Grand OpeningA rousing send-off at olympic stadium reminds U.S. athletes there's no place like homeby Alexander Wolff
If you can overlook the bumper stickers that read DON'T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR ATHENS; if you can regard these Olympics as something more than a stage set for a Jeff Foxworthy monologue; if you can (literally) get past the
kitschorama vendors and slow-roasted flesh that are clogging downtown Atlanta,
you may be able to feel the uplifting updraft that buffets every Olympic city for
its fortnight as the world's stage. It is the zephyr that bears a Bob Beamon to a
theretofore unimagined distance. It is the fresh air that fills the prepubescent
lungs of a Nadia Comaneci as she puffs out her chest upon dismount after a
perfect 10. It is the oxygen that feeds the flame.
The home crowd could send Chow soaring. photograph by
As torchlight opened these Centennial Games last night under a sky cooled
mercifully by nightfall, a phrase from the South's own William Faulkner seemed to
bid the participants to "create out of the material of the human spirit something
which did not exist before." Olympians can do this-can reconcile the physical
with the spiritual and conflate the two into feats never accomplished before.
World Cup finals are decided on penalty kicks; Super Bowls are decided in the
first quarter. But the achievements of the next 16 days will be so vast in their
variety-and enough will be sufficiently surprising in their provenance-that these
Games will defy disappointment. The Olympics never disappoint.
Certainly the opening ceremonies, a Cecil B. de Fifteen-Million-Dollar homage to
the modern Olympics' classical roots and multicultural present, spared nothing.
They featured chrome pickup trucks and Greek priestesses, a Presidential
near-stumble as Bill Clinton made his way to the infield and the words of bards
from the Greek poet Pindar to those consorts of the artist formerly known as
Prince, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. And while there is no escaping the vulgarity
of an Olympics in Atlanta when one sets it alongside the last two oh-so-tasteful
Western European editions-say, while we're at it, why don't we run the Kentucky
Derby at Aqueduct?-the keynote struck last night sounded just right. Spectators
were boisterous enough that they could have been Between the Hedges on a Saturday
afternoon, yet each had been handed a sunflower upon filing in. To that old
theatrical rule-never work with children or animals-might be added a corollary:
Never work with crowds of more than 80,000. People ignored the
audience-participation guides left at each seat. But even though the ceremonies
were delayed by 20 minutes because of the glacially slow Parade of Nations, they
were rapt when Muhammad Ali stepped up to ignite the Olympic cauldron. Withal,
last night established that there is both an Athens that was the birthplace of
the modern Games and one that's just down the road a piece, and the two can
coexist.
A lift to Mayweather could be provided by the home crowd.
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As the competition begins today with medals at stake in 10 events, no group of
Olympians figures to derive more lift from the location of these Games than
members of the final delegation to file into Olympic Stadium last night, the 800
or so athletes of the U.S. team. Just as Spaniards overachieved in Barcelona in
1992 and Norwegians vastly exceeded expectations two years ago at the Winter
Games in Lillehammer, Americans are expected to lead the medal standings with
their most dominating showing since they put the boot to all manner of
international booty at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (although that was in
invasion-of-Grenada fashion, against a field thinned by the Soviet-led boycott).
Whether the Americans will be as dominant as they say they'll be is another
matter. A lot of sweet-sounding verbiage accompanied last night's festivities,
from those words of Faulkner to the impassioned benedictions of Martin Luther
King Jr. But those gentlemen could walk it as well as talk it. Can greenhorn pole
vaulter Lawrence Johnson, a brash college student at Tennessee, really do what he
says he aims to do-outsoar his sport's godfather, world-record holder Sergei
Bubka of Ukraine, whose personal best is a half-foot higher than Johnson's? Does
U.S. men's gymnastics coach Peter Kormann have any business invoking the 1980
U.S. hockey team only a few weeks after his athletes fell 15 times on one day in
a single meet? What could 37-year-old Mary Slaney have been thinking when, after
qualifying in the 5,000 meters with a time that was 50 seconds off this year's
world best, she announced, "I'm going for a medal"?
Some members of the home team don't sound like rude hosts so much as oblivious,
clueless ones. "Whatever team steps on the floor with us is going to get a
butt-kicking no matter what uniform they're wearing," says Tara Cross-Battle,
captain of the U.S. women's volleyball team, perhaps forgetting for a moment that
she and her teammates have lost their last four matches to China, which isn't
even expected to earn a medal in Atlanta.
Torrence and the jump she needs to win a medal in front of family and friends.
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Russia's Alexander Karelin is an eight-time world champion Greco-Roman wrestler
who has never lost an international match, and Matt Ghaffari of the U.S. has lost
to Karelin 12 straight times. Ghaffari nonetheless says, "My job is to see that
he has one loss before he retires." Matt may wrestle in Greco-Roman, but he
speaks in tongues.
Starting today, with finals in fencing, judo, shooting, swimming and
weightlifting, actual results will begin to call to account all those brash
predictions of citi-U.S., alti-U.S., forti-U.S. Hometown fans will most
definitely be urging their local heroes on, but they'll expect to see
medal-winning performances-mostly gold ones-in return. Could there be any other
drawback to being on terra cognita and chowing down on home cookin'? "One word,"
says Katrina McClain, a star forward on the U.S. women's basketball team who
played collegiately at Georgia. "Tickets." Tell it to McClain's teammate Ruthie
Bolton, a Mississippian with 19 siblings, who believes she has the answer to her
ducat dilemma: a raffle. And for the longest time, Atlanta's Gwen Torrence-
another Southern native, with a chance to earn a medal in the 100 meters-looked
the other way when she passed Olympic Stadium as it was being built, considering
the place emblematic of the pressure she would feel on that day she finally
settled into the blocks.
In practice this week Japanese synchronized swimmers worked to get two legs up on the home team.
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But most of the U.S. team is only too happy to be at home. Tonight at
Birmingham's Legion Field, where a football crowd is traditionally cleaved
equally between Alabama and Auburn, virtually all 81,085 voices will gang up on
the A-team of Argentina. "From the moment we got to Birmingham, we've felt the
spirit of these people," says defender Alexi Lalas, who also played on the '92
U.S. Olympic soccer team. "Imagine being used to being ignored, relatively
speaking, and busing into a town where 4,000 people greet you and chant, 'U.S.A.!
U.S.A.!'"
Floyd Mayweather Jr., a 19-year-old U.S. boxer, points out how a friendly crowd
can ruffle a judge's judgment. "Overseas the crowd will howl when the other guy
just touches me on the arm," he says. "Here the American crowd will be chanting
for me when I do that. It's going to keep me hyped, keep me ready."
U.S. flagbearer Bruce Baumgartner, a four-time Olympian who wrestled at the L.A.
Games, can still recall the perfect 10 that gymnast Mary Lou Retton nailed a
dozen years ago. "Would that have happened in Korea or Moscow?" he says. "Who
knows? But it did happen in the United States."
In the U.S., race walker Curt Clausen can convey by bus 45 members of his family
from North Carolina, to watch him negotiate 20 kilometers. In the U.S.,
Asian-American gymnast Amy Chow can play to the crowd-and give political
correctness a good pommeling, as it were-by performing her floor-exercise routine
to Dixie. In the U.S., cyclist Jeanne Golay can invite 63 of her closest friends
to a pre-Games banquet.
A rousing send-off at olympic stadium.
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And in the U.S. even Torrence can find something hospitable about that Olympic
Stadium she once regarded as a mausoleum of expectation. After winning the 100 at
the trials there eight weeks ago, Torrence took a languid victory lap, pausing
and posing for photos with fans in the stands, waving like a beauty queen borne
on a float gliding down Main Street. "As I went around the track I kept seeing
people I went to high school with, that I went to elementary school with," she
says. "I had to stop and say hello and let them take my picture."
It was, she says, like leafing through old yearbooks and family albums; in one
circumnavigation of that 400-meter track she saw all the stages of her life. And
for us, Torrence's tale is a reminder that, for American athletes, there will be
many more human spirits-kin, friends and fans alike-from which to create their
bronze and silver and gold.
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