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Such scenes are worth cherishing when one hears too much about
doping scandals and billion-dollar bullet trains, and when the
eye makes out giant Coke bottles in the middle of white Alpine
silence. Indeed, one by-product of last week's reminder that
nature doesn't bend to bullet-train schedules was that suddenly
curling, unsmudged by the snow, appeared on Channel 36 in
Nagano, and then on Channel 48 and Channel 47, the camera
trained on competitors who looked like your Uncle Bob and the
sound track made up of nothing but their curses, asides and
excited cries of "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" (a technical term, one
was told, meaning they should move fast). Another unlikely
savior in the spotlight.
Every Olympics is a grueling 100-km cross-country marathon that
puts the host on show and on trial. But as the official Games
suffered lost heroes and snarled buses, the unofficial ones kept
on digging through the snow to find something glinting. At the
ski-jumping area on Japan's Fourth of July, schoolchildren sat
on the snow and 40,000 fans clenched fists and held their breath
as the ill-starred old man of Japanese ski jumping, Masahiko
Harada, aimed at his first gold. Eight spectators even sat in
wheelchairs on the slopes to witness the likable veteran give
Japan a formal birthday present.
This time, as so famously before, Harada fell at the last
hurdle, tumbling on the last of the day's 92 jumps from first
place to fifth. But his teammate, Kazuyoshi Funaki, scored a
silver. And at almost exactly the same moment, on another
mountain, a 21-year-old freestyler from Hokkaido was bouncing
toward the podium with a picture of her father by her heart.
--With Reporting by Hannah Beech and Frank Gibney
Jr. /Hakuba And Lawrence Mondi /Nagano
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