If you made the trip to Norway, or even if you just watched on TV, you know that the Olympics in Lillehammer four years ago might have been the best ever: Tons of drama. Foremost were the eponymous Norwegian winterscapes with at least three feet of settled snow everywhere you looked. Then there were gold and silver medals in skiing for Americans Tommy Moe, Diann Roffe-Steinrotter, Picabo Street and Liz McIntyre. How are the folks in Japan going to top that?
Hey, they probably won’t. But the XVIIIth Winter Olympic Games, February 7-22, in Nagano will almost certainly provide lots of excitement and will definitely feature several firsts. Chief among them: snowboarding, which makes its Olympic debut in Nagano; and, thanks to a 14-hour time difference between Japan and the Eastern U.S., an Olympic downhill broadcast live in prime time.
Snowboarding, a sport that’s barely 20 years old, arrives at the Olympics this winter with giant slalom and halfpipe competitions for men and women. Snowboarding and the Olympics make an odd couple, and many riders will tell you they don’t have any interest in the Games. Others, including Jake Burton Carpenter, founder of Burton Snowboards, actually worry that the Olympics, with its emphasis on teams, nationalism and commercial sponsorships, will do lasting damage to this quintessentially individual sport.
But that’s not the way it’s seen by most snowboarders competing for berths on the first U.S. Olympic snowboard team. When Ski Racing asked U.S. team athletes what their goals were for this season, just about everyone mentioned a medal in Nagano and many were talking about gold. Since most of the top riders in the world are from the U.S., the toughest test this winter for American riders might be making the team.
Among those who seem like good bets to go, the threats for medals include halfpipe experts Ross Powers, Todd Richards, Jimi Scott, Ross Powers and Dan Smith on the men’s side, and Shannon Dunn, Sabrina Sadeghi, Tricia Byrnes, Cara Beth Burnside and Michelle Taggart among the women. Taggart is also a contender for gold in giant slalom, as are 1997 world champion Sondra Van Ert, Betsy Shaw, Rosey Fletcher, Lisa Kosglow and Stacia Hookom. On the men’s side, giant slalom favorites from the U.S. include former World Cup champion Mike Jacoby, Rob Berney, Jeff Greenwood, Steve Persons, Chris Klug and Bill Enos.
It will be disappointing if U.S. riders don’t come home with medals in all four events, and two or three golds is not out of the question.
For U.S. fans, the big news is that if you’re watching the Olympics back home, those 14 time zones separating the U.S. and Japan will be a boon, because events that take place in the morning in Nagano will be happening in U.S. prime time. The men’s downhill, for example, which starts at 10:15 a.m. on February 8 in Japan, will be broadcast by CBS on February 7 at 8:15 p.m. in the Eastern time zone. CBS believes this will be the first time an Olympic downhill has been broadcast live in prime time.
Before the Games end on February 22, CBS expects to broadcast 128 hours of Olympic coverage, much of it in prime time. The network will also have late night shows for the duration of the Olympics and “CBS This Morning” will come to you live from Nagano every weekday. As if that weren’t enough, Turner Sports Network, which purchased the U.S. cable rights to the Games from CBS, will be doing 50 hours of Olympic programming, most of it in the late afternoon time slots, previewing what’s to come on CBS later that night and airing the odd event thrown its way by CBS.
When you talk to CBS about the Olympic broadcast schedule, you often hear the words “weather permitting,” and for good reason. Nagano’s Games will be held in the same region of the country— called “the Roof of Japan” and home to mountain ranges topping out at 9,300 feet—that brought you the 1993 Alpine World Championships, an event beset with poor weather from start to finish. Many events were delayed, some for days, and one—the men’s super G—never happened at all.
While they can’t do anything about the weather, the Nagano organizers have left almost nothing else to chance in preparing to greet the 83 national teams and 3,000 athletes and officials who will arrive in February. Japan has spent nearly $10 billion building and improving roads in and around the Nagano region and constructing a bullet train line connecting Nagano with Tokyo, 155 miles away. The train, which began running in October, reaches a top speed of 160 mph and cuts the time for the trip to under 80 minutes. Another billion went into construction of the venues, the Olympic stadium and the athletes’ village, and the Nagano Organizing Committee (the acronym is NAOC, which is pronounced “Nowk”) expects to spend about $825 million (that’s 100 billion yen) just putting on the Games.
From the start, Nagano has pledged to run the “greenest” Games possible. One result of that promise was a serial shouting match between NAOC and the International Ski Federation (FIS) over the men’s downhill course in Hakuba. NAOC insisted on starting the race at an elevation of 1,680 meters; the FIS asked that the start be raised to 1,800 meters to lengthen the course and produce a more challenging event. But raising the start would have put it into a “National Park Special Zone,” home to many rare plant species. No dice, said NAOC.
This soap opera ended its run in early December when the FIS and the NAOC compromised: The start will be raised a bit, about 85 meters of vertical, adding 10 or 15 seconds to the length of the race, making it similar in length to other recent Olympic courses. And the FIS has promised to be as unobtrusive as possible, not disturbing the ground beneath the snow.
In addition to Hakuba, which is about 27 miles up the road from Nagano and will host the downhill, super G, cross-country and ski jumping events, the other skiing venues are at lizuna Kogen, in Nagano City (freestyle aerials and moguls) and Shiga Kogen, a resort on Mt. Higashidate in Yamanouchi Town, about 34 miles from Nagano (giant slalom, slalom and the snowboard GS and halfpipe venues). This does not shape up as a banner year for the U.S. in alpine skiing—most of the top racers, including defending Olympic champ Moe and former World Cup and world champion Street, are in one stage or another of recovery from serious knee injuries and they may or may not be at the top of their games when the Olympics arrive. But Moe, Street, Kyle Rasmussen and AJ Kitt have all won in the past and could do so again; Matt Grosjean looks tough in slalom, as do Kristina Koznick and Tasha Nelson; and some exciting young skiers, such as Sarah Schleper and Bode Miller, may make their first Olympic appearances in Nagano. It’s worth remembering, too, that Lillehammer was also supposed to be a bust for the U.S. team.
In the freestyle events, several of the favorites are Americans, including McIntyre, Donna Weinbrecht and Jonny Moseley in the moguls and Eric Bergoust and Nikki Stone in aerials. It’s here, and in snowboarding, that the U.S. is most likely to bring home gold from the mountains of Japan.
