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From the Olympics Toword Tomorrow
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Crowds cheer for Japan's jumpers despite snow storm
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Shouting yells of encouragement at the start, the crowd burst into cries of relief after the Japanese team captured the first Olympic gold medal in the team ski jumping event, erasing painful memories of Lillehammer four years ago when Japan narrowly missed the gold medal.
''It's all thanks to the spectators,'' said a tearful Masahiko Harada after his second jump of 137 meters paced Japan to victory as Japan was struggling at fourth place at the end of the first round.
Tuesday's gold, Japan's fourth in the Nagano Olympics, pleased the supportive crowd, which turned out to fill the stands undaunted by subzero temperatures and fierce winds.
Heavy snowfall from early Tuesday morning shrouded the jumping gates in thick fog and threatened to disrupt the schedule completely as the starting jump was delayed by 30 minutes and the start of the second round was interrupted by about 20 minutes.
For one moment when a troop of volunteers finished conditioning the course, the sun shone and the snowfall stopped -- sending the huge crowd, which later grew in size as temperatures dropped even further -- to blow their noisemakers with approval to mark the start of the jumps at 10 a.m.
As in Lillehammer, the Japanese team was favored to win.
The last jumper in the second round, Kazuyoshi Funaki, gold medalist in the large hill event on Sunday and silver medalist in last week's normal hill event, made a 125-meter leap that gave Japan a winning total of 933 points, 35.6 points ahead of second-placed Germany.
The Japanese victory was so convincing that Dieter Thoma, the last jumper for Germany, went down from the awarding podium to bow before the Japanese jumping team. (Kyodo News)
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Copyright 1998 The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun