Nicholas Howe [08/12/2008]

By Nicholas Howe

The Olympic Games are a showcase for the best that the athletes of the world can do, and they bring us those displays in glorious fashion, but there are also triumphs that do not show on the medal stand. One of them was The Great Blizzard of '84 that paralyzed the Olympics in Sarajevo. I was on the staff of the American women's alpine ski team, and this week, as the Olympics have opened in China, those Balkan games linger in my memory.It began to drizzle during the opening ceremonies, which was ignored by most of the 5,000 competitors and an equal number of media people, but met with suspicion by the people who lived there. The local apprehension was due to geography. Sarajevo is in the heart of a meteorological wonderland in which anything can happen but nothing can be predicted, a curiosity that is due to its location at the topographical seam where warm moist air flowing in from the Adriatic Sea meets cold dry air sliding down the slopes of the Julian Alps and the Carpathian Mountains that lie like an inverted L at the top of the country.The opening ceremonies in the city began under leaden gray skis that soon turned to a rainstorm that flooded the city streets hubcap deep. It was all snow up on Jahorina, the mountain where the alpine events would be held, and before long the race courses were buried and tunnels had to be dug to reach the buildings where the teams and course workers could store their gear. The storm lasted for eight days, which had two consequences. One was eight days of postponements for the races, the other was eight days of postponements for the ABC television crews.The latter group outnumbered the competitors and they'd scheduled wall-to-wall coverage of the events, but now they had to fill eight days of broadcast time that was now what they call "dead air." Not only that, but the premier of Soviet Russia died without warning. This was first-magnitude news and it had to be covered, but most of the newsmen had left their political files at home. They decided to do their stories by interviewing the teams from the mysterious Soviet bloc, but the hand of Big Brother was heavy on the land and the usual answer was, "I have not yet been told what I think."The downhill skiers were also inconvenienced. They had to figure out new strategies and lines for terrain whose contours they'd memorized as icy hard snow during training, but were now soft powder and changing from hour to hour with no predictable end in sight.There was also a third group, and they had to decide what to do if the outdoor Olympic events couldn't be run at all. These were the organizers, and the problem turned out to be more complicated than it would seem. The Olympics go way back, they're almost inherited from the minds of the gods, and there should be no trifling with the quadrennial schedule. So, if the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics cannot be held in Sarajevo, can they be moved to another country and still be the Sarajevo Olympics? Can they be held in Sarajevo a year later and still be the 1984 Olympics?The organizers decided to keep going and those days in Sarajevo live in the cherished memories of everyone who was there. We do not remember the elaborate pageantry or the mountains of food prepared to meet the many tastes brought by the teams, and most people tried to forget the perils that lay just beyond the city limits bordering this celebration of peace.The Cold War was running very hot, and Yugoslavia was a neutral island perilously isolated between the contending giants of East and West and wracked by both poverty and danger on every hand. The gasoline was so poor that team vehicles ran as if they were burning kerosene. Terror attacks were not just possible, the organizers believed they were probable, but the danger would not come from the political giants, it would come from the contending elements within Yugoslavia itself. No one was forgetting that the assassinations which touched off the First World War took place in Sarajevo, the footprints where the killer stood are preserved in marble on the fatal street corner, and now there were armed soldiers everywhere and machine gun emplacements on the roads outside the city.Two first-year members of our alpine ski team were lightly-regarded, they were there for the experience, they were there for next time, but they scored two historic gold medal upsets at Sarajevo. That's in the record books, but what I remember most is the kindness of the Yugoslavs. The Olympic facilities required a great deal of electricity, so the rest of the country volunteered for two weeks of brown-out to send the required power to the visitors' facilities. There hadn't been enough to eat for many years, but families living in windowless stone huts on the road to the women's race mountain would wave us over and give us tasty treats they'd made because we were their guests.The next winter Olympics were held in Calgary, Canada, and I was still with the American women's alpine group. Calgary is a major city, but accommodations the organizers had prepared for the teams and the media groups were stretched to the limit and I was given quarters and meals in the Banff Springs Hotel. This is one of the most glorious lodging places anywhere in North America, and almost every morning I had breakfast with the sisters who were the original Toni Twins in the long-running advertisements for the celebrated home permanent kit and they still looked very much the part. They were both skiers of ample means and they'd come to Calgary to see the fun, but those tattered people by their hovels on the road to the race mountain in Sarajevo still rank among my best memories of the Olympic spirit. Nicholas Howe is a writer from Jackson. E-mail him at nickhowe@ncia.net.