Old Glory Days

Do not adjust your television set. Do not dial your cable operator and demand to know what happened to the greens and the yellows and the oranges and the many other hues you distinctly remember paying for.

The 2002 Winter Olympics, brought to you by NBC from Salt Lake City, will be triple-cast in red, white and blue. And after that, just to mix things up, there will be redder reds, brighter whites and truer blues.

Now that New England has completed its stopover at Super Bowl XXXVI, make way for the Patriot Games. It will be wall-to-wall stars and stripes, American flags around the clock, Old Glory everywhere. For 16 days and 375 1/2 hours of television coverage, the Star-Spangled Banner will be No. 1 on the charts.

Part of this is as predictable as NBC, the ironically nicknamed “peacock network,” which treats every Olympics it covers as if it were the All-American Bowl: Yankees, this is your home; everybody else, sorry, wrong colors.

Part of this is thanks to the ever-expanding Winter Olympics menu, which since 1994 has added such American-friendly events as snowboarding, skeleton, women’s hockey and women’s bobsled.

That means more American medalists--the U.S. Olympic Committee has set a goal of 20 medals, seven more than the U.S. Winter Olympic record--and that means more smiling Americans and more renditions of the national anthem.

And part of this comes down to the particulars of time and place.

This will be an American Olympics, possibly the last for the foreseeable future, five months removed from the greatest tragedy in U.S. history. The United States is at war in Afghanistan, scorched rubble is all that remains of the World Trade Center and a country still shaken from the horrific events of Sept. 11 must rise to the occasion of welcoming the world to the planet’s biggest winter sporting spectacle.

Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 gold-medal-winning U.S. hockey team, remembers the wave of patriotism that swept through the country after that improbable victory, which also happened on home soil, in Lake Placid. He sees the same kind of sentiment cresting around the opening ceremony in Salt Lake because of current events and emotions.

“With the Olympic Games back in this country, it’s a great opportunity for us as a country to show the world that, first of all, we will never forget Sept. 11--and we should never forget that,” Eruzione says.

“But we can also show the world that we will survive and we will move on and we will, as President Bush said, persevere.”

Bud Greenspan, longtime Olympic documentarian, sees similarities between the national mood coming out of Lake Placid in 1980 and that readying for Salt Lake City 2002.

“I was there when America got patriotic for the first time in years after the Russian-American hockey game,” Greenspan says, referring to the U.S. upset of the heavily favored Soviets in a 1980 semifinal. “When we got out of the game, it was about 7 o’clock in the evening and the snow was coming down and people were walking up and down Main Street and hugging and kissing each other. And then we heard a strong baritone voice singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ And everybody stopped and began to sing.

“It was at that moment that Vietnam was forgotten and America fell terribly, terribly in love with its own country....

“This time, it has been ‘U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!’ since Sept. 11. I think you’re going to find a lot of emotional things happening every time an American does something in Salt Lake City.”

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These will be the fourth Winter Olympics held in the United States. More than simple ski-skate-and-hockey competitions, each has served as a tap into our collective psyche during good times and bad, during wartime and peace, during economic troubles and boom periods.

The first U.S. Winter Olympic Games were held in 1932 in Lake Placid during the depths of the world-wide Depression. They were shoestring Games, attended by only 17 countries, down from 25 at the St. Moritz Games of 1928, with land for the bobsled run donated by the president of the organizing committee, Dr. Godfrey Dewey.

Scraping out a living, doing whatever it takes to get by--these were staples of everyday American life. The lofty “Olympic ideal” was not above such hard-scrabble reality. With the Games on their own turf, the hosts imposed a different set of rules on the speedskating competition, replacing the traditional international format of two skaters on the ice skating against the clock with heats of five or six skaters. The switch outraged the Europeans, causing five-time Olympic champion Clas Thunberg of Finland to pull out of the event.

After a few shoulders had been shrugged, the Americans began rubbing their hands together. Under the so-called “North American rules,” North American skaters claimed 10 of the 12 speedskating medals.

Twenty-eight years later, the Winter Olympics returned to the United States, to the tiny California ski resort of Squaw Valley. It was February 1960 in America. The Eisenhower administration was in its final months, the economy was prospering and despite the attendant Cold War anxiety of the day, the nation was feeling good about itself.

In affluent times, skiing had become a popular diversion. Heralding a women’s Alpine competition that would produce three U.S. silver medals, Sports Illustrated ran a drawing of Olympian Betsy Snite on its Feb. 1 cover, along with a headline announcing, “U.S. Girl Skiers On Top Of The World.” Inside, the accompanying story carried another headline: “Young, Cute, Deadly.”

In the weeks leading up to the Games, Sports Illustrated also ran stories on Dorothea Walker, the first woman social director to oversee protocol at an Olympic Games, and the “sumptuous buffet” being prepared at a Lake Tahoe lodge for visiting Olympic dignitaries--15-pound sirloin roast, greened spaghetti, apricot mousse for dessert. There was a fascination with wealth. Hedonism was in, with silliness riding in the sidecar.

Squaw Valley organizers turned the opening and closing ceremonies over to “pageantry chairman” Walt Disney, who proceeded to decorate the village with “snow sculptures” made of plaster, promising officials that they would look just like actual snow, even though Squaw Valley was well-equipped with the real stuff.

This did not sit well with all visitors. Olympic Chancellor Otto Mayer feared the elaborate entertainment plans, which included the likes of Art Linkletter and Danny Kaye performing nightly for the athletes, would turn Squaw Valley into “a second Disneyland.”

Despite the Hollywood-ization of the Games and an overdose of American cheese, U.S. athletes managed to win only three gold medals and 10 altogether at Squaw Valley. Ice hockey yielded one of the golds, creating what is now a familiar blueprint: Underdog Americans surprisingly climb their way into the semifinals, where they upset the defending champion Soviets and then ward off post-shocker letdown and one final opponent to clinch the title.

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The 1980 U.S. hockey team simply followed 20-year-old skate marks. Yet, the 1980 victory is lauded as a “Miracle On Ice,” one of the great moments in Olympic history, and the 1960 triumph is remembered as a pleasant sidebar, if it is remembered at all,

“It was the exact same scenario as 1980,” says Olympic historian David Wallechinsky. “An American team of amateurs unexpectedly upset the Soviet Union, and then, in the last game, came from behind and won the gold medal. But there were two differences.

“First, the mood of the country was different. In 1960, the economy was booming. Americans didn’t feel put-upon. Yes, there was the Cold War, but it was just different. In 1980, the economy was bad and the Soviets were taking advantage--that’s the way it was perceived.

“So, it was the exact same format of victory, which was just a nice little story in ‘60, but a national story in ‘80--the miracle.

“The other difference between ’60 and ’80 was television. Nobody saw those [victories] in 1960. But everybody watched in 1980.”

By the time the Winter Games returned to the United States in 1980, Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter was discussing a boycott of that year’s Moscow Summer Olympics. Fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran. The U.S. economy was stalled, along with millions of cars lined up outside gas stations across the nation, waiting to overpay at the pump.

Consequently, a hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union at Lake Placid took on heightened “symbolic significance,” according to Wayne Wilson, head researcher for the Amateur Athletic Foundation.

“Before the ’80 Games, there was the [ever-present] media issue of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and feeling of helplessness on the part of the United States as to how to deal with that,” Wilson says.

Eruzione firing the puck past goaltender Vladimir Myshkin for a 4-3 U.S. victory didn’t move the Soviet Union one step closer to evacuation of Afghanistan; Carter went through with his threat to boycott the Summer Olympics when the Soviets refused to remove their troops. But, for a few giddy days in late February, it provided Americans with a respite and a diversion, the right tonic for the times.

“We did something that very few people in their lives have a chance to do,” Eruzione says. “And that is two things: one, win a gold medal in the Olympic Games, and two, not only have it as a great moment for yourself and your team, but to have a country share in it.

“There aren’t many events where that happens. You know, the Arizona Diamondbacks win the World Series--well, I’m a Red Sox fan, I don’t really care. The Lakers might win a world championship, but I’m a Celtics’ fan.

“But when it’s the Olympic Games, it’s a whole nation that watches and it’s a whole nation that feels a part of it. So when the U.S. Olympic hockey team wins, or the Mary Lou Rettons or the Carl Lewises or the Dan Jansens or the Bonnie Blairs ... the whole country feels like it wins.”

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A similar scenario surrounds the Salt Lake City Games. Caution: Emotional overload ahead, underscored by the likelihood that these could be the last U.S. Olympics in a very long time. The International Olympic Committee, shamed by the bribery scandal unearthed after these Games had been given to Salt Lake City, is not believed to be keen on rewarding the United States any time soon.

“If it hadn’t been for Sept. 11, we’d all be writing stories about the bribery scandal,” Wallechinsky says. “In a way, Utah lucked out.”

Wallechinsky believes the IOC has been “wanting to spread the Games around more, anyway” and is concerned about the possibility of “in the middle of the Games, the United States starts bombing another country, or there’s an incident at the Games.

“On the other hand, if Salt Lake does a great job, and everything runs smoothly, then that will be good for American prestige.”

John Lucas, an Olympic historian and lecturer at Penn State University, has a simple wish for the 2002 Winter Olympics: that they succeed in providing “a brief peaceful interlude between chaos to the left and to the right, before, and possibly, after.”

Long before prime-time audience shares and USOC salary bonuses tied to American medal counts, that was the intent.