Winter Games

Tell you what's great about spectating, reporting, competing or just checking results and maintaining an interest in the Winter Olympics: Size.It's pretty easy to keep track of, no doubt because the Games of Ice and Snow really have no place to expand unless they can come up with a scoring system for snowball-throwing, windshield-scraping and snowman-making.Now the Summer Olympics, that's an out-of-control mess: a couple of dozen sports containing a couple hundred separate events, plus trials and heats, spread out over an area approximately the size of the Northwest Territory.

Got the barbecue fired up? Dogs and burgers at the ready? Cooler packed with ice and cold drinks?Sure, you're all set for Labor Day.So now is the perfect time to begin thinking about -- snow. And ice. Not the cube-kind that you put into your drinks, the flat-kind that people zip around on, wearing funny shoes with blades on the bottom.I'm talking Olympics. Winter Olympics.That's right, the games are only a few months off; six, to be exact.Funny -- seems like only last year . . .It was only last year that Albertville, France, was host to the Winter Olympic Games.

Reading Time, two minutes: Tell you what's special about the Winter Olympics in case you didn't pick up on it the last couple of weeks or decades: The Games are too small and out of the way to become a platform for world politics. Look, we sent Dan Quayle and it didn't even turn out to be a funeral with our athletes picking up 11 medals.Truth to tell, that Us vs. Them mentality has never been eviden at the Games unless, when the hockey teams met, media types wanted to read something extra into it. After all, during the height of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union always had a team over here looking to pick up rubles and blue jeans, and no one boycotts the February Frolic.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- You can buy a CCCP jacket right off the back of an Olympic athlete. One hundred fifty dollars American.No problem.You can buy an athlete's pin, the one with the old hammer-and-sickle on it. A real collector's item. Fifty dollars.No problem.You can even buy into a fledgling professional hockey league in the former Soviet Union. All offers considered. Price negotiable.Definitely, no problem.This isn't a team, anymore -- it's a going-out-of-business sale.These are the final days of the Soviet sports machine.

MERIBEL, France -- At a lunch buffet the other day, an intrepid American reporter spoke French to the young woman behind the cash register. This despite a large hole in his foreign language education.Pointing to the slice of duck on his plate, he attempted to say: "I love duck."But his French grammar was tangled and it came out: "I love, you, my duck."All of which sums up the very American problem of trying to make sense of these very foreign Winter Olympics. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Now, it's Dan Jansen's Olympics. And Bonnie Blair's.Now, the stage belongs to a charismatic skier from Italy, an ebullient figure skater from Japan and a veteran cross country skier from Siberia.After 11 years of planning, six years of building, and four years of traumatic political change, the world's best skiers, skaters and sliders will assemble today for the 16th Olympic Winter Games.Framed by mountains, and transformed by the fall of a wall -- and an empire -- these Games already possess a place in history.

The thought of Americans at the top of the mountain at the XVI Winter Olympics is heady and strange. Still, Americans may have more to cheer about than ever before.The sweeping political thawing in Eastern Europe and elimination of its government-aided sports programs, coupled with the U.S. Olympic Committee's increased financial support of its winter sports, may result in a U.S. record medal count in Albertville, France."I want to be able to leave here saying we came, we saw, we conquered," said Alpine skier AJ Kitt, the first American to win a World Cup race since 1984.

Tourists seeking a break on prices at the 1992 Winter Olympics will have about as much success in France's Savoie region as Great Britain's Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards will have in the ski-jumping competition.Tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies in Albertville are on sale for $61, $143, $204 or $305, but one should not count on being able to purchase them because 60 percent of the seats in the 35,000-seat stadium are reserved for media, sponsors and VIPs. Tickets for the figure-skating competition, also in Albertville, will cost $61, $143 or $204.

For Americans, the opportunity to combine European travel and the Olympics won't get any better than 1992, when the winter games will be held in the French Alps and the summer games in Barcelona, Spain.It will be the last year in which both the summer and winter games are staged the same year. The winter games then will move to the alternate biennials, starting in 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway. The next stop for the summer games will be in Atlanta in 1996.Both the French Alps and the Mediterranean seaport of Barcelona are tourist destinations of their own; the addition of the Olympic Games either adds to their lure or detracts from it, depending on your affinity for competition and congestion.