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Yet as the week went on, the victories in the face of difficulty
began to pile up, sometimes from surprising faces, sometimes
from the old familiar ones we had almost forgotten amid talk of
an Olympic youth movement. Often, in fact, looking up at the
podium, one could imagine oneself in some Eastern version of
Sleepy Hollow. There was Artur Dmitriev, lifting his new partner
Oksana Kazakova to a gold, with a long program of soulful if
hardly flawless majesty, and collecting the medal he had won six
years before. There was Georg Hackl, the businesslike German
soldier, shooting away with the gold in the men's luge, as he
had done in Lillehammer and in Albertville. And there was slalom
ace Alberto Tomba, saying he wanted to find a girl to settle
down with. As the newcomer Kazakova said, after surviving a
singled double Axel, "We have a little problem"--and then her
face brightened--"but I think no problem."
Every Olympics, of course, finds many of its highlights in the
corners, where no one thinks to look for them. The upper-case
Games were about Wayne Gretzky's checking into the Olympic
Village like an Everyman; the lower-case ones were about
lesser-known athletes' rubbing shoulders with the Great One. The
marquee performer in the men's downhill, when finally it was
completed, Hermann Maier, stormed out of the starting gate and,
at the first major jump, turned into a cartwheeling,
somersaulting blur of red and orange as he crashed through two
retaining fences and ended up in a snowdrift without his skis
(but miraculously walked away like the tough bricklayer he was).
In the same race, Jean Luc Cretier, a customs officer who had
never won a major downhill, skied to gold.
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