Hear Them Roar

By Pico Iyer/Nagano With Reporting By Hannah Beech And Frank Gibney Jr./Hakuba And Lawrence Mondi/Nagano

Suddenly, after days of swamping snow, the morning of Japan's Fourth of July--its national holiday, commemorating the nation's founding 2,658 years ago--dawned birthday blue. Tae Satoya, a 21-year-old from Sapporo who had never won a major competition and had finished only 11th in the first of her two runs, bumped and jangled over the women's moguls course. Then she just stood there and, with an air of excited surprise, watched champion after champion fail to beat her score. Just seven months before, soon after the world championship, her father had died, and now, as her American rival Liz McIntyre said, "she wanted to have redemption." The first female Winter gold medalist in 2,658 years of Japanese history dissolved into tears.

That same day--such is the cunning magic that sometimes hides out in the Olympics--America had its turn. Picabo Street, the supercharged performance artist from the Idaho hamlet of Triumph, streaked through the super-G course in 1:18:02. A few months ago, Street too was a spectator, having torn a ligament in her knee; in only her fourth race back, 11 days before, she had knocked herself out while whizzing through a course at 75 m.p.h. Now, like Satoya, she stood at the bottom of the course and, unlike Satoya, delivered an irrepressible commentary as one, two, three and the rest of the 43 skiers came down, some within a whisper of her. Only the woman in the shocking orange tiger helmet, with the diamond stud glinting in her right ear, would say, "I knew it was only a matter of time before the spirits would come through." She won the race by one-hundredth of a second.

Meanwhile, Bjorn Daehlie of Norway was (less surprisingly) becoming the first man in Winter Games history to collect his sixth gold as he struggled through a heavy drizzle to win the men's 10-km classical cross-country event. Yet what really crowned his victory was his own long vigil: he waited and waited at the finish line until the last competitor of all--from Kenya, finishing 92nd, 20 minutes behind him--staggered across it.

It was apt, perhaps, that all the champions waited, because everyone was tapping fingers a little in the early days of the Nagano Games, and an occasional hint of loss, frustration and anxiety flavored the opening moments. The glamorous, made-for-TV showcase of the men's downhill was postponed and postponed and postponed again, as snow gave way to sleet gave way to rain. Delay after delay left the athletes fractious, and fans who had traveled from distant islands to watch the Games found themselves standing in strong winter monsoons. The Olympic Village waited and waited to see Paul Kariya, the Canadian hockey star of Japanese descent, arrive, and finally he had to cancel too, because of a concussion.

Most embarrassing of all, the unlikely May-December alliance between the separatist snowboarders and the International Olympic Committee hardly survived even its honeymoon, as the aged judges said they would revoke the first snow-surfing gold medal ever--when traces of marijuana were found in Canada's Ross Rebagliati, winner of the men's giant slalom--and then were overruled, marking a triumph for rebellion. One foot was speeding forward, it seemed; the other was staying in place.

Yet as the week went on, the victories in the face of difficulty began to pile up, sometimes from surprising faces, sometimes from the old familiar ones we had almost forgotten amid talk of an Olympic youth movement. Often, in fact, looking up at the podium, one could imagine oneself in some Eastern version of Sleepy Hollow. There was Artur Dmitriev, lifting his new partner Oksana Kazakova to a gold, with a long program of soulful if hardly flawless majesty, and collecting the medal he had won six years before. There was Georg Hackl, the businesslike German soldier, shooting away with the gold in the men's luge, as he had done in Lillehammer and in Albertville. And there was slalom ace Alberto Tomba, saying he wanted to find a girl to settle down with. As the newcomer Kazakova said, after surviving a singled double Axel, "We have a little problem"--and then her face brightened--"but I think no problem."

Every Olympics, of course, finds many of its highlights in the corners, where no one thinks to look for them. The upper-case Games were about Wayne Gretzky's checking into the Olympic Village like an Everyman; the lower-case ones were about lesser-known athletes' rubbing shoulders with the Great One. The marquee performer in the men's downhill, when finally it was completed, Hermann Maier, stormed out of the starting gate and, at the first major jump, turned into a cartwheeling, somersaulting blur of red and orange as he crashed through two retaining fences and ended up in a snowdrift without his skis (but miraculously walked away like the tough bricklayer he was). In the same race, Jean Luc Cretier, a customs officer who had never won a major downhill, skied to gold.

Everywhere, it seemed, the regular guys took over. Roughly 750 soldiers in camouflage fatigues worked through the night to clear what looked like feet of fresh snow from the slopes. Cashiers consulted dictionaries between customers, and even the local organized-crime syndicates agreed to observe an Olympic truce. At the luge spiral, fans sat on banks of snow in earflaps, letting out cries of delight and astonishment as contestants whooshed past in 80-m.p.h. gusts of air. As cheering fellow lugers raised Hackl, lifting the perennial champion to their shoulders, a competing smile played out on the face of the Venezuelan team of one, known around the dinner table as Iginia Boccalandro.

Boccalandro, a 37-year-old former Rolfer who'd always wanted to compete in the Olympics, had been watching the Lillehammer Games on TV when she noticed that the women's luge champion was, like herself, not small. "You'd be perfect for it," said her cross-country coach, John Feig. "You're laid back, you love speed, you're not afraid, and you're kind of crazy." With the Venezuelan delegation (mostly her twin sister and her mother), she marched through the opening ceremonies in a startling poncho. Declaring, "This is what I was destined to do," she finished 28th in a field of 29.

American male lugers might have thought themselves in an even stranger waking dream when, in an event that has ever seen only German, Austrian, Italian and Russian medalists, they abruptly took a silver--and a bronze. Indeed, second-place Chris Thorpe and Gordy Sheer came within 22/1,000ths of a second of the mighty Germans, who had collected a gold, a silver and a bronze in the previous three Olympics. Zipping down the track in their lemon yellow suits, the Americans (who recorded with their two teammates a theme song titled Arctic Evil Knievels) pumped their fists as they saw their 0-for-27 Olympic-medal streak end.

Before the Games, someone had asked future bronzers Brian Martin and Mark Grimmette if they knew they would be competing on Friday the 13th. Martin smiled, "It's a lucky day."

A similar gust of New World optimism came from Jonny Moseley as he spun 360[degrees] in the air with his trademark Heli-Mute Grab Jump, flew through the rest of the men's moguls course and then erupted into a gold medalist's gush ("I can't believe it. Ohmygod. This is unbelievable"). He was another competitor, one gathered, who would subscribe to the Street-wise logic: "One of the things about Japan is that it is very far removed from everyone's comfort zone. It's neutral territory for everyone."

Neutral, perhaps, but by no means dispassionate, as one saw, even in distant Karuizawa, a chic summer resort that found itself the host for curling competitions. Not far from the Pension England House Windsor, the town held its very own opening ceremonies, with its own parade of athletes, its own concert of bagpipers and Japanese drums. As the competition got under way, the Kazakoshi Park Arena--not unlike a high school gym--was filled with Japanese primary schoolchildren, old ladies blowing Piccolo Mini Cheer Horns and a crowd of Canadians crying, "Come on, button boy. Stop, baby, stop." Here was one place where an "in turn," as it happened, referred to "a rock filled with clockwise rotation," as opposed to, not a special prosecutor, but an "out turn." Nearby was a whole museum of curling--well, a couple of display cases, containing a signed brush, a 19th century crampit, a polishing machine and all 10 issues of the now defunct Japanese magazine Happy Curling.

Such scenes are worth cherishing when one hears too much about doping scandals and billion-dollar bullet trains, and when the eye makes out giant Coke bottles in the middle of white Alpine silence. Indeed, one by-product of last week's reminder that nature doesn't bend to bullet-train schedules was that suddenly curling, unsmudged by the snow, appeared on Channel 36 in Nagano, and then on Channel 48 and Channel 47, the camera trained on competitors who looked like your Uncle Bob and the sound track made up of nothing but their curses, asides and excited cries of "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" (a technical term, one was told, meaning they should move fast). Another unlikely savior in the spotlight.

Every Olympics is a grueling 100-km cross-country marathon that puts the host on show and on trial. But as the official Games suffered lost heroes and snarled buses, the unofficial ones kept on digging through the snow to find something glinting. At the ski-jumping area on Japan's Fourth of July, schoolchildren sat on the snow and 40,000 fans clenched fists and held their breath as the ill-starred old man of Japanese ski jumping, Masahiko Harada, aimed at his first gold. Eight spectators even sat in wheelchairs on the slopes to witness the likable veteran give Japan a formal birthday present.

This time, as so famously before, Harada fell at the last hurdle, tumbling on the last of the day's 92 jumps from first place to fifth. But his teammate, Kazuyoshi Funaki, scored a silver. And at almost exactly the same moment, on another mountain, a 21-year-old freestyler from Hokkaido was bouncing toward the podium with a picture of her father by her heart.

--With reporting by Hannah Beech and Frank Gibney Jr./Hakuba and Lawrence Mondi/Nagano