Seven days in Turin Winter's Tale snowballs

OLYMPICS: One week into the games, Keith Duggan recounts his experiences in Turin and tries to understand the enduring popularity of the event.

Hans, Mrs F and Oulx

Somehow, the mighty Alps are the forgotten star in the wonderful folly of these Winter Olympics. It is, of course, not enough for the human race to merely admire one of the more austere and noble geographical phenomena on the planet.

We have to skate, ski, jump and fall off them. We have to decorate those perfect slopes in bunting and iconic logos, sound out our brassy national anthems, hand out gold medals, eat pizza and take photographs. We have to own the Alps. In two swift weeks, the Winter Olympic movement ascends the Alps in one great voracious burst, takes what it needs from the jagged, stoic slopes and departs without a glance backwards. Ciao, Torino. Hey, Vancouver.

The Winter Olympics are about sensational, snow-capped images and furry hats and heroic images and gold medals and 1.2 billion. A journey that will end Sunday week in the shiny triumph of the closing ceremony began for everybody, as Olympic journeys must, in a vast car park where hundreds of buses stood purring.

The Olympics are about nothing if not moving vast numbers of people to places better left undisturbed. And a lot of snow has turned to slush since the chill night when I encountered Hans, tall and pale as a vampire and his Teutonic instinct already causing him to lose patience with the Italian transport system. We call him Hans only because the office was explicit that we should leave no stone unturned when it came to unearthing racial stereotypes.

He offered a small bow and said, somewhat primly: "I am from Germany."

Only later did I realise this made him Winter Olympic royalty: the Germans, it turns out, are better than every other country at the business of skiing and skating as well. "Ireland," I replied. Hans frowned at this, processing the peculiarity of a nation with no snow to speak of, let alone an Alp, having a team in Turin.

"Roy Keane," he ventured, conversationally. "Yeah, we are entering him in the men's downhill," I said, imagining how great it would be if that were true, Keano grimly slicing and sluicing his way down the death-defying slopes at Sestriere, wearing only his Celtic shirt and shorts, having dismissed the offer of a helmet.

Hans stared in momentary confusion and then returned a huge, endless belly laugh of appreciation, a frightening alto bass register which might well have been responsible for the minor avalanche reported up in Pragelato. A cheerful, muttering little Italian approached us and guided us to a bus before sneezing sharply.

"God Bless," said the man from The Irish Times politely. "Oulx!" the Italian said again.

"There is a bit of a dose going around."

"Oulx," the Italian repeated, slowly this time. Oulx: it was our home. Or rather, it was home to The Irish Times. Happy Hans was bound for Sauze d'Oulx, the fun ski-town which reportedly never sleeps while this reporter was destined for his run-down first cousin, plain old Oulx, where the clock stopped in 1939 and nobody got around to repairing it.

After journeying for an hour and a half, gracious Hans bade me a reproachful farewell. There was not a sinner to be found on the main street and, more worryingly, while The Irish Times' lodgings had an address at 86, Via Monginervo, Oulx came to an abrupt end at number 75. It was a low moment. Suffice to say there were incidents with Alsatian dogs, those endlessly aggravated sons of bitches, and a long and harrowing conversation in Oulx's best (and only) pizzeria before it became apparent number 86 was housed in a communist-looking tower block on the edge of town. How could we have missed it? In Oulx, this was the equivalent to the Empire State Building.

Mrs Faschilla, host to The Irish Times, was waiting as promised. She was a tiny, swift-moving little lady whose hair looked like it had those 1970s plastic curlers in it even when it didn't. We quickly established we had no common means of communication so we settled on Mrs Faschilla's whirlwind tour of the apartment complete with quick-fire Italian commentary and a series of despairing gestures.

The place was warm and immaculately clean and effortlessly old-world. Pride of place on the wall were black and white photographs of these 1930s ladies, possibly Mrs F and her friends in the first bloom of youth, sunning themselves on the Alpine slopes back in the days when Hitler was just a rumour. As the guide would say, the place had character, atmosphere. It was quaint. Mrs F bowed out with a salute that, although issued in cheerful, machine-gunned Italian, almost certainly translated as "Now. I can do no more for you, you sorry looking bastard. God Bless!"

Slaloming, swaying and singing

There is Greenwich Mean Time and there is Olympic Time. Athletes, spectators and media alike quickly fall under the spell of the bewildering Olympic timetables and venues and events. At the Summer Games, missing a bus means you risk sunburn and kill and hour by sipping a beer. At the Winter Games, missing a bus means you may well die of exposure. It is true that down in Turin, there was a worrying absence of snow: there has been more snow sighted in Barnesmore Gap after a July heatwave. But the talk of it being "warm" was just nonsense. It was savagely cold, always, and on the media buses, where complaining is a speciality, the mood was rarely good.

Leaving Sestriere at around midnight on Sunday after the men's downhill skiing race, a vast, ramshackle American journalist flung his beaten-up Superbowl III satchel across the seat where The Irish Times sat in early-thaw. Bill, let us call him, threw a long and bitter look at the vast Alpine range, now all ghostly in the moonlight.

"BrokeBack Mountain, my Ass," he said tearfully, rubbing what we had best describe as his rump and pointing at his admittedly formidable looking satchel.

"Man, I don't mind saying this: my butt is chafed. Raw!" Thing was, at the moment the spirits of The Irish Times were chafed and therefore did mind Bill saying it and could think of no reply.

Other journeys were more pleasant. One evening after the speed skating, I discovered that (surprise, surprise) no other Olympic family member was planning a night out in that famed Italian par-tey capital, Oulx.

Nonetheless, The Irish Times Winter Corr was escorted to a gleaming and completely empty Mercedes luxury coach and instantly dispatched up the mountains by a young Italian who not only drove with maniacal brilliance but also serenaded both of us with a cassette featuring Italian love songs: it was Valentine's Night after all.

This seems as good an example of any as to why Ireland can never host the Olympics. Even if the world's climate went sufficiently haywire for us to feature bobsleigh on Carrauntohill and figure skating on Lough Allen, even if we became the snow capital of Europe, it wouldn't work. There is something deep within the Irish psyche that just could not permit a brand new 50-seater coach to set off into the night bearing just one passenger. We are still catholic enough to fear that such lavish foolishness would consign us to hell.

But economy goes out the window when it comes to the Olympics. Outside the opulent and forbidding Hotel Meridien, where the perfumed members of the Olympic family are quartered, a line of top-of-the-range Mercedes cars, with tinted windows and leather seats, stand idling all day and all night.

The Olympic movement is such a smooth and moneyed beast now that film stars and former athletic gods and the wives of world leaders can move unseen and untroubled through the pristine and comfortable IOC corridors, delighting in the Olympic hospitality.

NBC television, one of the primary cash cows of these Games, fed $650 million into Turin and has already reported sales of $900 million in advertising. And this despite the single greatest threat to the company's viewing figures is British Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell, whose ratings on the rival Fox network are soaring. But Simon Cowell is a mere mortal against the might of the Olympics. No organisation makes such a virtue of the "world family" but those shaded windows and the cordoned hotels make no attempt to disguise the fact that the Olympics is lavishly bankrolled and populated by the inconceivably wealthy.

But against that, where but at the Olympics would you see five guys wearing Kazakshtan team coats, looking like goatherds and sitting cross-legged on a wreck of a stone wall on a freezing night in the high altitude town of Casana, sharing a huge plastic bag of bananas for their tea and generally having a high old time of it?

The Olympics has an edge on other sporting carnivals because for all its imperfections and money-stink, it has this aura that somehow inculcates a sense of friendship and goodwill on tens of thousands of people with all sorts of varying dispositions.

It is a magical trick because it means all accidents or disappointments or blatant failures can be excused as "the Olympic experience", as though the movement is a spontaneous explosion of human energy and that nobody can be held accountable for its consequences.

For example, it has been impossible to find one churlish Italian. Turin is aching for these Games to be declared as wonderful as its predecessors and the volunteers, in particular, have worked themselves into dark-eyed, hollow wrecks to make sure this happens. Often, on the treacherous, winding mountain roads, you see bus loads of spectators, stoic Finns and flag-bearing Americans and solemn French folks crowded into one steamy vehicle. And in true Olympic spirit, the drivers don't so much as steer their way down the mountain as slalom it, happily jerking the wheel from north to south so that from the outside, it appears as if all the passengers are swaying back in fourth in harmony to whatever song the driver happens to be merrily and tunelessly belting out.

You do fear the worst though. These Alpine roads are a feat of architecture, with vast tunnels blasted through the dark heart of the mountains and incredible hair-lip turns and twists winding around the mountainside. But they have astonishing drops. And with the famed Italian temperament and passion, you worry that maybe the emotion of the Olympics or a row with the girlfriend might cause one of the drivers to misjudge a slalom turn and thus consign his passengers to a downhill ski record that nobody wants to be part of.

New kids on the slopes

It was Thursday before the Turin Olympics uncovered its first official drugs cheat. The dubious honour went to a Russian biathlete, Olga Pyleva. Although there is a widespread perception the Olympics is just one huge medical cabinet, they go to pains to convey the opposite impression. You cannot purchase painkillers within the Olympic enclosures. Obtaining a plain old aspirin involves a lengthy inspection by a doctor, a taxing interview and a period of form signing that makes you fear you have just unwittingly purchased a house or become a sponsor for the Kenyan bobsleigh team. All of this leads to the presentation of one measly aspirin, which is gravely presented as though it is the elixir for life itself.

Such reverent respect for household medicine is laughable given the surroundings but also understandable. At the very least, the Olympic family have to keep up the pretence that all substances are checked and monitored and accounted for, even when administerd to expendable members of the Olympic family.

The low rate of drug cheats unmasked in Turin naturally would suggest that once again the testing procedure cannot keep tabs of evolving science. The Russian was the only bust out of 380 tests performed over the opening week. But it isn't just the purity of the mountain range that makes the Winter Olympics seem somehow less violated than its summer companion.

The thing is, a lot of the sports here seem too "fun" and downright goofy to have much truck with the darker arts of medical science.

The notable thing about Turin is how the traditional giants of snow-sports - the skating, the hockey, the skiing - have struggled to match the popularity of the ridges and obstacles where teenage snow prodigies perform their stunts and acrobatics in front of crowded, adoring galleries.

This is the constituency that seem destined to set the tone for future Winter Olympics.

Of all the medallists in Turin, few made as strong an impression as Scott Dale-Peck, the 21-year-old freestyle skier who accepted his gold medal with sardonic coolness and just shrugged when asked if switching loyalty from his native Canada to Australia had been difficult. It was clear that although he won gold for the Aussies, the 21-year-old cyber genius was in Turin to represent himself.

Nationhood, the very notion on which the Olympics thrive, means little to him. And the same was true of many of his peers: they looked the same, used the same slang words and ripped the same sounds from the Web. They are bound by pop culture and the kicks they get from the sport rather than the outdated notion of national pride.

Perhaps that is not such a bad thing.

They are young and in a hurry and Bardonecchia, the youth hang-out, was just another hit on a global search for adrenaline rushes. The Olympics is old and grand and is struggling just to keep pace with them.

The snowboarding course is set not so very far away from where Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, guided 50,000 men and 40 elephants over the Alps back in 218 BC, entering Italy through the pass at Susa. It was a feat which, of courses, dwarfs the sporting thrills and exhibitions on show at these Olympics.

Still, though, imagine what the great warmonger would have thought if he could but glimpse the future to see all the heroes of Turin flipping through the air and zooming down the slopes and thundering down icy funnels, in shades and aerodynamic helmets and vivid clothing. Surely the apparition, the scale and colour and relentlessness of Olympian valour would have frozen the unstoppable Hannibal in his tracks. Surely he would have died right there and then. Provoking wonder and astonishment is bread and butter for the Olympics.

As Turin skates towards its finale, the Winter Olympics goes on and on, the avalanche of triumph that knows no end.