![]() ![]() ABC then treated us, as five other skiers took their runs, to playbacks of the crash, plus interspersed shots of Grissman being dragged off the course by ski patrollers, Grissman being loaded onto a sled, Grissman waving feebly to the crowd, Grissman being slid into a helicopter, Grissman flying up the valley. "Here's where Jean-Claude Killy went off the edge in a practice run in 1964 and right there so-and-so got killed in a 1966 World Cup event and that's called the Soldier Section because they found a dead soldier there in 1945." As if that wasn't enough, when an Italian named Stricker crashed on the course, ABC reran the film with comments like "What a tremendous crash, Wow!" Two runs later, an Austrian, Grissman, wiped-out and bounced and slid and quivered over a couple hundred yards of the course. Just before the last practice runs for the men's downhill skiing event, for instance, ABC's skiing expert, a Canadian participant in the 1964 Games, traced through a map of the course with a pointer. And all the rest, except for a witty and informative Pierre Salinger video piece on prices in Innsbruck, was downhill. The next day, ABC said that 30 people had been hospitalized for bruises and broken bones suffered in the crush of people at the ceremonies. The mayor of Sapporo, Japan, where the 1972 Winter Olympics were held, downed a gulp of brandy with the "jolly burgomeister" of Innsbruck And then there were all those panning camera shots of Olympic flags and scenic valley vistas, and above all, whitecapped mountains, gray mountains, jagged mountains piercing blue skies. ![]() The contingents of athletes marched in wearing their hotdog winter stretchsuits littered with racing stripes. The opening ceremonies were fairly innocuous, sometimes stirring but mostly boring. But this year's coverage of the Winter Olympics wins the all-time Hubert-Humphrey-"I-was-a-Jew-once-myself" Poor Taste Award, not just for morbidity, but also for sexism, chauvinism, and plain stupidity. Saturday afternoon's most gripping moment was always the beginning of ABC Wide World of Sports: "the thrill of victory" (as Pele lays in a goal on a soccer field and a teammate throws him up in the air) "and the agony of defeat" as an Olympic ski-jumper slides sideways off a 70 meter jump, taking a few saplings with him on the way to the infirmary. ![]()
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