1992 Winter Olympics: At The Starting Gate

The toddler in leopard-skin coat and hat stirred in his stroller. The Puerto Rican team hurriedly consulted as to how to wear their capes. A huge circle -- the whole town, it seemed -- formed in the street to greet the Olympic flame. And then planes colored the sky, bells tolled through a dream of a blue afternoon, the sun set behind the mountains amid a spangle of fireworks, and the opening ceremonies of the 16th Olympic Winter Games were officially under way.

As the athletes began parading past, chaperoned by rhyming verse in English and French, the rah-rah doggerel gave the presentation promenade something of the air of a Miss Universe contest (finding rhymes for "Latvia" and "Cypriot" must surely qualify as an Olympic-style suicide mission). During the ensuing pageantry, classical romanticism was offset with futuristic whimsy. The air of playful modernity, dreamed up by Philippe Decoufle, a 30- year-old high school dropout who talks of getting ideas while asleep, conjured up a Mademoiselle France who was fresh, lighthearted and a little bit spacy.

Yet among the pleasures of the day, the greatest perhaps were the unchoreographed wonders: the members of the Unified Team, from the famously ununified former Soviet Union, marching under the five-ring Olympic banner; the groups of athletes gleefully waving under the unfamiliar flags of Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia; the lonely skier from Senegal; and the ski-capped twosome from Bermuda, shuffling behind a man in blazer and (c-c-c-could it be?) eponymous shorts. Three days earlier, the show's dancers and clowns had been kids in duffel coats and anoraks, many of them threatening to strike on the grounds that their beds were too small, their salaries too measly and their rooms 90 minutes from the site. The site itself had been a mess of young workers brushing away puddles with brooms, like nothing so much as curling apprentices. Now, however, in the magic of the moment, all had been turned to gold.

Such lofty ruminations were a long way from the thoughts of the typical visitor as he swung around his 14th switchback in 10 minutes, in a bus that labored painfully up the mountain curves like a slaloming snail, its driver consulting a map as he lurched along on the two-hour trip from Albertville to such distant sites as Courchevel and Val d'Isere. Any time not spent in a bus in the days before the Games seemed to be spent in a line for a bus. And on the epic rides along treacherous, icy roads, the passenger could be forgiven for thinking himself a born luger and wondering which new Olympic events he could enter: free-style cursing, perhaps, or uphill climbing, or cheap skating (since a pair of tacos at the top of the mountains would set him back $16). When striking taxi drivers blocked the area's only highway for 10 hours one day, visitors had even more time to ponder the fact that a bob-sled here could travel 40 times faster than a bus.