Bill Conlin: A 'snownik's' lousy luck at Winter Games

February 09, 2010
  • Machines were needed to provide the snow at Calgary in 1988.

SO IT'S THE last day of ski jumping at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and I'm walking around town in a light sweater. Office workers are eating lunch on park benches and sunning themselves. The only snow in the Alberta cow town has been trucked more than 50 miles from the foothills of the Canadian Rockies and packed onto the ski jump.

It was melting as fast as the army of workers could put it down. It appeared Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, a self-promoting Brit with the ski-jumping skills of Shrek, might be saved by a water landing.

As a professed snownik, I eagerly volunteered for Winter Olympics column duty. And why not? I envisioned one blizzard after another and packed for Calgary like a 19th-century arctic explorer. When Les Bowen and I arrived there, it was about 10 degrees and the ingredients that go into champagne powder snow were gently falling. Hot damn. OK, cold damn. By the time we arrived at the media village, the flurry had stopped. They were the last sincere flakes to fall on Calgary until the day after the Closing Ceremonies. A number of alpine skiing events had to be postponed when a chinook wind blowtorched the mountain slopes. It is difficult to run downhill on a slope of slush. The trails used for the nordic events had to be manicured with ribbons of trucked-in snow. We wondered if the Jamaican bobsled team would be literally bobbing down the chute like corks.

I covered four Winter Olympics - Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer and Nagano, spending a total of 12 weeks in the company of God's Frozen People. There was zero snow in Calgary. Albertville, which sits on a valley floor surrounded by the majestic French Alps, was flakeless. The only snow I saw actually falling was the day of the women's downhill in Meribel, which is kind of like the Wildwood of the Alps. Les actually got snowed in up there covering hockey. He's on the cell phone describing the big, fat flakes and I'm 20 miles away in the La Lechere press center describing the big, fat raindrops. When I covered the men's downhill in Val d'Isere, the town just north of the Italian border still was choked with snow from an epic December storm. At lunch, a waiter informed me I was sitting exactly in the spot where, a month earlier, two people were killed when an avalanche thundered into town. Oh??

L'addition, s'il vous plait.

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