SPECTATOR SPORT
THE BIZARRE and pretentious kitsch (as it came over on television) of the Winter Olympics' opening ceremony underlined once more the need to ban such vulgar tomfoolery from the sporting calendar. Mercifully, I do not have to be there this time. What they call winter sports leaves me cold. The only time I can recall my spine being riddled and the cockles warmed by the genuine stuff of sport was the after- noon at Innsbruck in 1976 that the ono- matopoeic Franz Klammer sensationally hurled himself and his skis down the ice- armoured mountainside in an heroically clattering spasm which won him the gold medal against the odds. For the rest, well, the Torvill and Deans have as much right on the sports pages as Margot Fonteyn had in the batting and bowling averages.
My first Olympics were in 1968 at Greno- ble. I was working for ITV then, and as one of my pointless titles was 'Eurovision Liai- son Officer', I was told to go out and 'liaise'. Ah, this was the life, I thought, as I contentedly lounged over the apres-ski bar with all the beautiful Martini people the night before racing began. Some hopes! Only a couple of hours into my draughty chalet in the press village, I was roughly wakened with orders to Raus! Raus! and board a battered bus which would take us
It's gone downhill
Frank Keating
to the top of some nearby Matterhorn. The snaky mountain track was shimmering glass in the headlights of the wheel-spinning old jalopy. It was the scariest hangover cure I've ever had. We made it to the top. A Cap'n Oates blizzard was blowing. My threadbare 1959 Milletts two-toggled duf- fle was no match for it. We counted the damn-fool racers down, one by one holler- ing suicidally into the white swirl. Then it was back to the bus for the skidding descent, with sheer drops left and right but less sheer terror this time, for my eye- lids had been sealed shut with frozen snow I vowed there and then never to cover the actual mountainside stuff again.
The sledging was okay. Well, the British event really. Mad dogs and Corinthians and all that. It was Boys' Own stuff when Nash and Dixon won the two-man bobsleigh medal at Innsbruck after the world champi-
on, Monti, had lent them a crucial bolt from his own bob to make an emergency repair just before their final run. No chance of that today. Lord Brabazon of Tara was still racketing dowli the Cresta in his fifties. When he finally packed it in, he said: 'At every run I was frightened. But when the exhilaration is worth the fright you must come back every year. The moment the ter- ror outweighs the fun, you must choose somewhere else for your holiday.'
The cricketers, David Gower and Allan Lamb, are the only two Cresta nuts I have ever met. They both get down in around a minute. The record for the almost vertical, glass-ice drop of 514 ft over about three- quarters of a mile is just over 40 seconds. The only way of braking is by the simple yet strenuous ploy of pressing your toe-studs ever harder into the ice. In 1947, apparent- ly, Errol Flynn had a go. His 180 seconds remains the slowest time ever recorded. Strong legs and spiked toe-caps, he almost crawled down, and at the hairy Shuttlecock Corner — so conflicting stories have it he came to a complete stop and a) lit a cigarette, b) swigged champagne with a wil- lowy blonde who had emerged from a Rolls-Royce, or c) both, before completing his run with m'lady draped around him. That, at least, was civilised winter sport.
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