Faster and faster. Bigger and bigger. Farther and farther. Brighter and brighter.
This is the Olympics we've come to know and maybe, to love. John Hollenhorst reports.
To the Olympic ideals, add one more. "More is better."
Well, it wasn't that way in Marv Melville's glory days.
"It's certainly on a much larger scale than I saw 42, 46 years ago," he says.
He's one of the few native Utahns to compete in earlier Winter Olympics.
He was a downhill racer back in the days when broken legs were par for the course. His Dad shot home movies on his first trip to the Olympics; Cortina Italy, 1956.
In that era hockey players wore no helmets. And there were no fancy safety bindings for skis. Melville remembers one event in those days when so many athletes got hurt, they ran out of stretchers.
Utah's Olympics involves huge crowds, expensive tickets, tight security. Not so at Cortina in '56 or Squaw Valley in '60.
"We could go to any venue, everything was close by. It was easy," Melville says. "It was fun and fairly low key, I suppose, by these standards."
And then there's the question of how fancy the Olympics needs to be. In Utah a mere Opening Ceremony cost 37 million dollars, in an extravaganza as elaborately produced as a Speilberg movie.
Contrast that with Cortina. A single skater carries the torch into an ice-rink and... whoops! What's that lying on the ice?
"There was one cord in the middle, crossing the ice. And he tripped on it. I don't think the torch went out, but it was a spectacular event. Everyone booed and hollered about it," Melville recalls.
And then there's the issue of commercialism, and money, which has settled over the Olympics like a fine dust, tainting the ideals, if not actually burying them.
"I think the athletes are focused more on money than we were back then," he says. "I mean there wasn't any money basically to be involved in."
"I don't think it's necessarily a black mark. I think it's change. And I think we have to adjust to change. I'm trying to make that adjustment and I hope others are."
Melville says he's biased in favor of the old bygone days of Olympic simplicity. But he's an Olympian still. And he still loves it. And now, it's Salt Lake's turn.
"It's not going to last very long, so we better enjoy it," he warns.
