The Mickey Mouse Olympics

About that $15,000. Write it off as tax money well spent. Try not to demand something tangible for it, like a lot of gold medals. Or silver medals, or bronze medals. Clear your mind of all crass thoughts about how America blew the World University Winter Games a fortnight ago in Italy. And repeat after us: the spaghetti Olympics were held for fun and international understanding, not for sports profit.

The student games were conducted high in the Italian Alps, in Sestriere, a community of vivid contrasts at 6,675 feet. It is so lost in fog at times that even the Italians can't find it. At other times it is a town of lovely shops and pensiones and an air of 1933 elegance. Beautiful women abound in Sestriere—they ski by day and reappear each night dressed in Ginger Rogers' old evening gowns. Sestriere is another, an older world. And for the World Games the place was jammed to the ski lifts with hundreds of students from 19 nations, all part of FISU, the International University Sports Federation.

The Russians came in pale-blue parkas and baggy, pre-Bogner ski pants. They were older than everyone else and uncommunicative, as though fearful someone might ask them, "Are you really students? What happened, did you get a late start, or something?" The Europeans came in happy clusters, and the Americans came in cowboy hats and Levi's, nine kids on a State Department ticket, the first Americans ever entered in such an event.

There was a tendency to take all this very big in Europe. Radio and television ran wild with it. Newspapers called it beautiful. There was much banner and bunting in Sestriere, and national anthems were played on a scratchy old tape recorder. All the spectators raved about the quality of the competition, which ought to give you an idea of how out of touch Sestriere really is.

To be mercifully brief, the World Games went roughly like this: three women skiers out of 34 split up all the prizes among them. The men's special slalom was won by a Pole—think about that one for a moment—and if you get the impression the race was a wild one you should have heard the Italian announcer try to pronounce Andrzej Bachleda. The Poles were delirious. "Andrzej," his coach said, "hardly ever beats anyone back home."

And over an orangeade in the Duchi d'Aosta Hotel, Switzerland's Theresa Obrecht, most beautiful skiing coed in the whole world, apologized for her sketchy English. But she spoke it well enough to say, flatly, "If you win here, it does not mean you are the best. It means nothing. You Americans describe this sort of thing well. The games are—how you say—the games are Mickey Mouse. But they mean much to international goodwill."

Seen from a Mickey Mouse viewpoint, an attitude that more Americans should adopt overseas to keep their perspective, the games were perfect, staged with a certain innocent, oldtime bravado. "Everything, she is perfecto," one official sighed, standing on a mountainside from which the snow was fast melting away, while racers all around him were executing sweeping turns best described as mud Christys across the finish line.

The Nordic events were running simultaneously in Claviere, a one-street border town down the twisting hill from Sestriere. There, the world student championship cross-country races were staged against a backdrop of less than 70 spectators. Most of them were international newsmen, the rest of them Italian housewives standing there in black dresses and aprons, their arms folded stolidly across their stomachs. The competitors swept along a trail that snaked through the village, occasionally sending a clutch of chickens skittering out of the way.

The ski jump was hacked out of a steep hillside forest, the only jumping hill in the world with a slight dog-leg effect in the middle of it. Below, the runout was canted to the left, a situation that so unnerved American jumper Ron Jacobson, 21, that he fell on the landing and ended up in 20th position when he would have had ninth.

The FISU had a tough time getting established, starting as a breakaway group in 1948 from the old International Union of Students, with headquarters in Prague, which had gradually been taken over by the Communists as more of a propaganda machine than a sports organization. From its early days FISU took on considerable worldly flavor, with both Franco Spain and Communist Yugoslavia as members. Then in 1949 the board invited Monaco to join and—well, you know how translations go—the invitation went to Munich by mistake ("The names looked alike to me," shrugged one FISU officer), and the group began to grow from that point. Monaco finally did make it. Israel came in and the U.S. came in, despite the fact that some congressional critics insisted the group was Red-infiltrated.