Andy Again

Andy Again With the winter Olympics winding up at Oslo's famed Holmenkollen ski-jumping hill this week, some 150,000 Norwegians, shouting Heia! after each soaring leap, seemed to think that this was the best of all winter Olympic games. Native-born Arnfinn Bergmann won the big jump; Norwegian Speed Skater Hjalmar Andersen became a national hero by his grand-slam performance in winning the 5,000-, 1,500-, and 10,000-meter races on consecutive days; and Norway, according to unofficial point scores, won the games, 125 1/2 to the second-place U.S.'s 89 1/2. Yet the Norwegians still had plenty of cheers to spare for the top woman performer of the games: the U.S.'s 19-year-old Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Andy, a fortnight ago, had won the 1952 winter Olympics' first gold medal when she skimmed flawlessly down the giant slalom course. Then, in the downhill race, Andy came a cropper, skidding to two bad spills. Such jarring tumbles might well shatter the nerve of an ordinary competitor, but slim-hipped, 130-lb. Andy was in high spirits last week as she inspected the special (i.e., shorter) slalom course for her final race. Andy skittered around like a frisky colt as Coach Herb Jocum and Husband Dave Lawrence plotted her descent. "Gee," said Andy with a carefree grin, "this looks like a swell course."

A third of the way through her first run, Andy was not quite so sure the course was swell. A ski tip caught one of the flag-decked course markers. She spun around, tumbled on her side. Then, to the cheers of the crowd, she bounced up, took five quick climbing steps to make sure she was through the "gate," and set off hell-for-leather for the finish. The spill had cost her at least three precious seconds, but when the first heat results were compiled, Andy was in fourth place. Dave, his brows puckered with worry, left Andy alone: "She knows she's behind, and she knows how to fight."

Andy's getaway on the second heat was a poled jump. She was still jumping eight gates down, cutting the corners high, racing with her skis flat rather than losing time by edging them for more control. She fairly whistled with speed as she zipped across a bridge, cut in & out of a hairpin turn. The knowing crowd was yelling itself hoarse; no one had ever seen anything quite like it. Andy's time: 1:03.4, a full two seconds faster than any of the world's best women skiers had been able to do all day. The feat was comparable to a middle-distance runner breaking the world record for the mile by more than seven seconds. Despite her first-heat spill, Andy had become the first U.S. skier ever to win two Olympic gold medals. Her winning margin, over Germany's Ossi Reichert: eight-tenths of a second.

Other Olympic winners of the week: Figure Skating. The U.S.'s World Champion Dick Button, 21-year-old Harvard senior who worked, between practice sessions, on an honors thesis on the Schuman Plan, won added honors--his second straight Olympic title--with some of the fanciest prances ever seen on ice. Explaining that "I can't copy anybody, because nobody has anything new," Button added his own new stunt to the figure-skating book: a triple-loop jump in which he takes off to three air-spinning gyrations and lands on the same foot with hardly any perceptible loss of speed.

Four-Man Bobsled. Germany's heavyweight team (total weight: 1,050 Ibs.), driven by World Champion Andreas Ostler, edged out the U.S.'s Stan Benham & Co. (weight: 970 Ibs.), by 2.6 seconds in four heats. Since added weight means added momentum, the Olympic Committee has ruled that hereafter average weight shall not exceed 220 Ibs. per man. Sighed one fat bobsledder: "It's diet or quit."

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