Sarajevo’s Troubles Make Any Other Story Look Silly

Six chilling days ago, mortar shells tore through Sarajevo’s teeming marketplace, killing scores, scaring thousands half to death. On Tuesday, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Winter Olympics in what once was a city of gaiety, tranquillity and charm, hundreds of sympathizers stood together silently in quaint and quiet little Lillehammer, at the steps outside the town hall.

In a demonstration of solidarity with Sarajevo’s living and dead, they struck matches to illuminate 200 candles, arranged in five circles like Olympic rings. The candles continue burning here, day and night.

While the siege of Sarajevo raged and government officials of the United States were weighing whether to intervene, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, made a public plea: “Please stop the fighting. Please stop the killing. Please drop your guns. We shall not give up our efforts to contribute, as it is stipulated in our charter, to building a more peaceful and better world.”

And all the while, 14 terrified athletes, all skiers and sledders, were making a daring escape through Bosnia-Herzegovina’s bloody snow.

I think of these people and I cannot take the plight of Tonya Harding or Nancy Kerrigan very seriously.

I think of these people and I think back to the Sarajevo that I found so enchanting 10 years ago, and what remains of it.

I think of these people and I must redefine my ideas of what constitutes a crisis in the life of an Olympian, of what counts as actual courage.

Somewhere in another far-off hemisphere, there are Americans distressed by the condition of a figure skater’s bruised kneecap and by the bitter dispute over whether another figure skater was culpable for this vicious “attack.” In the capital city of the former Yugoslavia, there are athletes whose rivals and relatives are fighting for their lives, athletes who could only sigh and fantasize that their troubles were no more disturbing than Kerrigan’s or Harding’s.

These are individuals who have shared little else in recent days but a destination and a determination to get there in one piece.

A couple of them took refuge in tanks. Others traveled through the war-ravaged Bosnian countryside by car, working their way toward the border, looking anxiously over their shoulders around every turn. The airport at Tuzla was closed. The one at Sarajevo sat uncomfortably in the line of fire of heavily armed Serbs in the hills, of cannons and mobile mortars and hundreds of pieces of artillery. So no, air travel was not an acceptable risk. These athletes had to find some other safe passage to the Olympic Games.

In age they ranged from Zdravko Stojnic, a bobsledder of 36, to Sakib Birdio, a cross-country skier of 15. Three were women. There was Verona Marjanovic, 20, a luger who loved heavy-metal music and longed to be able to listen to some in peace. There was Samira Radaca, 21, who missed the golden mornings in Pale, Yugoslavia, when she could cross-country ski along roads without seeing armed soldiers, and Ariana Boras, 17, who was born in Konjic and became a skillful Alpine skier in the actual Alps.

Her brother, Igor Boras, had his 26th birthday Tuesday. He spent it successfully escaping Sarajevo and reaching his ultimate destination of Norway, where he will be a member of a bobsled team that will represent Bosnia-Herzegovina in these XVII Winter Olympics. He and his brother bobsledders made it safely to Lillehammer, leaving only one important piece of equipment behind.

All they need now is a sled.

There is a growing commitment here in Lillehammer to help these people and those they left behind, in any way possible. Funds are being raised and donations accepted by a volunteer Olympic aid committee, not only for Bosnians but for victims of carnage in Guatemala, Lebanon and Afghanistan as well.

About 2,000 people have signed a document that has been designated as “a protocol of solidarity,” among them the mayor and members of the city council of Lillehammer, officials of their Olympic committee here and representatives of the Norwegian Church. This scroll will be presented to the mayor of Sarajevo when he arrives here next week. The Bosnian athletes themselves were asked to put their signatures to it, and gladly obliged.

Samaranch, the IOC chief, found himself thinking back wistfully to the Sarajevo he had visited in 1984. It was his first Olympic Games as their president.

He said, “Ten years ago, the youth of the world was gathered there to celebrate in a spirit of friendship, solidarity, fair play and the commitment of peace.”

I remember.

I remember shy and smiling schoolgirls in lederhosen carrying trays of plum brandy, greeting travelers in Zagreb on their way to the Games.

I remember Gypsies serenading patrons of a hilltop restaurant, strolling with accordions and mandolins, flirting with the women.

I remember plumes of cigarette smoke, floating above the heads of pedestrians as though from locomotives, and fresh oxygen in the mountains, exhilarating and pure.

I remember being behind a rope at the finish line when skier Bill Johnson came rocketing down the hill, and sitting beside Pat Lafontaine’s parents as their son stick-handled a puck, and feeling goose bumps while the limbs of Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill intertwined during an erotic interpretation of Ravel’s “Bolero” on ice.

And I remember a party in the streets when a slalom skier named Jure Franko took second place, when around his neck was draped the only Winter Olympic medal that any Yugoslav had ever won. They put his face on a postage stamp for doing that. They danced and drank and laughed long into the Yugoslavian night.

And now their country isn’t even there any more.

Tonya Harding doesn’t have trouble. Nancy Kerrigan doesn’t have trouble. These people have trouble.