Games at Garmisch (Cont'd)

In the tiny Bavarian towns of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where winter makes the little houses look like gingerbread and sugar, the eleven days of skiing, skating, hockey, bobsledding, which compose the Fourth Winter Olympic Games, ended last week.

Officially, no country ever wins the Olympic Games. Scores are kept only for individual events in which the first three contestants get respectively gold, silver and bronze medals. Unofficially, sportswriters long ago worked out a system to determine team championships by awarding ten points for first place, five for second, four for third and so on down to one point for sixth in each event. On this basis last week, the U. S., winner of the Olympic Games at Lake Placid in 1932, finished a feeble fifth. Norway won with 121 points. Germany was second with 57, Sweden third with 49. Less startling than these results to the 350,000 people who watched the games was the scrupulous courtesy with which Nazi Germany utilized its opportunity to make a favorable impression on its visitors. Most significant squabble of the week was a minor argument in a hockey game in which a French player bit a Hungarian in the arm. More remarkable than the games themselves was the behavior of the guests, whose antics, touched by the sparkle of a gala sports event, kept transatlantic cables buzzing through the week. P:In nearby Oberammergau, famed Anton Lang, Christus of the Passion Play, grew excited over radio accounts, went over to Garmisch to see what they were all about. An expert winter sportsman, he watched the fancy skaters, wagged his grey beard with approval when Germany's Karl Schafer got the gold medal. P:U. S. Columnist Westbrook Pegler arrived from London, reasoned that the miserable showing by the U. S. might be a benefit in disguise. Wrote he: "If the trip had been called off, the firm-jawed, clean-limbed, clear-eyed American athletes would have felt that they had been denied a great honor and privilege, to say nothing of a free trip to Europe, and might have blamed the Jews for that. Now, however, at most they demonstrated that they did not deserve so much as a nickel ride on a street car much less a voyage deluxe to the Old World. . . . This, then, should result in the manufacture and sale in large quantities of skates, skis, boots and costumes . . . which . . . will be provided by our Jewish neighbors in the garment trade."

P: Last fortnight, Germany won the downhill & slalom skiing, Finland, the 40-kilometre ski-race. At the finish last week, 15 more Olympic championships had been decided. The events:

Figure Skating is patterned on the ballet. To make sure their figures would fit perfectly the music which accompanied them, World Champion Pair Skaters Ernst Baier, 29-year-old Berlin architect, and Maxi Herber, his 16-year-old Munich protegee, last autumn had themselves photographed in action by a cinema camera, sent the film to a composer who devised a score to match their action. This painstaking process justified itself last week. The seven judges soberly awarded Skaters Herber & Baier first prize for a demonstration which supplied in finish whatever it lacked in spontaneity. Viennese Bandleader Karl Schafer, who made the Austrian swimming team in 1928, took the men's title. Blonde Sonja Henie of Oslo won the women's championship as she did in 1928 and 1932.

Bob-Sledding. Like Hubert Stevens, driver of one U. S. Olympic sled, who owns a Lake Placid hotel, is the most famed German bobber, Hans Kilian, who owns one at Garmisch and until last fortnight held the record for the Garmisch run. Like Stevens and a French team, which brought a streamlined sled, Kilian failed miserably last week, wound up in seventh place. Swiss teams took first and second. Three days later the U. S. won its only gold medal of the Games when an Adirondack guide named Ivan Brown, with his neighbor Alan Washbond at the brakes, won the two-man bob-sled championship, after breaking the course record three times in four trips.

Skating Races contributed the most brilliant single performance in the history of the Winter Olympic Games, by Norway's Ivar Ballangrud. He won three races (500, 5,000 and 10,000 metres), set world's records in two, finished second to his teammate Charles Mathisen in the 1,500 metre race.

Hockey. After an involved round robin, Canada lost the Olympic championship it has held since 1924 to England. The U. S. was third.

Skiing. Swede Artur Larsson nosed out three fellow-Scandinavians in the 18-kilometre ski-marathon. Oddbjorn Hagen of Norway won the combination 18-kilometre race and jump. In the ski jump, watched by a crowd of 130,000, Norway's stumpy little Birger Ruud averaged 245 ft. for his two jumps, kept the title he won at Lake Placid four years ago.

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