DATELINE: Albertville

Where would you least expect to see a beach ball bouncing through the stands?

At the Winter Olympics? At the Winter Olympics ski jump?

It happened.

A German gentleman, apparently moved by the spirit of global unity, launched not one but two beach balls that looked like the world.

And during the intermission between rounds of jumping, at the instigation of the public address announcer, the crowd tried repeatedly to do the wave. That didn’t work, because the stadium at Courchevel is a two-sided affair with both ends open. The wave looked more like two Murphy beds being stored for the day.

Altogether, it was a crazy day at the old ski hill.

When weather moves into the area here, as it did the other day, it drops the clouds right onto the mountainsides. That happened at the ski jumping hill, leaving everyone in a fog. The practice jumps were off a slide that few could see, onto a landing area that only a few more could see. Lord knows what the jumpers could see.

Brian DePasquale, the U.S. press liaison here for ski jumping and Nordic combined--in real life he’s the sports information director at Colgate--tried explaining to a small group of sportswriters what might happen if the fog didn’t lift.

“They’ll only postpone it if the judges can’t see the jumpers,” he said.

“Where are the judges?” one reporter asked.

“Over there in the judges’ stand.” DePasquale said, pointing into the mist and evoking, in chorus, “What judges’ stand?”

Eventually, though, the cloud moved off the mountain and into the valley, and the competition began after only a 15-minute delay.

And, said American jumper Jim Holland, it would have had to have been far worse to cancel the day’s jumping.

“Most ski jumpers have skied in fog,” he said. “It’s only dangerous if you’ve got some dogs walking around on the landing hill.

“It’s kind of like walking down the stairs in the dark; you know about how far it is to the next step. Same sort of thing in the fog. You’ve skied this hill so many times that you’ve got a good feel for it. And of course you can see a little ways in front of you. I would obviously prefer to ski when you can see, but (fog) makes it interesting. It’s a new twist.”

Crazy guys, these ski jumpers.