Getting Ready to Play the Palace

By Tom Callahan

Sarajevo prepares for the winter and the world

The Los Angeles Olympics next summer will be the pride of capitalist gamesmen. For what the Yugoslavs whimsically call "the other Olympics," they have gathered $140 million from worldwide TV rights, $3 million from Coca-Cola, and various other millions from 22 corporations, including the Miller Brewing Co., Nikon and Kellogg, to put on something of their own commercial Games. Unlike the Los Angeles production, however, the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games have required a great deal of construction. And far from refusing individual contributions as the Los Angeles committee has, the Sarajevo organizers have politely accepted $10 million from 1.4 million citizens, amazing support in an economy where the dinar is down to one-sixth of its 1979 value against the dollar.

Sarajevo, from the Turkish saray (palace), is a bustling mountain valley city (pop. 447,687) where world events have visited before. In 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was assassinated there by a local student, precipitating World War I. The places where wars begin evidently have a limited appeal for tourists, since the airport felt no need for a modern landing strip until one was installed this year.

Nine fir-lined peaks ring the town.

During World War II, Josip Broz Tito sheltered his partisans in the caves and crannies that honeycomb the hills, and in 1942 Tito's future Foreign Minister, Koca Popovic, led the First Proletarian Brigade across a plateau called Freezing Point. Temperatures fell to -40DEG F, and 200 troops lost either their limbs or lives. This is where the Nordic events, the ski jumping and the biathlon will be held in February.

So congested is the Olympic program, six ice hockey games will precede the Feb. 8 opening ceremonies, unusual scheduling but appropriate to an organizing committee furious to stay ahead of itself. Thanks to Yugoslav heart and volunteer labor, the matter is being accomplished. While much remains to be done, everything is essentially ready. For the past two years, thousands of workers have been blasting, digging and building heartily. The merriest have been 5,000 teenagers, sweating ten hours a day just a few weeks ago, leveling the ski-jump ramp, laying carpet in the athletes' quarters, working literally for a song at the end of the shift.

When testing was needed for the speed-skating rink at the Zetra complex (a renovated 30-year-old stadium, a new indoor arena and an outdoor skating oval), 10,000 "volunteers" a day showed up with their skates. The Games have already been an occasion for joy.

New structures include a 7,000-bed dormitory for visiting journalists, a radio-TV complex, a press center, a dozen restaurants, and some 15 inns for an expected 30,000 tourists, from whom the organizers hope to net $50 million. Besides the 2,000-capacity Mojmilo Olympic Village, which is a series of high-rise apartment buildings, a special hotel for competitors in the Nordic events was built cantilevered on the face of the mountain. Athletes with icicles in their beards will begin to report there in January, the better to muffle the shock of the Sarajevo winter.

From his command post in a chalet on Bjelasnica Mountain, Anto Sucic, 55, president of the executive committee and former mayor of Sarajevo, peers out at the men's Alpine courses. Sucic is enthralled with the financial picture. "The marketing was our biggest success," he says. "Marketing will cover about 75% of our costs, and we could have done more if we had started earlier. We looked for sponsors, sought them out. We tried very hard to create competition. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola came to us with bids, but we wanted more competition than that, so we brought in some other companies as well. We didn't care who the sponsor was, or what country it came from. We are not opposed to any sponsor's ideology."

The president of the organizing committee is another pragmatist named Branko Mikulic, 55, who served as the liaison between the planners and the government. But Sucic is the day-to-day decision maker. Mindful that Yugoslavia is standing inspection for the world and that everything had better be right, the federal government and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (of which Sarajevo is the capital) have not interfered.

If as a business proposition the Sarajevo Games have been inspired to a degree by Los Angeles, they have been modeled as a sports event after Innsbruck, Austria, the city that was such an attractive host to the Winter Games in 1964 and 1976. During Sucic's six-year tenure as mayor of Sarajevo, he made the felicitous acquaintance of Alois Lugger, the Innsbruck mayor. They hunted bear together near Sarajevo in the '70s and toasted their friendship with lethal slivovitz brandy. In a positively Olympian display of brotherhood, Lugger served as an unofficial consultant at the outset of the planning, with phone calls back and forth daily, sometimes hourly.

One thing was still missing last week: snow. But Spokesman Mehmed Husic insists, "I'm a lot more worried that we're going to have too much snow, and that we won't be able to see the mountains." Nonetheless, a snow trench, a gigantic man-made bin, is ready to store auxiliary snow carted in from other places. A persistent fog, which makes air travel haphazard, is another uncontrollable element. Says Husic, "We are Communists. We have finished our part of the work. The rest is in the hands of God." --By Tom Callahan. Reported by John Moody/Sarajevo

With reporting by John Moody This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.