Our Olympics, our (now-patriotic) American selves

Bode Miller is the reckless and powerful American Alpine skier who may win a gold this month. He has been touring Europe most of the winter, winning four World Cups. As an American, he said this week, he shared the devastation of the terror attacks in September. But he was proud to be an American skier in Nagano four years ago, he said, and he will be just as proud competing in his own country. But no Olympic medal, he said, could bring back the life lost on Sept. 11.

Amy Peterson, a five-time Olympic skier, looks at it a little differently. "There's a little more pressure on us to produce," she said, "but mostly I think we're in a win-win situation. Every person we walk by on the street is supporting us. To compete in the United States of America is probably the biggest privilege I'll have in any of my Olympic experiences. Every country that I've been to waves their flag high and I don't think we'll be any different. All Sept. 11 did is to make it mean that much more to each and every person who waves the flag."

The ancient dreams that the Olympics might be an agent for peace are still treasured, but not very real.

There have been murders in the Olympics, boycotts, fraud as the money in it escalates, routine doping, and political manipulation. The American athletes look like attractive men and women today, and they probably are, but just four years ago in Nagano, the American hockey team tore a hotel room apart, which was more than it was able to accomplish against its opponents on the ice.

The Olympics are the world's wishful but muddling attempts to find joy and reconciliation by assembling its great athletes in friendly rivalry. That doesn't always happen, but sometimes the atmospherics matter as much as the performance.

The Salt Lake games are being characterized by psychologists and the jock mavens as the perfect therapy for a country shocked and mortified just a few months ago by its discovery of vulnerability. It probably is, to the relief of Salt Lake City, whose promoters nearly killed it two years ago with a strategy of bribery that has now been carefully forgiven. But when you look at the Olympics in the larger picture over the decades you have to be struck by the sheer melodrama and burlesque that flavors much of it.

If you see only the athletes and the show here in Salt Lake, for example, you'll miss one of the juicier sideshows. This is the place, Brigham Young said, and the Mormons settled here. The Mormons essentially run Utah. They brought to the mountains and the desert mixed gifts of piety, prosperity, a becoming prudery, and polygamy.

Some of these gifts have become obsolete, and the Mormon leadership looks on the Olympics with a kind of smiling ambivalence. It's nice to have a million visitors in Utah and the eyes of the world on the Mormon Tabernacle. But what about those plans by Olympic organizers to make condoms freely available? Whoa! It's happened at other Games, in the interest of health, but jarred here. Racing into a new millennium is never easy, especially in Utah.

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