Olympics: Only the Lake Was Placid

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Compared with the downhill, with its extravagant relationship between gravity and a sort of exhibitionist will, speed skating seems tame to Americans, an exercise grindingly precise, an icy, athletic watchmaking. Only in recent weeks have Eric and Beth Heiden, the brother-and-sister speed skaters from Madison, Wis., begun to educate Americans about the beauties of their sport: the swoopingly powerful grace, the lean, economical rhythms of a skater swinging over very fast, gray-blue ice, bright, silver shavings leaping minutely in the sun with every snick of the skate blade. In Norway and The Netherlands, citadels of the sport, Eric is an athletic hero. As the Olympics approached, he acquired celebrity in his own country.

The 500 meters is Heiden's weakest event. Five days before the Olympics opened, he lost the first heat of the world sprint championships to U.S. Teammate Dan Immerfall, an upset that left Immerfall mildly dazzled and Heiden, oddly enough, relieved. "The defeat took some of the pressure off," said Heiden. "I could relax a little."

He felt easier as he got set for the 500 meters in Lake Placid, and found he was in one of those splendid matchups that rarely occur in a sport in which the race is not against another but against the clock. The pairings for speed skating are a matter of pure chance. For the 500 meters last week, the draw for the inner lane was the Soviets' Kulikov, the current world record holder in the event and the gold medal winner in 1976. For the outer lane: Eric Heiden.

When Heiden skated onto the ice, the crowd chanted rhythmically, "Eric! E-ric!" Heiden and Kulikov stripped down to their sleek, skintight uniforms. Their hair was tucked into constricting hoods that improve their aerodynamics but, says Heiden, make it hard to breathe in any position other than a skater's crouch.

There was a false start, charged to both skaters. Then the race was off cleanly: it amounted to a little more than half a minute of intense windmilling energy, an event of amazingly compacted skill. Speed skating is a contained, glyptic art, etching heat applied to ice. Kulikov whipped through the first 100 meters .05 seconds faster than Heiden. Then the Soviet slipped for an instant on the first turn, stuck out a hand, regained his balance and held his lead into the backstretch. The two men switched lanes in the backstretch, as prescribed, but Heiden was still behind going into the final turn. He began to accelerate as the most dangerous moment in speed skating approached: going at 30 m.p.h., he had to fight the centrifugal force of the turn. Heiden was digging into the ice as though his blades were geared to small and furiously spinning wheels of diamonds.

The American came out of the turn in a dead heat with Kulikov. Heiden's powerful, heavily muscled legs chopped into the ice and his strokes sent up rooster tails of shavings. There was no such trail of glittering ice in Kulikov's wake. Heiden pulled away to win and establish a new Olympic record of 38:03 sec., 1.14 sec. faster than the mark achieved in Innsbruck by Kulikov. The Soviet, who finished in 38.37, had to settle for the silver. Heiden said later that he felt almost as though he had been fired out of a slingshot when he came through the final turn. It was one of the great moments of the Olympics' first week.