Finally, the Olympic Games

For two weeks the whole world is young and strong and fearless, sporting and peaceful and clean. That is the Olympic myth and the wellspring of the Games' enduring appeal. They are like a national patriotic day for the whole world, a day when flags wave and people march and the grim realities of the past and, often, the present, are forgotten in a global surge of pride and unity. The reality has often been less inspiring -- in Hitler's Berlin in 1936, in the Munich beset by Palestinian terrorists in 1972, in the tit-for-tat cold war boycotts of 1980 and 1984, not to mention the myriad smaller moments when political bitterness or personal dishonor or random fate blemished the panorama of joyful striving. But whatever the misdeeds and mischances, the myth continually reasserts itself and endures. So it is always a surprise when the Olympics fall short of what the world imagines, a respite from the ordeals of daily headlines and household heartbreak.

This year's games, in bucolic Lillehammer, in serene Norway, promised to be more than usually escapist. The ideological bombast between East and West has vanished without even the vestige of the old order that marked the Albertville competition in 1992 -- the "Unified Team" of swiftly separating nations that were united only in rejecting their common heritage. This year's tiny host nation, a folksy land of reindeer and trolls, has welcomed the world with no harsher intention than occasionally overcharging for a beer.

* Yet as the Lillehammer Games began in panoply and kitsch, they seemed, especially to Americans, painfully ill-starred. From murder and mayhem to medical peril, from fatal accidents to merely mortifying tumbles, from wolf- pack aggression by American reporters to spontaneous affronts by the egalitarian hosts toward the pampered panjandrums of the International Olympic Committee, the news often evoked disillusionment or dismay.

And over everything has loomed the sorry spectacle of Tonya and Nancy. Their contretemps is not only a living metaphor for tarnished ideals of sport but also a depressing reminder that a litigation-mad and bureaucracy-laden society has if anything diminished its means of extracting plain truth in timely fashion. Whatever the ultimate twist of their tortuous saga, it seems certain that the contest they both sought so ardently to win will unfold without decisive evidence of Harding's innocence or guilt. The satisfying simplicity of sport, with its winners and losers and tangible numbers and seemingly objective results in a world otherwise given to opinion and guesswork, will in their case be marked by an asterisk of moral doubt. Perhaps that ambiguity reflects the real world as it mostly is. But that is all the more reason to hope for something else from sport.

If the assault on Kerrigan made a kind of crude competitive sense -- a product of ambition, anxiety and greed -- many of the sad stories that led up to the Games seemed, by contrast, altogether senseless. They involved suffering that could bring no one any gain.