Olympics: Bring Your Own Balloon

"Winter is icummen in," Ezra Pound wrote. "Lhude sing God-damn." And he bemoaned the season: "Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us." Exhorted Pound: "Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM."

So sing, Ethel, because we've been standing here freezing for two hours. Thus ran the mood after the opening pieties of this somewhat dreamily organized chilblain derby, when those in the audience who had not thoughtfully arranged to travel by hot-air balloon had to foot it through the slush for the three miles back to town. Eight marchers were treated at the hospital for frostbite. The bus system had broken down earlier in the week because of a labor dispute, but now, after several days of practice, it was breaking down spontaneously, without need of a labor dispute. The hot-air balloons, on the other hand, worked just fine; they bobbed overhead, all brave and fine and directionless, as Lord Killanin spoke wistfully in praise of peace.

The buses turned balky again that very night, after the first run of the luge, leaving hundreds of people standing on the pavement with cold water seeping into their shoes. The trouble is that Americans would sooner take hook worm medicine than a bus. The fact is that the buses know they are despised, and in their resentment they simply would not stop.

There are many bus-taking nations represented here — Austria, for example, where buses are contented and well behaved — but the Olympic delegations from these nations are made up of big shots who ride in limousines in their homelands, and they no longer know how to smile at a bus that has lowered its ears, pat its flank, and get it to open its doors. No one is quite sure where the buses go when they are not sulkily picking up people at the luge run, but there is no doubt that the ban on private cars has cleared the streets of traffic. State troopers standing in the intersections kick pebbles and talk about their vacations. What is in some question is whether the war between the buses and the people may also have cleared the Games of a good many spectators.

Crowds at the venues have been sparse to medium ("venue" in ordinary English is something you try to change if you face a richly deserved conviction in a court case, but in Olympspeak it is a place where an athletic contest is held). Even the men's downhill, generally thought to be the most grandly lunatic of the Winter Games, drew less than a swarm. At the men's 30-km cross-country venue, the American spectators would have fit around a poker table or two. (Some 400 people rocked from one cold foot to the other, but most were Norwegian or Finnish officials.)