First came the parade of athletes from 64 countries. Each delegation was led by a woman dressed as a snowdome; they wore long, stretch dresses, bonnets that gave the teams’ names and plastic snowballs with flakes made of white feathers. For once the march produced as many tears as chauvinistic chants as the Baltic States entered under their own flags, and five other former Soviet republics-including Russia were led by the Olympic banner. Then French soccer star Michael Platini - the flaming torch in his right hand, a 9-yearold boy clasped in his left - trotted to the top of the stadium. He handed the torch to the child who touched it to a thin steel cable. The flame raced up the cable toward the stadium’s giant torch, which burst brilliant orange in a premature conflagration a split second before the fireball actual reached it. The only other unplanned moment was the “wave,” started in the stands by the athletes themselves, that eventually swept even French President Francois Mitterrand and U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle to their feet.
It was an appropriate break with tradition for this the first post-cold-war Olympics. Just as the EastWest competition for medals vanished, new intramural spats emerged to fill the void. The Japanese raised Gallic ire by flying in two tons of rice, red-bean cakes, soba noodles and other Oriental delights, explaining that while French cuisine was ,‘very good," their athletes needed “mind food.” A local hotel upset the Austrian, German and Swiss luge teams by prohibiting them from sleeping with their sleds-a practice that stems from neither superstition nor fear of AIDS but from the desire to keep secret some technological improvements on the luges.
Inside the Olympic Village, athletes logged onto the INFO ‘92 computer system and interfaced - the ultimate in safe sex. The French organizing committee anticipated some more direct interactions, however, and distributed 10,000 triple packs of condoms. The U.S. Olympic Committee had its own advice. During a private briefing, Dr. David Joyner told the Americans, “Watch your practices.”
In keeping with the new economic order, the entrepreneurial impulse clobbered socialism, though the currency of choice was neither francs nor VISA cards. It was pins, an Olympic tradition pushed over the edge. Every team, every corporate sponsor-every visitor with a letterhead, it seemed-had brought along give out as souvenirs. And virtually everyone had become a collector, some for sentimental reasons, others in hopes that they would become valuable. Other free marketers took a more direct approach. Theft of cars, cash and cameras was common: one photographer was relieved of a rental car filled with more than $100,000 worth of camera gear. Aware that some athletes might want to cash in even before the cereal-endorsement folks showed up, USOC handlers pleaded with the American athletes not to sell or trade their official uniforms (comprising nearly 50 articles of clothing, from broadbrim felt hats to leather flight jackets)-at least until after the closing ceremonies. They just might need them for a medal ceremony.
No team had higher hopes than the U.S. bobsledders. The four-man team had missed a bronze at Calgary by .02 second. Since then they’d recruited two unique assets. Herschel Walker (he of the 9.3-second 100-yard dash and the Minnesota Vikings) will push both a two- and a four-man sled. And a simulator designed by Silicon Graphics of California has allowed the drivers, who are entitled to only two practice runs daily for the four days before their events, to sit in a real bobsled in a hotel salon and, with a flick of the wrist, run the course hundreds of times. Programmed with a replica of the Olympic run, the simulator’s screen shows the course as the driver steers through the multiple turns. At the end, the computer spits out his time and also an analysis of where he lost milliseconds-by turning into a curve too late and so sliding too far up the banked sides, for instance. Even if this device doesn’t bring home a medal, it seems destined to have a future as an arcade game.
Advanced technology seemed less well equipped for the delicate matter of telling the girls from the boys. Since the 1968 Games the IOC has required “sex typing” for athletes competing as women. The rule followed widespread rumors of men competing as women, and of women who weren’t quite: a Polish sprinter was stripped other 1964 gold and bronze medals after failing a sex test in 1967, and the 1932 gold medalist in the 100-meter dash was found, at her autopsy in 1980, to have testes.
Albertville is the first Olympics to use a new method that detects Y chromosomes. Usually, a woman has two X chromosomes; a man has one X and one Y. But nature has so shuffled some people’s genetic deck that there are XY women, XX men and other permutations. An XY woman, with her defective testes, produces no muscle-building androgens or else is insensitive to them. She therefore has no advantage of strength or speed, yet the IOC labels her a him. This is an anomalous genetic situation occurring in one of every 50,000 women. On the other hand, as many as 3 percent of XX women have genetic conditions that increase their supply of musclebuilding androgens and thus increase their strength. The IOC’s sex test nevertheless labels them female: it punishes the innocent and acquits the guilty.
The French medical establishment blasted the new sex test as “an offense” and “an obvious discrimination.” Alexandre de Merode, head of the IOC medical commission, defended the tests last week as “necessary to defend the ethics of sports” and ,‘stifle such amoral and scandalous practices" as exploiting children with sexual anomalies. Any woman who “fails” can submit to a battery of physical and gynecological tests to recover female status.
At the end of the week, the hockey players got off their stilts and the IOC stepped down from its high horse. It was time to let the athletes play. Let the Games begin and hey, anybody want to buy a slightly used warm-up jacket, cheap?
