Neither Sleet Nor Snow

One of the biggest problems at the Winter Olympics is winter. At Grenoble last week, heavy snow and gale-force winds, followed by a quick thaw, forced postponement of the men's downhill ski races and two-man bobsledding, then threatened to wash out the tobogganing altogether. The slippery slopes played havoc with the U.S. ski team: two fractures, a sprained ankle, a dislocated shoulder and a gashed head. A television helicopter crashed into a snowbank, forcing a French skier to veer off course into a fence, and a runaway toboggan smacked headlong into a spectator.

As if all that were not enough, Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, blew up his own storm on the eve of the Games by demanding that the Alpine competitors paint out the trademarks on their skis. The skiers refused--after all, they get their equipment free from the manufacturers. Eventually, the argument ended in compromise: the competitors agreed to take their skis off before posing for photographs.

His Appointed Round. Neither sleet nor snow nor Avery Brundage could stay France's Jean-Claude Killy, 24, from the swift completion of his appointed round. Favored to win all three Olympic Alpine races--downhill, giant slalom, special slalom--Killy was under tremendous pressure. "He's too tense," insisted Austria's Toni Sailer, himself a triple gold-medal winner in 1956. "He can't win." But on the day of the downhill, the pressure seemed to ease. Killy stood patiently at the starting gate, the picture of confidence as he awaited his turn and checked the speeds of competitors. He was No. 14, and by the time he pushed off, the run was rutted and choppy; the leader was his own teammate, Guy Perillat, who had started first and zipped down the 1.8-mile course in 1 min. 59.93 sec. "I knew Perillat's time," Jean-Claude said afterward. "I figured I had the race in hand." He did. His body tucked low to cut down wind resistance, he was a blur in blue as he slashed through the turns and flashed down the long schuss at something like 70 m.p.h. Crossing the finish line, he slammed to a stop and looked up at the timing board. The figures read: 1 min. 59.85 sec.--a victory for Killy by 8/100 of a second.

Not all the contests at Grenoble were that close. Austria's pretty Olga Pall, 20, won the ladies' downhill by almost half a second over France's Isabelle Mir. The pro-caliber Russian hockey team blanked Finland, 8-0, and East Germany, 9-0, then handed the U.S. squad its third straight defeat, by the equally lopsided score of 10-2. Nine-time World Champion Eugenio Monti, at 40, demonstrated that he has lost none of his skill and daring by piloting Italy's No. 1 sled to victory in the first two heats of the two-man bobsled. And no one could keep pace with Russia's Ludmila Titova in the ladies' 500-meter speed-skating race, although three U.S. girls--Minnesota's Mary Meyers, Illinois' Dianne Holum and Ohio's Jenny Fish--tied for second place, and all got silver medals.

Wearing the Green. The week did produce one real shock when Italy's 27-year-old Franco Nones became the first person other than a Scandinavian or Russian ever to win an Olympic cross-country ski race. A wiry customs agent from Castello di Fiemme in the Dolomites, the tireless Nones sped 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in 1 hr. 35 min. 39.2 sec., to beat Norway's Odd Martinsen by the margin of 49.7 sec.--roughly the equivalent of three city blocks. Some experts credited Nones' victory to the wax he used on his skis --a special green wax designed particularly for the kind of crusty, frozen snow that covered the course. But Third Place Finisher Eero Maentyranta of Finland, who won the same brutally taxing race at Innsbruck in 1964, allowed that wax was not his problem. Said he: "I was so exhausted I had to stop and be sick."

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