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From the Olympics Toword Tomorrow
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Samaranch labels Nagano Olympics 'best organized'
And games organizers received the highest praise possible during the traditional speech made at the closing ceremony by Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
''Congratulations, Nagano. Congratulations, Japan,'' Samaranch told the crowd of 50,000 at the Olympic stadium in southern Nagano on a night of clear skies and chilly winds. ''You have presented to the world the best organization in the history of the Olympic Winter Games.''
Athletes and officials from a record 72 countries entered the Olympic stadium in southern Nagano for the second time, marching neatly as delegations unlike recent Olympic closing ceremonies in which the athletes enter en masse to symbolize the peaceful unity of the world's youth.
According to games organizers, the official count came to 2,302 athletes and 1,464 officials from all five continents, far exceeding the previous winter games attendance record of 1,801 competitors at the 1992 Albertville Olympics.
Nagano Mayor Tasuku Tsukada handed the Olympic flag to Samaranch, who then gave it to Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini, whose city will host the next winter games in 2002.
That the winter games will travel across the Pacific was illustrated clearly when horseback riders and a stage coach burst onto the stage during the ceremony's segment introducing Salt Lake, vividly depicting the Wild West of the United States.
With a host of royalty present, including Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and Crown Prince of Netherlands Willem Alexander, children and entertainers warmed the crowd with a generous scoop of local traditional dancing, ''taiko'' drum beating and gigantic colorful hairpin-like banners.
Nagano is the third city in Japan to host an Olympics following Tokyo in 1964 and Sapporo in 1972 and, like the past two events, the organizers and the government spared little expense.
An estimated 2.4 trillion yen went into building venues, new roads and a Shinkansen bullet train that connects Tokyo and the central Japan city in 90 minutes.
Economists, however, are predicting that the economic impact will be greater.
IOC leaders, athletes and the media generally felt that Nagano Games organizers succeeded in the mundane aspects where hosts of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics had failed -- providing smooth transport, delivering competition results on time, and ensuring security without much hassle for the million-plus visitors.
After the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, Olympic observers said Nagano had a tough act to follow. Australian IOC member Kevan Gosper said that after Nagano, the organizers of the 2000 Sydney Olympics are now in the same exact position.
Nagano chiefs promised these would be a ''high-tech'' games, and they delivered.
The games' official Internet home page was a huge hit, recording some 500 million hits from around the globe. Spectators had video replays of games highlights at their fingertips via the ''Video on Demand'' TV terminals.
TV ratings were apparently down in North America due to the ''lack of controversies'' like those seen in Lillehammer.
But sports fans around the world got some breathtaking television views of athletes in action thanks to the ingenious placing of miniature cameras on the ice rinks, luge tracks and ski jump.
Athletes and officials were also delighted by the hospitality.
Gian Franco Kasper, secretary general of the International Ski Federation, arrived in Nagano to find that his mobile telephone had already been programmed with 30 phone numbers that organizers thought he would use during the Games.
''In the end, I used about 25 of them,'' Kasper said.
And like Atlanta and Lillehammer, Nagano produced moment after moment of sporting drama.
In the final sports event held Sunday, the Czech ice hockey team stumped the pundits by beating Russia to win the gold medal of the first ''Dream Tournament'' in the Olympic debut of star players from the North American National Hockey League.
Earlier in the morning, Norwegian cross country skier Bjorn Daehlie continued to mine deeper into Olympic stardom by winning the men's 50-kilometer freestyle race for his eighth gold medal and 12th overall.
Germany ended up on top of the overall medals table with 29 total medals, including 12 gold, followed by Norway with 25 medals overall and Russia (17).
Canada had its best ever winter games, chalking up six golds and 15 medals overall while the U.S. had 13 total medals.
The home crowd, which helped fill 80 percent of all seats available at venues, also got a special treat by witnessing Japan's best-ever performance in the winter games.
The five gold, one silver and four bronze medals gave birth to a truly energized atmosphere at many venues. After Masahiko Harada exorcised the ghost of Lillehammer by helping Japan win its first team ski jumping gold medal, Samaranch later thanked him personally ''for that wonderful jump.''
Nagano hosted the first-ever official Olympic competitions in snowboarding, curling and women's ice hockey -- the first in order to keep up with the ''extreme'' tastes of younger generations.
In return, Olympic leaders got more than what they had anticipated. They demanded the return of Ross Rebagliati's gold medal after he tested positive for marijuana, then had to give in 24 hours later when an appeal body ruled that concrete rules regarding the drug were not in place.
For a brief while, the hashish problem became the most hotly debated issue in town, and the IOC acted quickly by forming a marijuana task force. All of this happened while an Austrian snowboarder trashed some hotel equipment and had his games accreditation pulled by his own team.
Nagano was prepared to tackle drug cheats by introducing a sophisticated carbon isotope ratio spectrometer which could detect hard-to-find muscle-building steroids.
However, not one positive doping test was listed on the IOC books by the end of competitions held Saturday.
Nagano's notoriously fickle weather did its best to frustrate the Alpine and Nordic skiing schedule. But every race was eventually held and produced moments of athletic greatness, heartbreaks and redemption.
Kasper also promised that World Cup alpine skiing would someday return to the pistes of Hakuba and Yamanouchi.
A dark pall was cast over Nagano before the start of the Feb. 7-22 games when U.S. leaders could not promise that a military strike against Iraq, which refused on-site inspections of its suspected weapons facilities, would not happen during the Olympics.
This posed as a threat to the Olympic Truce, in which nations pledged in November to cease all hostilities during the games. Fortunately, an attack did not take place and Samaranch expressed his thanks.
''We hope that the observance of the Olympic Truce during the Nagano Olympic Winter Games has served the purpose of searching for peaceful and diplomatic solutions to the conflicts we are facing today,'' he said.
As seen in past sports events in Japan, the children who performed in the opening and closing ceremonies and filled stadiums proved a big hit among overseas visitors.
The ''One country, one school'' program which gave every delegation -- from Kazakstan to Kenya -- a cheering squad prompted Corradini to pledge, ''I am going to propose this type of program to our educational system.'' (Kyodo News)
No part of the article, photographs, or illustrations presented here may be printed or used without permission.
Copyright 1998 The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun