A Grand, Old Party That’s Really Cool

The British Virgin Islands Winter Olympics team walked into the Opening Ceremony. The British Virgin Islands Winter Olympics team looked cool. His name was Erol Fraser, he was the first black speed skater in the recorded history of the Games, and he wore a pea-green military cap like Castro’s, a black velour turtleneck, black leather pants, and green high-heeled boots.

Not far behind, in the 1984 Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, parade of nations, was the Puerto Rican Winter Olympics team. His name was George Tucker, he was a luge slider, and he was about as Puerto Rican as Natalie Wood was when she was cast for “West Side Story,” George having been born on the island to American parents, and relocated to New York almost immediately.

As they paraded into the beautiful Kosevo Stadium, before a crowd of 55,000 and a worldwide television hookup, you could see practically anybody from anywhere. There were the Argentines in their red ponchos and black gaucho hats, and the Moroccans in their flowing black capes, and the Andorrans, all six of them, in their ankle-length brown coats and black Blues Brothers hats, looking like pallbearers.

One of the beauties of any Olympics, Summer or Winter, is the way it mixes and mingles its party guests, the young and the old, the tanned and the pale, the bums and the swells. Heritage can be a factor, certainly, but for every British princess who gets up onto her high horse in the equestrian events, there are foster kids like Scott Hamilton and Peter and Kitty Carruthers whose families scrimped and saved to pay for their skates.

If ever there were an example of this--an equal opportunity Olympic event, as it were--it just has to be the bobsled competition coming up next week at Calgary. About the only person you won’t find on one of these sleds in the Winter Olympics is Charles Foster Kane, on Rosebud.

We begin by introducing his serene highness--although he doesn’t seem all that calm, if you ask me--Prince Albert of Monaco, son of Prince Rainier and the late Princess Grace, who thought as long as he was going to be hanging around as a member of the International Olympic Committee, he might as well give one of the events a go. Good thing this isn’t the Summer Games, or he might have entered the synchronized swimming.

Prince Al, 29, has been a football player, a runner, a rower, a swimmer, a squash player, a golfer, a skier, a horse rider, a judo expert, a wind-surfer, everything but a boogie-boarder in his already full life, and now he is ready to try something else. When he saw the bobsled event at the Olympics a few years ago, he said, “Ahh, I’d like to try that sometime,” and went off to find a proper place to train, seeing as how the principality of Monaco is approximately the same size as a sled.

During the Calgary competition, the young prince might have a chance to compare helmet scratches with another of the official entries--the bobsled team representing Jamaica. Yes, Jamaica. Jamaica have a team in the Winter Olympics, mon.

We can only hazard a guess as to why all those “Come Visit Jamaica” tourism advertisements never remember to mention that Kingston is the Aspen of the Caribbean. Picture yourself sliding and gliding down picturesque Mt. Ganja, shushing down the snowy slopes to the accompaniment of a steel drum. Then later, retreat to the lodge, in front of the fireplace, and warm yourself with a rum-and-Coke.

The bobsled run at Calgary also will be occupied by an American team. The Americans haven’t won this event since 1948, when a water pipe burst in the middle of the second round, flooding the course.

Before that, the Americans last won the four-man event in 1932, when one of its team members was 48 years old, another was 20 years old, another was an ex-boxer who already had won an Olympic gold medal in that sport, and the other was a songwriter, Tippy Gray, whose compositions included “Got a Date With an Angel,” a song that had nothing whatever to do with Wally Joyner.

In the two-man event, the United States hasn’t had a winner since 1936, when its driver, Ivan Brown, was the only man to compete without a helmet, the Gerald Ford of his day.

And speaking of football players, one of the alternates on this year’s U.S. bobsled team happens to be Willie Gault, the wide receiver of the Chicago Bears. If only Gault had talked teammate William Perry into joining him, the Americans could have become the first Olympic bobsled team ever to pop a wheelie. We wish the golden Bear all the luck in the world in winning a Gault medal, and we warn him that Prince Albert, looking for something else to amuse himself, probably will be calling Mike Ditka for a tryout at flanker.