Olympics: Only the Lake Was Placid

(10 of 10)

But all that lies far ahead, and attention remained focused last week not on the geopolitical aspects of sport, but on the accomplishments of remarkably gifted athletes. The Winter Games maintained a marvelous level of tension, at times exhilarating, at times poignant. The plot seemed only to improve as the competition went on. And at week's end any number of stimulating questions were still to be answered. Can the bumptiously wholesome American hockey players summon up the old college try and keep on winning? Can America's Linda Fratianne capture the figure-skating, gold medal? Can America's stylish Charlie Tickner possibly triumph in the men's figure skating against Britain's brilliant Robin Cousins, East Germany's exact Jan Hoffmann and the Soviet Union's unyielding Vladimir Kovalev? Will Ingemar Stenmark, the matchless Swedish craftsman, take the two slaloms that so surprisingly eluded him at Innsbruck in 1976? Can Lake Placid really bring it off? Will the buses ever arrive on time? As the British sporting phrase so aptly puts it: "Play on."