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Security's so tight even Russians complain
By Lee Benson
Deseret News columnist
They were billed in advance as the most secure Olympics $320 million could buy and three days into the action, who's arguing? You don't have to shout for a policeman up and down the Olympic Front, a whisper will do.
Already, crooks must be declaring Salt Lake the worst Olympics ever. The place is crawlin' with cops. If you tried to pull a bank job in downtown Salt Lake you'd get on "America's Dumbest Criminals" twice.
We have more troops stationed along the Olympics corridor than they have in Kandahar. There are 10,000 on the ground and in the air and another 5,000 back at headquarters, manning the desks. That's almost three times what they had in Sydney and 100 times what they have for the Hope Diamond. For every athlete at the 2002 Games there are five security personnel. For every member of the media there are almost two cops.
Police and soldiers are everywhere, with the possible exception of upright on a skeleton sled. You can see them guarding parking lots, exits, alleys, the back road to Evanston. Some policemen have reportedly gone undercover, working from the inside, blending into the local landscape. Who knows just where? Which is as good a time as any to ask: Did the Tabernacle Choir seem a bit flat to you in opening ceremonies?
Metal detectors are omnipresent. It's like the entire city is an airport concourse. Going to figure skating is like flying to Beirut. No one is exempt. Every time we journalists enter the Main Media Center, for example, we have to do the mag and bag. And I can tell you from experience it does not help to smile and say, "Remember me from yesterday?" If anything, it only makes it worse.
They check your bags and make you unbutton your coat and scrutinize your i.d. photo. The fact that you look like a journalist — badly dressed, wearing mostly free stuff — does not faze them. They make you turn on your cell phone and computer. But they have a heart and stop short of making you stand there and write a decent paragraph. At least so far.
Maddening? Oppressive? Over the top? Somewhere Patton is smiling? You bet. Although, as the friendly volunteers keep reminding you at the back of the line, it does beat the alternative.
It can get to you, though, which is reportedly what happened at the Soldier Hollow cross country venue Saturday when a Russian athlete got more than a little perturbed when she was told to take a sip out of her water bottle — to make sure it really was just water in there.
You know it's tight security when it's getting to the Russians.
Think about it. This is probably the safest place on the face of the Earth with people in it. Where else is an entire army stationed with no visible war going on?
For sure it's the most protected Olympics. I was in Los Angeles in 1984, with a war going on in Afghanistan and a Soviet Bloc boycott that threatened to ruin the party, and it was nothing like this.
(Who'd have thought that 17 1/2 years later the Soviet Bloc would be disbanded, a nightmare confined only to the history books . . . and security would be worse?).
I was also at the Seoul Olympics in South Korea in 1988. Security was extremely tight there because, for one thing, North Korea, which declined to compete in the Games, was less than a hundred miles away across the demilitarized zone, and for another, student riots and general unrest had erupted inside South Korea just before the Olympics began. There were threats from without and within.
But security still wasn't as tight as it is here.
It's just one of those ultimate ironies that the strongest and freest country in the world has to have the most oppressive Olympics.
It's all certainly a long, far cry from the Sydney Olympics of just 18 months ago, when they solved the occasional problems of backups at the metal detectors by simply shutting them off.
When the crowds thinned back down, they turned them on again.
Ah, the good old days.
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 11, 2002
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