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Maier survived a monstrous spill to take two golds

Second Wind

The Nagano Olympics may not have earned a gold medal, but all that glitters isn't made of that kind of metal

By PICO IYER /NAGANO

he Olympics, to invoke a perhaps too-available and all-encompassing analogy, are much like the Titanic, both the movie and the ship. In other words, it's a grand, old-fashioned blockbuster that stirs you in some primal, half-forgotten place, however vigilant your defenses, throwing up simple human images of panic and delight and loss; and a huge, showy, zillion-dollar model of the family of man that, for all its state-of-the-art grandeur and planning, cannot outswerve a block of ice. It shouldn't work, but it does; things should work, but they don't. As the surprise U.S. silver medalist in the doubles luge, Chris Thorpe, said of his surprise bronze-medalist teammates, "They don't have great lines, they don't have great form. They just fly."

If medals were awarded for staging an Olympics, Nagano would doubtless receive a silver, the color of its snowfall; almost everything Japanese was delicate and accommodating except the weather, which turned skiers on their heads when it wasn't doing the same to schedules. In the end, however, true grit prevailed: the fastest man on skis, Hermann Maier ("Other Name: Das Monster," his official bio explains), confirmed his extraterrestrial status by getting up from a horrific crash and picking up two golds in four days; his female counterpart, Katja Seizinger, returned to form by winning two golds in two days. Even little Denmark claimed its first Winter medal ever, in curling--quite a feat for a nation that doesn't have a functioning curling rink. For Japan, the Games were a happy windfall, as the host nation rode on the cheers of its faithful fans to win more golds in 16 days than it had won in 70 years of Winter Games. Ski jumper Kazuyoshi Funaki assured himself of heartthrob status by flying away with three medals; more movingly, Masahiko Harada, who had let glory slip away in his final jump in two consecutive Olympics, somehow pulled off the longest jumps in Olympic history in two consecutive events to claim redemption. Roar after roar ran through the crowd, larger than in all the other arenas combined, and the grand swelling of emotion in a people not usually demonstrative touched even foreign hearts.