesn't have a functioning curling rink. For the Japanese the Games were a happy windfall, as the host nation rode on the wave of its faithful fans, bravely waving flags in heavy snowstorms, to take five golds in less than three weeks--more than it had won in 70 years of Winter competition. Ski jumper Kazuyoshi Funaki assured himself of heartthrob status by flying away with three medals; more movingly, Masahiko Harada, who had let glory slip away in his final jump four years ago, somehow pulled off the longest jump in Olympic history in two consecutive events to claim redemption. Roar after roar ran through the crowd, larger than in all the other arenas combined, and the grand swelling of emotion in a people not usually demonstrative spoke of a national pride reborn. In 1964 the Tokyo Olympics were seen as formally commemorating the nation's arrival in the Executive Class of nations, a grown-up power to be reckoned with. Now Japan faced a much harder task: living up to the expectations attendant upon the world's second largest economy. But the Games, as had been hoped, did offer a respite from a long spell of political inertia and recession--the country's 100th gold medal came just two days before a fourth person hanged himself in a government financial scandal. And in new heroes such as Hiroyasu Shimizu, who speed skated away with a gold and a bronze, Japan had a perfect image of how it likes to see itself: a 1.6-m "little giant" who conquers much taller rivals from the West. The Games showcased the look of the New Japan in the manicured Funaki, with his gold-streaked, unrepentant, "I jump for myself" credo (like freestyle gold medalist Tae Satoya, he looked as if he were on his way to a Venice, Calif. dance club). Fans of the old-style samurai got their man in Harada, who smiled heroically through all his disappointments, and whose open, friendly face registered every feeling as he won medals for perseverance and not being cowed by the past. After he helped secure the gold in team ski jumping, he held onto an old friend, and sobbed and sobbed. Americans were presumably less happy with the proceedings. The millionaire-filled hockey "Dream Team" won just one of its four games, and, pining perhaps for the days of being an amateur underdog, trashed parts of the Olympic Village before departing. A sparkly Tara Lipinski ("Occupation: Pupil") and an obviously disappointed Michelle Kwan ("Hobby: Corresponding with pen pals") claimed gold and silver in figure skating, and joining them on the medal stand, in her last Olympics, was a radiant Lu Chen from China. As at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, it generally fell to women to lift U.S. spirits: Nikki Stone, told she could never ski again two years ago after a back injury, claiming a gold in freestyle aerials; or Chris Witty, winning a bronze and a silver in speed skating. Perhaps the most rousing moment came when the U.S. women's hockey team beat four-time world champion Canada, 3-1, to take an emotional gold. The two games between the fierce enemies introduced fans to a style of fluency and electrifying passion that put many a National Hockey League game to shame, as well as to such new words as "underwomanned." Though body checking is not allowed in women's hockey, it would have been hard to tell that to any of the bodies flying across the ice, while maple leafs clashed with stars and stripes all around the packed arena. "We have an intense dislike and an intense rivalry," said Canadian coach Shannon Miller after seeing 20 penalties in a preliminary game on Valentine's Day. But when the American women beat her team for the second time in three days, Miller still looked up and "had a feeling of joy going through my body. Because an Olympic gold medal was being hung around the neck of a female hockey player." All the new sports, in fact, left their mark: perennially cutting-edge snowboarders treated the Olympics as if they were a halfpipe, and curling captivated so many television viewers across the world with its stately version of Go on ice that in Sweden viewers protested when a local channel switched to figure skating. Sometimes, the Nagano Games could seem less dynamic than aerodynamic, as competitors muttered about clap skates and luge booties and rubber strips on speed skaters' uniforms that helped them fly. But all the machinery in the world couldn't erase the piercing human moments: Harada, with his back against the temporary wall of a cafeteria, after his failure to win gold in the normal-hill jump, a copy of the Results Sheet in a glove that said "Japan"; or Cammi Granato, the captain of the U.S. hockey team, after a black lacquer disc with gold dust was hung around her neck, holding her face in her hands, overwhelmed. Before the Games, an organizer had rallied his troops by reminding them, "We should regard even a slice of meat and a piece of tomato as representative of Japan." In fact, though, the last Olympiad of the millennium opened out into a new post-national order in which an athlete named Kyoko skated for the U.S. and a Dusty tended goal for Japan (while Sweden's Ulf Samuelsson was forced off his hockey team, when it was found he carried a U.S. passport too, and so was no longer technically Swedish). Dutch speed skater Gianni Romme, after setting the first of his two world records before a crowd of jolly, orange-clad countrymen who turned the M-Wave arena into a province of Holland, said there was nothing special about his country's program. "We are Dutch, but we could be Norwegian or German." Next to him, Bart Veldkamp, who'd managed to break the Dutch monopoly only by switching nationality to become part of the Belgian team, said, "I was born in Holland, I skate for Belgium. But if you are looking at the moon, and ask, 'Where do you come from?' I come from Earth." That's why the Olympic spirit survives any icebergs that come its way.
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