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Amid the ahhs, you could hear Utahns exhale
By Lee Benson
Deseret News columnist
On a winter Olympic kind of night — cold enough you needed the parka, not so cold you wished it wasn't you in it — the 19th Olympic Winter Games opened in Salt Lake City Friday night.
That sound you heard immediately after George W. Bush declared open the 2002 Games was everyone exhaling at once. Seven years in the on-deck circle was long enough, particularly when the wait included a bid scandal and the most egregious terrorist attack in U.S. history. More than once, it looked like Salt Lake's Games had as much chance as a Shaquille O'Neal free throw.
But on a crisp, clean February evening at the foot of freshly dusted Rocky Mountains and with Black Hawks keeping watch by night, the star-crossed Games were cleared for takeoff.
It was just after 9:30 p.m., Olympic Mountain Time, when members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, led by captain Mike Eruzione, joined hands to light the stadium caldron — with no technological fuss, just a straight-on slap shot — and make it an official Olympics. It was a dramatic moment and, especially for anyone over 18, a Miracle off Ice.
It was not, however, much of a surprise. Rumors had widely circulated for weeks that the caldron-lighters would be the hockey team that shocked the world, and the Soviets, in Lake Placid. Despite top-secret precautions taken by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, including threats of termination or perhaps banishment to Wendover, somehow word got out. There was a breech. Whoever thought Salt Lake could keep anything secret from the world?
Much slicker was the bait-and-switch the Secret Service pulled off earlier in the day when President Bush paid a visit to the leader of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, at LDS headquarters in downtown Salt Lake. While the president-to-president meeting was going on, a large crowd gathered on the steps outside the building, keeping a close watch on a long black presidential limo parked at the curb — only to later discover it was a decoy limo. The one that whisked POTUS away was in an alley a block the other way.
The opening ceremony took place, appropriately enough, barely a mile from the spot where Brigham Young stood almost 155 years ago and said, "This is the Place," which would have been a nice place to park last night — or even sit and watch the fireworks — except it was closed to parking and everything else unless you were CIA, FBI, DEA, or a prairie dog. The entire area around the Olympic Stadium was swept as clean as a curling rink. Even the new light-railway line was silenced — after a furious around-the-clock effort the past six months to get it up and running. It was like buying a new Beamer and then leaving it in the driveway.
But if that's what it took, that's what it took, and even if the capacity crowd of 55,000 was a captive audience, so to speak—or that the evening cost $7 a minute for those 15,000 members of the general public who paid $885 a ticket to get in — it didn't seem to matter.
The entrance of the ground zero American flag, escorted into the stadium at the beginning of the ceremony by a contingent of athletes and policemen, set the tone. As much as anything, that flag raised from the Trade Center ashes of 9/11 — tattered, battered and flanked by extra security — symbolizes the comeback spirit of not just the country hosting the Games but an International Olympic Committee equally intent on not giving in to thugs.
Some people saw the gesture as a political statement. I saw it as proof through the night that our flag is still there.
The opening ceremony capped a whirlwind couple of days that saw the Olympic flame arrive in the capital city and saw a blanket of temperature inversion gloom exit the Salt Lake Valley early Friday morning, ousted by a light snowstorm exactly as forecast. The weathermen were right. Things were looking up.
Torch runner after torch runner had inched the flame closer to its final destination in a relay that included cameos by, among others, LaVell Edwards in Provo, Spence Eccles in Ogden, the LDS Church Presidency in Salt Lake, and a special appearance of Stockton-to-Mahre. Among the most dramatic moments was the one early Friday evening when adopted Utahn Stein Eriksen took the flame from a caldron in front of the State Capital and triggered the lighting of the five huge gold rings in the northeast Salt Lake foothills that will shine every night throughout the 17 days of the Games.
All the gold medal Norwegian Olympian from 1952 had to do was lift his torch and the rings sprang to life. A proud moment. But wait till Stein gets the light bill.
It was all a setup to the final, and starting, touch Friday night, when those hockey players took the torch and stood tall and lit the flame that came from Olympia and the flag from ground zero waved yet again. It was enough to make you think the Salt Lake Games might not be jinxed after all.
Lee Benson's column runs daily during the Olympics. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.
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February 9, 2002
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