Winter Games

Jim Lampley will host Turner Network Television's coverage of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. Lampley's appearance will be the ninth time he's reported or hosted an Olympics. He's also covered the international event for CBS and ABC. He has worked for HBO Sports since 1988. Turner acquired exclusive cable broadcasting rights to the 1998 Winter Olympics in an agreement with U.S. rights-holder CBS. CBS, a unit of Westinghouse Electric Corp., paid $375 million for the entire package.

Before the Olympic torch arrived in Atlanta last month, Hilary Grinker already had her sights on capturing the hills of Nagano, Japan, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. In February, Grinker, 31, and her colleagues at Educational Marketing Concepts in Wayne displaced a Japanese rival and secured the right to make the first IMAX film of the Olympic Games. IMAX films are designed to be shown on panoramic screens several stories tall. The 40-minute film, Olympic Glory, is scheduled to be released in early 1999.

Eastern won the championship of the Voorhees CER Summer League last week on its own court, defeating Triton, 52-31, in the final. Triton? Yes, Triton, which went 2-21 last winter. Triton, competing as Storms in the summer girls' basketball league, ousted heavily favored Haddonfield (Bread Board Plus) on the way to the final. Freshman forward Michelle Mazyasovsky scored 19 points for Triton in the loss to Eastern (Eagles' Nest). "The team played really well this summer," Triton coach Dave Storms said.

The Wasatch mountains are still snowcapped around Salt Lake City, even in June, and sometimes you can ski almost into this summer month. The roads are fabulous, the arenas are plentiful and modern. The airport is big and busy, the hotels are geared to skiers and skaters and the people who like to watch skiers and skaters. The people are friendly and eager to please and, don't worry, you can drink your colas and coffee. The Mormons will let you. So Salt Lake City is ready to welcome the world.

Pennsylvania's fall hunting seasons have come and gone. But the winter seasons have just begun, giving hunters additional chances to pursue deer, small game, upland birds and waterfowl. Most of the late seasons opened on Monday, but their closing dates vary. Deer: The late seasons for people who wish to hunt deer with flintlock muzzleloaders and bows and arrows will continue through Jan. 14. The Pennsylvania Game Commission reminds hunters that they must have a flintlock or archery stamp if they wish to take part in these seasons.

Here are plums awarded and darts thrown by a critic after watching television coverage of the XVII Winter Olympic Games from Lillehammer, Norway - plus three unreliable reports from Rumor Control Central. Most significant statistic. Women make up 60 percent of the viewing audience. So that's why the CBS coverage, both widely watched and broadly criticized, looked the way it did. CBS aimed not at the hard-core fans of any particular sport, but at people, women in particular, who may not watch another major sports event this year.

Speedskater Bonnie Blair is gritty and gutsy, not glamorous like a figure skater. She gets on the ice and goes - and yesterday, in the 1,000-meter race, she sprinted to her fifth Olympic gold medal. (She's also won a bronze.) No American woman had ever won five golds in Olympic competition. No American - man or woman - had ever won six Olympic medals in the Winter Games. Speedskating is a blue-collar sport; its practitioners don't sign multimillion-dollar deals with ice shows or corporate sponsors.

Major mogul bummer, bumpheads. The queen is dead. Those nasty Norwegians cheered her demise. They even booed. It was just like being at the Vet for a Wild Thing happening. Donna Weinbrecht, the absolute, sure-thing, take-it-to-the-savings-and-loan lock to win another gold in freestyle mogul skiing, finished a disappointing seventh yesterday. The U.S. team did win the silver medal, though. Liz McIntyre, of Winter Park, Colo., whose father practices medicine and whose mother raises sheep (for her own yarn)

No promises, but there could be a spectacular sight at today's official opening of the XVII Olympic Winter Games. No. Tonya and Nancy will not kiss and make up in a moose-drawn sleigh. Bigger than that. Northern Lights. "If the weather remains clear and dry," said Borre Holmeslet of the Northern Lights Observatory in Tromso, "there could be a possibility. " Even without such a natural wonder, this two-week sports and entertainment extravaganza will begin with snow trolls and Vikings; a good-sized herd of reindeer; folk dancers; air acrobats; a flame-bearing ski jumper; actress Liv Ullman; a thousand kids, and one king.

With the fanfare of an Olympic event, seventh- and eighth-grade students from around Chester County went to Great Valley High School Saturday to match their math skills in the ninth annual Mathcounts competition. More than 180 middle school students came with sharpened pencils and scratch paper to test their knowledge in written and oral exams. The "mathletes" had to compete against each other and the clock. For most of them, that wasn't a problem. Before one could say "square root," they had the answer at the tip of their pencils.