Truths Her Brother Told Me

"It's all politics," Judy Blumberg's brother told me, and at first I thought he had to be paranoid.

But by the end of three days at the Lake Placid Olympics I knew he was right--it is all politics.

The cranky bushy-haired spectator delivered his opinion before his sister--competed in the ice dancing preliminaries, where she later placed seventh. Reluctant to admit his sister was the best ice dancer in the United States, he was anxious to talk about how hard it is for American skaters to break into this traditinally European-dominated sport. "You gotta pay your dues," Blumberg said as the Russian champions executed their figures on the ice with an almost sterile precision.

"See, these guys have been at it a while. They'd have to fall on their faces to get scores that are lower then anyone else's," he stated. And then in his cynical, croaking voice, never having looked at the rink during the Soviet performance, he predicted what score each of the nine judges would bestow on the unsmiling, cool and controlled Russian skaters.

And he was right on target. From the 5.8's the Communist bloc dished out to them like candy, to the more reserved 5.5's the North American judges gave them, his predictions were impeccable.

The reality of the Moscow Olympics' imminent death at the hands of political intrigue hovered over the Lake Placied games, making evidence of political overtones all the more glaring. The blind eye the judges turned on Judy Blumberg because she "hasn't paid her dues--she's only been competing for two years," and the evidences of bloc voting again and again infuriated the seli-out crowd who booed Judy's low scores for five minutes.

At the Czechoslovakia-Romania ice hockey contest the day before, an initially uninterested crowd grew more and more involved as the "Romanians fell further and further behind. "If they can score, you can," the excited spectators shouted to the oblivious Romanians players.

"When I got tickets to this game," the man next to me explained, "I didn't know who I'd root for, with two communists playing each other, you know."

But now, "It's easy to see that the Czechs are like the Russians," his wife added, trailing off, and for the crowd the hockey games slowly but surely evolved into a metaphor for an international power struggle.

But when the day was over--when they awarded the gold medal to Eric Hidden and raised the American flag while the official Olympic Band played The Star Spangled Banner--the crowd was momentarily stunned by emotion, and than broke into ecstatic cheering.

And when a stocky Russian next accepted the gold medal for the biathlon, the cheering once again was unrestrained. Even across the town--where the people waiting for buses could see a the fireworks fill the sky but only hear strains of the National Anthems--cheers overpowered the cold, and a the politics that blanketed Lake, Placid like anthin coat of ice, melted, if only for a moment.