This Is a One-Time-Only Deal

\o7

\f7

Watching the Winter Olympics on TV, I am struck anew with how we in this country prize the second-rate in our athletics.

I mean, I can do without the luge or the two-man bobsled, and I don't have to go to Nagano to see the New York Rangers play hockey, but I marvel at the pressure-packed implacability of the events for athletes on snow skis or figure skates.

Look! You think a World Series is throat-choking pressure? A Super Bowl? Even a golf Open? Wimbledon?

Forget it. You get three strikes in baseball. You get four downs to make 10 yards in football. You get three to five sets in tennis. You get four rounds of 18 holes in golf.

These people get -- what? -- 25 seconds? A minute?

It's incredible. They work and even slave for years, all their lives striving for perfection. Nothing less will win. Then, their skate or ski edge slips a matter of inches and it was all for naught. They have sometimes only split seconds to validate their whole personas.

I watch in open-mouth amazement at the micrometer precision of the pairs skaters, melding their athleticism into one whole as if there were only one person performing these complicated routines.

I was not surprised to be told that one pairs skater had her skull laid open by a partner's blade edge whirling too close to it in a practice routine. I shake my head that there haven't been more.

Consider those young women spinning down the mountainsides in the snow, twisting and turning past the slalom flags at exactly the right angle. One sideways slide, one moment of imperfection, and a lifetime of training goes down the drain. There is no reprieve, no rerun. I can remember one year, at Grenoble, the great Jean-Claude Killy had apparently won his third gold medal, in the slalom, when the Austrian, Karl Schranz, claimed his run had been interfered with in the fog of Chamrousse by a French policeman. He had to abort the run, he said.

They reluctantly gave Karl another run and he apparently bested Killy, but then someone remembered that the Olympic creed is one-chance and one-chance-only. No penalty for pass interference. No balk rule.

Schranz was overruled and only later was it learned he had missed a gate long before the fiasco with the \o7flic \f7-- if it happened.

That's the Olympic ethic. Get it right the first time or go home and brood on what might have been. Sometimes, a gold-medal run is wrested from you at the last gate or your skates slip out from under you and you hit the boards just as you are winning the 500 meters.