Once Upon A Winter's Night...

By Howard Chua-Eoan

A 2,500-year-old Greek poem extols the power of music to enfold and enlarge Olympic glory. And so in Torino, Italy, the athletes of the world marched into a stadium originally erected by the dictator Benito Mussolini to several ancient tunes, such as Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, KC & the Sunshine Band's I'm Your Boogie Man and the Village People's Y.M.C.A. Are these the Winter Olympic Games or a disco inferno?

It does make some sense. For this is Italy, a country particularly proud of infernos. Indeed, after the thump, thump, thumping came a reading from the peninsula's poet-prophet, with the Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi reciting an inspiring passage from Dante's Divine Comedy. In a fiery scene, scores of legs kicked in the air, evoking the sinners' feet in the Inferno's Canto XX. How unholy is the thrill when you sense that the circles of hell have, in the end, been transformed into the Olympic rings?

For all the evocations of international camaraderie, the Olympics are a lot about national pride. And so, beyond Dante, the peninsula trotted out stars to tout its culture: Giorgio Armani designing costumes; Sophia Loren carrying the Olympic flag; supermodel Carla Bruni slinking in with the Italian flag; Luciano Pavarotti singing Puccini's Nessun Dorma (Nobody Sleeps) from Turandot; Eva Herzigova (a Czech-born resident of Torino) starring as Botticelli's Venus on a half shell. A Ferrari roared onstage, the speakers blared the theme from Rocky (Stallone! The Italian Stallion!), and suddenly, after a magnificent dove formation by acrobats on gossamer thread, there was a poetry-spouting Yoko Ono. (Who knew she was Italian?) The only thing missing was the famous shroud.

Reminders of the harsher realities were perceptible, however. The Olympics are about the pride of the host country, but the Games also bring in worldly and cruel anxieties. Danish athletes reportedly received special protection because of the global swirl of threats surrounding the publication of cartoons inimical to the Prophet Muhammad. Everywhere in Torino and around the stadium, soldiers and police were visible. And until the disco music drowned them out, helicopters whirred loudly over the proceedings.

As for the internal controversies of the Olympics, they were on parade even before the opening ceremony. Propecia sounds like an Olympian god, and so it had its sacrificial victim. U.S. skeleton slider Zach Lund clearly needs the drug, used to reduce hair loss due to male-pattern baldness but shouldn't have used it. As a result, he has been banished from the Games because Propecia can mask the use of steroids. In another roil, Wayne Gretzky, head of Canada's hockey team, is being stalked by a scandal linking his wife Janet Jones and a close associate to a mess of gambling. Says an indignant Christine Keshen, a member of the Canadian women's curling team: "If people can't lay off of him for what's going on back home, they need to realize this is the Olympics."

And that is the point, after all, in spite of patriotic excess, overpowering wedding-banquet music and all sorts of anxiety. It is the refuge of sport that keeps athletes and fans coming back for the Olympics, summer or winteran exhilaration felt with the U.S.'s first gold medal on Saturday, won by Chad Hedrick in the men's 5,000m speedskating event. No matter what is said by Dante in his Inferno. For the occasion, his famous line should read, "Reclaim every hope, ye who enter here." Let the Games begin. 34 Team U.S.A.'s magic number to match or beat: the medals won by Americans at the Games in Salt Lake City, Utah

84 Gold medals to be awarded at the Games through Feb. 26

52 Age of Anne (Grandma Luge) Abernathy of the U.S. Virgin Islands, competing in her sixth Games--the oldest female Winter Olympian ever

750,000 Sporting-event tickets, costing from $24 to $334, that had been sold as of opening ceremonies; 250,000 were still for sale

900,000 Population of Torino, largest city ever to be host to a Winter Olympics

With reporting by Reported by Andrea Gerlin, Sean Gregory, Jeff Israely, Alice Park / Torino