A full list of articles T A B L E_T A L K Olympic Village: All the news on everything that skates, skis or slides at the Nagano games R E C E N T L Y Retro burger By Gary Kamiya Musings on women's hockey, Japanese English, the quest for tosto and other cross-cultural oddities (02/12/98) CBS drops the ball in Nagano By Daniel Radosh Bring on the cheerleaders! The anorexic gymnasts! CBS's Olympic coverage is a snooze (02/12/98) Stoned on ice By Gary Kamiya Our man in Japan learns to love curling, the Monty Python of spectator sports (02/11/98) Apres moi, de luge By Gary Kamiya Getting a half-second high from the sport that gives a whole new meaning to the expression "balls out" (02/10/98) Higher! Faster! Wetter! By Gary Kamiya Our half-Japanese man in Japan reports on the thrill of Victory and the agony of Nagano (02/08/98) More Olympics articles

______The fastest man on ice ______THE DOWNHILL IS CANCELED AGAIN AND SCALPERS ______ARE FLEECING YOUR CORRESPONDENT, BUT A ______THRILLING MEN'S 1500-METER SPEED SKATING ______RACE BRINGS THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT ALIVE. Aadne Sondral of Norway wins the gold medal in the 1,500-meter men's speed skating. BY GARY KAMIYA NAGANO, Japan -- Friday, 9:25 a.m. Yesterday, it finally felt like the Olympics. Maybe it took the medal ceremony to do it -- the Japanese Scouts solemnly marching in with the three flags, the playing of the national anthem as the flags slowly ascended to the ceiling, the three athletes standing solemnly on the platform to receive their medals, the champion looking off into some nameless, hallowed inward distance as the song of his country is played, then wiping away a tear before taking a lap of honor to the roar of the crowd. This is what it's all about -- the deed, and then the world's celebration of a rosy-cheeked kid who just did something better than any other human being on the planet, and knows that for the rest of his life, even when some other rosy-cheeked kid does it faster, they'll never be able to take the gold medal away from him. In a world in which everything whirls away and is lost, this must be a glory that endures. The event was the men's 1,500-meter speed skating, and, thanks to my own stupidity, I almost didn't make it. I got up at the crack of dawn to catch the 7:39 for the third rescheduling of the men's downhill and combined downhill races up in Hakuba. At one of the scalper's corners at the end of Nagano Station, I figured I'd sell my prime $90 speed skating ticket, since the event took place at the same time as the skiing. I held up my ticket and was immediately approached by a guy with curly black hair cut in a retro '70s shag. He had the polite, cut-throat demeanor of someone who hawked low-grade electronic goods in Joisey, or sold bad weed in Washington Square -- possibly Ross Rebagliati's connection. (Actually, since Rebagliati is saying he only imbibed secondhand smoke at a party, the culprit was probably President Clinton, blowing out a big old cloud of that smoke he didn't inhale.) "How much do you want?" he said. "Face value," I said, adding naively, "I can't go, so I have to sell it." For some reason, perhaps lack of sleep, it had not yet become clear to me that I did not need to assure this gentleman that I was not a scalper, since he was one himself. "I don't pay face value," he said. "I'll give you 6,000 ($50)." I didn't have time to haggle -- the last Hakuba shuttle buses were going to leave and I was already late. I sold it to him, irritably aware that he was probably going to turn around and sell it for $150. It always hurts to be on the shafted end of a primitive capitalist transaction. Karl Marx probably started writing "Das Kapital" after getting burned by this guy's great-great-grandfather in some Turkish-rug scam outside the bus station in Leipzig. On the hour-long bus ride up to Hakuba -- the bus was equipped with a big monitor that constantly showed our movement on a map -- the weather began to worsen. By the time we got off, we were enveloped in a wet gray-white shroud. It rained, then snowed, then rained. After the shuttle-bus fiasco on the first day, the organizers had evidently decided to improve matters by having the shuttle bus drop us off a mile and a half away from the site, instead of right next to it as they had last time. Just why this constituted an improvement was unclear, but we all got out and began schlepping through the rain. When we got to the site, there was practically nobody there -- a lot of people had had to go home, or had simply lost hope. A delay was announced, and I made my way over to a little line of tents and got some hot noodles. I'd stupidly gone with a down jacket instead of Goretex and was beginning to reek of wet feathers. An American guy in a big fur coat was helping his cute little boy, who didn't know how to use chopsticks, eat soup. The snow falling in it helped cool it off. I heard him say to someone that the conditions would favor so-and-so in the race. I asked him who he was talking about, and he said, "My boy." Who was that? "Tommy Moe," he replied. I was slurping Chinese noodles across a plastic table from the father of the gold medalist in the downhill at Lillehammer. Tom Moe Sr. was a friendly, craggy-faced contractor from Anchorage, Alaska -- an outdoorsman, active skier and general straight shooter. I asked him if he thought they were going to run the race. "Well, if they do, they'll just be giving the gold medal away. It'll just be luck. The conditions are ridiculous. It's like this in Alaska -- that's why Tommy's used to it. I was up there at the top earlier, and it's terrible. They've got the Japanese army all stomping down the snow -- they just brought in hundreds more of them. Those poor guys are really working." I asked if his life had changed after his son won the gold. "Oh, it's been great. Just watching him grow during this whole experience. He's a great guy. I know, I'm his dad and everything, but everybody says that. With all the media and everything, I guess it can go either way -- you could become an asshole." I said that Picabo Street, the effervescent American who had won gold in the women's Super-G Wednesday, seemed like quite a character. (In the English-language Japan Times, a Japanese reporter who stood next to her after her run quoted Street as delivering a deliriously ingenuous running commentary as her arch rival, Katja Seizinger, roared down the hill: "She's gaining ... but I'm faster! I'm gonna make the podium ... It's gonna be a night out in Nagano tonight!") "Oh, she's a trooper," he said. "I know all the skiers on the team, and they're all great people." As the parent of an athlete, Moe said he got tickets to his son's events -- but that was it. "What people don't know about being a parent is that you don't get to see much of the Olympics, unless you're rich." N E X T+P A G E+| Capitalism works PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE HEWITT/ALLSPORT Archived images are provided by Allsport Photography USA, Inc. all rights reserved, any redistribution, resale, re-print or other use is strictly prohibited without written consent from Allsport Photography USA, Inc. directly.