Soviet Red Carpet Out for Swimmer : Lynne Cox Trains as Storm Approaches

The Soviets have rolled out the red carpet here in Siberia for cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox.

Their only regret is that they can’t offer her better weather.

Although her journey through five time zones from Moscow to this village on the shore of Lake Baikal was delayed a day by fog and her attempt to swim the world’s deepest lake has been moved up to Friday to beat an approaching storm, the Orange County swimmer has received VIP treatment along the way.

In Moscow, her comments and picture made the front page of the mass circulation newspaper, Soviet Sports, and the prestigious back page of Pravda. That is rare for a sports personality and establishes official government recognition, support and approval.

Officials Present Bouquets

At the last two airport stops, the 31-year-old Los Alamitos woman was met by top regional Communist Party and Sports Committee officials with bouquets of flowers, and she was given a glitzy evening press conference at Irkutsk, 60 kilometers from here.

Then she and her party were brought here by police escort in a six-car caravan. They followed the flashing blue lights on the official van through the thick birch forests of Baikal National Park until their goal--Baikal--could be seen under the reflection of a three-quarter moon.

“It looked like a sea,” was Cox’s only, quiet comment.

The Soviets, who have been intrigued by Cox since last year, when she swam the Bering Strait to their country’s Big Diomede island from the U.S.’s Little Diomede, said they would name one of the nearby points of land Cape Cox.

She had planned to attempt her Baikal swim Sunday. However, an official weather forecast Wednesday called for rain Saturday and Sunday, with winds of 30 to 40 knots and 6-foot waves. This, of course, was after a Soviet official had assured her that around Baikal “on this particular day, they didn’t have storms in the last 100 years.”

That came from Anatolii Kuryan, the beleaguered deputy chairman of the Irkutsk Regional Sports Committee, who had organized the Soviets’ end of the operation and is now trying to keep it from falling apart.

“When the wind gets above 35 knots, you don’t go,” Cox said. “I want to make sure the people along with me are safe, as well.”

Earlier, Cox had told a dozen Soviet reporters that the 1-mile depth of the lake didn’t concern her as much as the water’s temperature, which, she discovered in a 52-minute workout Wednesday, can vary from 52 degrees on the surface to 43 a couple of feet down.

“I plan to stay on top of the water,” she said, laughing. “But I might think about what’s down there underneath me.”

During the workout she paused once to see how cold it was down below. “It was like diving into a freezer,” she said.

She shivered intermittently afterward but suffered no aftereffects.

Happy to be in her element, she said, “This is the best I’ve felt all week.”

But a couple of hours later the weather forecast turned her spirits around again.

The 2-mile workout was only about one-fifth of the proposed attempt, and she will

have only two days to get used to the cold.

“I’ve never had less than seven days before a cold-water swim,” she said.

In dealing with Soviet officials and journalists, Cox has been talking through two 23-year-old Soviet Sports Committee interpreters provided for her two-week stay, Elena Mineeva and Katya Rozhdestvenskaya. Katya resembles a young Audrey Hepburn, and her surname translates freely to Christmas.

Seated at a table behind small U.S. and Soviet flags, Cox charmed the reporters and officials at Irkutsk. She fended off the few politically slanted questions with straightforward explanations of her motives.

“They don’t seem to understand,” she said later. “I’m just doing this for friendship, not for money or political reasons.”

In any event, she seemed to have won them over with her own form of disarmament.

Sample: “If you want to see what it’s like, bring your swimsuits to my workout tomorrow.”

That one broke them up.

Although it was sunny, shirt-sleeve weather when Cox worked out Wednesday, the water was as cold as she had anticipated.

She also said: “I could feel streams of cold water. One glacial stream was about 400 yards wide. But I only got cold when I stopped swimming and after I got out. All the time I was swimming I felt OK.

“It feels a lot different than the ocean. Swimmers feel colder in fresh water, I think because of the buoyancy factor. I’m swimming a lot deeper in the water.”

Cox was met on shore by a couple of dozen quietly curious townspeople. Thousands had been expected to come over from Irkutsk for her weekend swim, but the move to Friday may cut into the crowd.

Capt. Victor Ignatyev, who has been running a tugboat-like tourist boat on Baikal for 32 years, said Wednesday morning that clear visibility was rather unusual, that it is more likely to be foggy on any given morning.

But he thought that if Cox stayed near the Listvyanischniy Bay, where Baikal drains into the Angara River, she would have fewer problems with wind and rain.

“In this bay, the water is usually calm,” he said.

Cox’s party had been scheduled to arrive in Irkutsk early Tuesday morning after a 2,600-mile, all-night Aeroflot commercial flight from Moscow, with a scheduled stop for a plane change in Bratsk, 300 miles away.

But on the way to Bratsk Monday night, the Soviets said that city was fogged in, so they set down in Omsk, a city of 800,000 that gets few Western tourists.

While the other passengers--mostly Soviet citizens--spent the night in the small terminal, Cox and her party of seven were bused into town and put up at a small, rustic hotel. They had no luggage, there were no showers and the only food they had was what they had brought along for snacks.

The situation improved the next day when they reboarded the plane for Bratsk, where Cox was greeted by top local officials as she came down the steps. As before, her party was allowed to deplane ahead of other passengers and was whisked away to the VIP lounge while their luggage was transferred to a twin-prop plane.

Bratsk was founded in the early 1960s near the world’s most powerful hydroelectric dam. It is capable of generating 4.5 million kilowatts per hour--and Cox heard all about it.

Although it was a warm, sunny day, local Communist Party leader Eugenei Chasovokin told Cox: “I wish you could bring California weather here.”

When Cox pointed out the window, Chasovokin said, “It’s warm here only because of you.”

Later, Cox told reporters at Irkutsk: “The idea (of swimming Baikal) came to me before the Bering Strait swim. I thought (the Bering Strait swim) would be a way to open the door to this.”

She also has stressed that she didn’t select a lake that just happened to be in the Soviet Union but picked Baikal precisely because it is in the Soviet Union.

Through the long night and day of travel, Cox remained cheerful and did not complain about the delay, with its discomforts and difficulties, that cost her a day of training at Baikal--now a critical concern.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It was unavoidable.”

Besides, looking out an airplane window along the way, she said, she saw a rainbow.

A year ago, at a time when her successful swim of the Bering Strait was in grave doubt, she also saw a rainbow, and after that everything was fine.

More than ever, she needs a rainbow over Lake Baikal.