Triumph . . . And Tragedy

By Tom Callahan

At the Olympics, for every jubilant Pirmin Zurbriggen skiing to the limit, there is a devastated Dan Jansen suffering to the extreme. One suggests a bright ribbon, the other a black armband. But both are important players. They need each other to describe the Winter Games' opening week, with its fist in the air, its head in its hands, a grin on its face, a tear in its eye, and still eight days to go.

As touchstones, the Swiss downhiller and the Wisconsin speed skater could have been a little tidier: Zurbriggen, 25, triumphed and fell; Jansen, 22, fell and . . . fell again. The death of his sister on the first morning of competition, following a long siege of cancer, made Jansen's 500-meter and 1,000-meter events seem both less and more significant. "Maybe," he admitted at the last, "there is a slight sense of relief that I can go home now and be with my family." And yet he planned to return after the funeral to cheer Eric Flaim and the other Americans.

They needed encouragement. By the nature of most refrigerated sports, the Winter Games are understandably a Nordic and European bailiwick. But North American pickings have never been so pitiful. After an entire week of schussing, sliding and skating, Canada and the U.S. were still fighting over a solitary gold medal, ultimately lifted from the Canadian Brian Orser by the U.S. figure skater Brian Boitano to the gentle dismay of the hometown Calgarians. The Americans had to plow their way through nearly half the Games to reap just two medals: the 1,500-meter silver taken by Flaim, and a bronze won with a bobble and a splat by Figure Skaters Peter Oppegard and Jill Watson. The U.S. pair looked thrilled anyway, and the gold-medal spectacle of Soviet 5-ft. 11-in. Sergei Grinkov tossing 4-ft. 11-in. Ekaterina Gordeeva into the rafters enthralled almost everyone.

For the longest while, it seemed the Yanks didn't know how to win or lose. Speed skaters sore at the world threatened to hire attorneys, and a few clubhouse lawyers were pushing bobsleds. Cross-country skiers straggled in and blamed the wax; slow lugers cursed the friction tape on their sleds. Acting ; defensively only in the press conferences, America's fly-and-die hockey team spoiled rousing 7-5 losses to Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R. with rancid asides. "If they hadn't got that lucky second goal," Coach Dave Peterson said of the Czechs, "they might have tanked it." And the Soviets, he muttered into ABC's open microphone, "had to cheat to win."

In contrast, Czechoslovakia took an opening loss to West Germany with a gruff shrug. "They played with a bigger heart," said Jan Starsi, the Czechs' direct and wonderful coach. Surviving both the U.S. and its eight-year-old memory of the Lake Placid miracle, Soviet Assistant Coach Igor Dmitriev said, "We're very glad we won; our opponent was very strong. Our success was only thanks to our best efforts." And, referring to the spirited third-period comeback of the Americans, he added, "We forgot that here in North America, specifically in the U.S., they fight to the very end."

Not until the bad breaks began to overwhelm the bad sports did a few graceful U.S. instincts take hold. Downhill Racer Pam Fletcher, 25, missed her precious chance, when she crashed the day before the event into a skiing maintenance worker ("like hitting a tree") and broke her leg. After a brief cry, Fletcher was smiling again. "You can't have everything, you know," she said. "Where would you put it?" No American man or woman had ever finished as high as sixth in an Olympic luge, and when Bonny Warner moved up from the eighth position on her final run, she shivered with pleasure. "It's a warm feeling," said Warner, 25, "like the sled has little feelers on it, and it can tell you're happy, so it goes fast."

Happiness at the Olympics has always been a relative matter of little feelers. Eddie ("the Eagle") Edwards, the ski-jumping plasterer from England, spoke for all the Games' odd fellows when he declared, "To have jumped and still be alive -- it's a thrill." As if Edwards were the grand Finn Matti Nykanen himself, the Brit writers have claimed Eddie as their new knight of the woeful countenance (not to mention feeble eyesight and flapping elbows). What choice did they have? Out at Calgary's quaint hall for curling, the Scots were finishing last in another game they invented. It was pretty exciting curling, though the grandmothers knitting in the stands never dropped any stitches.

If the Olympics in general seemed a little spread out and stretched out, every venue and event had its delights, like the wooden shoes of the little Dutch girls echoing their clomps in the speed skaters' Oval. On Mount Allan, where Zurbriggen and Swiss Teammate Peter Muller drew most of the early glare, a softer scene involved the sport's former custodians, the Austrians. Leonhard Stock, 29, the fifth-stringer who replaced fabled Franz Klammer in 1980, then made it worse by winning the downhill gold, finished an unexpected fourth last week and was finally embraced. Two days later, when Zurbriggen found a gate between his skis in the combined downhill-slalom, it was an Austrian, Hubert Strolz, atop the podium once more.

With three trips left to the mountain, regal Zurbriggen expects to rise again. On the Games' penultimate night, Figure Skater Katarina Witt will look to become the queen. At an audience that attracted the most notetakers of the week, the East German champion told her sweet stories in English and German: "I started skating when I was five years old, and my mummy went to the rink with me, and the coach put skates on me. It was quite wet on the ice . . . My mummy said, if I fall, my tights are going to get wet. So maybe that's why I learned to skate well." But Debi Thomas also started at five. She will be there too, on the muscle.