No five-ring circus
In 1956, Winter Games were quieter and cozier
The silver medal was a thrill, but what Bill Cleary remembers most about his Olympic debut was marching in the parade at the opening ceremonies.
''Here I am, a young kid from Cambridge who had trouble getting across the Charles River," he says. ''And the next thing I know, I'm in the middle of these majestic mountains."
Fifty years ago, the VIIth Winter Games took place in Cortina d'Ampezzo, a quaint Italian resort town tucked away in the Dolomites up near the Austrian border. They were a snow-and-ice carnival from an age that is past, when the athletes lived in hotels, all of the events were outdoors, and nothing was shown on American TV. ''You had to go to a movie theater," remembers US figure skater Carol Heiss Jenkins. ''It was the old Pathe newsreels."
When the quadrennial sleigh ride returns to Italy this week for the XXth Games, there will be 2,500 competitors from 85 countries competing for 84 medals in 15 sports. In 1956, those numbers were 800, 32, 24, and 8. There was no snowboarding, no short-track speedskating, no curling, and only two sports for women: figure skating and Alpine skiing, plus two token cross-country races.
There will be more female hockey players in Turin than there were female athletes in Cortina, which was so compact that competitors could walk to most venues. As they've tripled in size, the Games have been metropolized, awarded to major cities like Nagano and Salt Lake City and Turin and Vancouver that have the hotel rooms and highways to house and transport 10,000 media representatives and hundreds of thousands of spectators. ''Cortina probably couldn't handle the Olympics now," Cleary reckons.
Cortina, like previous hosts St. Moritz and Garmisch and Chamonix, was a winter playground for the well-to-do. It was so isolated, in a sun-splashed amphitheatre hemmed in by soaring peaks, that many of its residents still spoke Ladin, a Romansch hybrid of Latin and the local mountain dialect. The village had one main street, the Corso, which had a Baroque church and campanile in the middle of the piazza and hotels and shops lining both sides.
''It was just gorgeous," remembers Heiss Jenkins. ''Everyone was wearing fur coats. It had that kind of ambience."
Cortina was so intimate that it was impossible for the Olympians, the tourists, and the townspeople not to mingle. ''We were staying at the Hotel Bellevue," Cleary recalls. ''My room was right over the dance floor. I thought, if I hear 'Arrivederci, Roma' one more time . . ."
''We didn't know much about the Russians then," says Cleary, who was in the Army when he competed that winter. ''They had copper blades on their skates and their equipment was inferior. But you could tell then that they could play the game of hockey."
The Russians outclassed everybody, beating both the Canadians and Americans and finishing the tournament unbeaten.
These were the Games in which the Finnish jumpers, using a radical aerodynamic ''drop" style with their arms along their sides, flew past the Norwegians, when Austria's Toni Sailer won all three men's Alpine races by a total of nearly 14 seconds.
In Oslo four years earlier, the women's slopes had belonged to Andrea Mead Lawrence, a Vermont teenager who won two of the three races. Now, at 23 with two toddlers and a newborn back at her Colorado ranch, she was back for a third Games.
''I didn't have anything in my head that said I was going to go out and win another gold medal," says Lawrence, who just missed making the podium in the giant slalom. ''It just didn't occur to me that I wouldn't do it."
As usual, the US medals came from the hockey team (their last at an overseas Games until 1972), from the bobsledders (their last until 2002), and from the figure skaters, who won an amazing five in the men's and women's events, their best-ever showing. Those were still their glory days, which began with Dick Button's gold medal in 1948 and didn't end until the plane crash that killed the entire 1961 team on its way to the world championships in Prague.
The men swept the podium with Hayes Alan Jenkins, Ronnie Robertson, and David Jenkins, Hayes's younger brother.
''I was thrilled to death to come in third," says David, who won the gold himself four years later. ''It was a wonderful thing to do with my brother."
The women, who'd never won the gold, went 1-2 with Newton native Tenley Albright and Heiss Jenkins.
Albright, who'd taken the silver in 1952, was world champion and the clear favorite. Then she spiked herself in practice less than two weeks before the Games, slashing her right ankle to the bone. Albright's surgeon father was able to strap the ankle so that she could walk on it, which was all she needed.
''As long as I knew that my leg wasn't going to fall off . . ." Albright says.
If she could get herself on the ice, Albright figured that she could push through somehow.
''I didn't know how I was going to get off the ice after that," she says, ''but that didn't matter."
Albright didn't have to do triple-triple jump combinations; the sport hadn't gone aerial yet. Skating was mostly about school figures, which made it a test of precision and poise and patience, with competitors often waiting hours for results.
''Sometimes you'd go and have dinner," Heiss Jenkins remembers, ''then you'd go back to the rink and find out."
Since Cortina's rinks were open-air, sun and wind and snow and cold all played a role. The ice could be brittle in the morning, soft in the afternoon.
''The worst was when the sun was up," remembers Heiss Jenkins. ''You'd get such a tremendous glare. A few hours later, it could be cloudy or it could be snowing. We didn't talk about fair."
Though the women's world champion always had won the Olympics, Albright was taking nothing for granted, especially after she took an uncharacteristic pratfall in practice.
''I did a waltz jump, the simplest thing you can do next to a bunny hop, and went absolutely splat on the ice," she recalls. ''That was a little scary."
Heiss Jenkins, who beat Albright at the world championships in Germany two weeks later, went on to win the 1960 gold medal, married Hayes two months later, and starred in ''Snow White and the Three Stooges."
Lawrence, her competitive urges sated, went back to her Colorado ranch, hung up her skis, and had two more children. ''It was a discombobulated year," she says, ''but I got it out of my system."
Cleary completed his military duty, went back to finish up at Harvard, and returned to win a gold medal with brother Bob at Squaw Valley, the last time the Russians were beaten at Olympus until the Boys of Winter did it in 1980 at Lake Placid.
''My friend Beel," Anatoly Tarasov, the godfather of Russian hockey, joked years later. ''I go to Siberia because of Beel."
The NHLers will be playing in these Games, as they have since 1998. Skaters, who stopped doing school figures in 1990, have been under a roof for decades now. NBC, with its cable partners, will show more than 400 hours of coverage this month. And there'll be four times as many media people in Turin than there'll be athletes, who'll be staying in three villages scattered from downtown to the mountains. The skiers won't see the hockey players, the skaters won't bump into the bobsledders.
It wasn't that way in Cortina, where the Olympians and the spectators and the villagers all strolled along the Corso together.
''It wasn't just about medals then, it was the whole thing," Cleary muses. ''It was about people, and I'm not sure it is now."
