These Games Are Serious Business : Olympics: With opening ceremony today, many athletes have other things on their minds.

Norwegians by reputation are polite but reserved, slow to warm to strangers, and were it not for the sheer joy they feel, and unreservedly share, as hosts of the XVII Olympic Winter Games, there would be a gloom over today’s opening ceremony at Lillehammer Olympic Park to match a hazy sky in which the sun is no more than a rumor.

It was only two years ago that we did this, gathering for the XVI Winter Olympics in the French Alps, and as a result, many of the athletes who will compete during the next 16 days are familiar--skier Alberto Tomba, speedskaters Bonnie Blair and Dan Jansen, figure skater Viktor Petrenko, the Jamaican bobsledders.

Others returning from Olympics past include figure skaters Brian Boitano, Katarina Witt, and Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.

But they have been overshadowed by events of recent months, most tragically by the death of 68 persons in an attack on Sarajevo’s Central Market in the same week that the Olympic movement commemorated its 10-year anniversary of the 1984 Winter Games there and on the same day that a truce sponsored by the International Olympic Committee and the United Nations was supposed to begin.

Austrian Alpine skier Ulrike Maier, a contender for three medals here, was killed in a downhill crash in Germany last month; U.S. ice dancer Elizabeth Punsalan’s brother was arrested last week for the stabbing death of her father in Ohio; Norway’s most popular athlete, cross-country skier Vegard Ulvang, who will deliver the athletes’ oath today, has been searching for months for his brother who disappeared while skiing in a snowstorm. “In the springtime, when the snow is gone, I will go and try to find him,” he said this week, his face streaked with tears.

When luger Cammy Myler carries the flag for the U.S. delegation in the opening ceremony, her brother, Tim, who introduced her to the sport, will be watching on television from a hospital bed in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he is undergoing treatment for cancer.

The problems of figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding seem minuscule by comparison. It is they, however, who are dominating the headlines, even in Norway. A photograph of Kerrigan’s face covered the front page of Norway’s largest tabloid, VG, one day last week. Superimposed was the headline: “GALSCAP.” Madness .

Wearing horned Viking helmets, painting their faces like the Norwegian flag and clanging cowbells until all hours of the morning, the citizens of this region have been similarly afflicted, behaving like, well, Americans.

A young waitress in a cafe here one day last week slipped on a wet spot and took a spill. Leaping to her feet, she struck a speedskater’s pose and said, “Koss,” referring to Norway’s speedskating hero, Johann Olav Koss.

One reason for their giddiness is that Norwegians like winter, and they have had plenty of it this year, with the most snow in three decades and temperatures hovering between minus-12 and 12. It is not quite as cold as it was during the 1952 Winter Games 110 miles south of here in Oslo, where carrier pigeons for news organizations froze to death, but it is cold enough.

Another reason is that they like winter sports. They have bought virtually all of the 1.4 million tickets available for 112 events in eight sports, far surpassing the record set by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which sold 84% of its allotment for the 1984 Summer Games. Thousands more Norwegians who were unlucky losers in the ticket lottery for the most popular sport here, cross-country skiing, are expected to line the snow-covered course for each race, many of them camping out overnight.

They are anticipating a gold rush for their athletes. After finishing first in the medal standings in five of the first six Winter Olympics, between 1924 and ‘52, Norway has done so only once since, in 1968. But with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the revitalization of their own sports system, Norwegians could win more medals here than any of the other 65 countries.

Americans, led by speedskaters Blair and Jansen and figure skaters Boitano and Kerrigan, could--if everything goes right, which it never does--win as many as 14 medals. The most they have won in the Winter Games is 12, at Lake Placid in both 1932 and 1980.

The U.S. Olympic Committee’s executive director, Harvey Schiller, said Friday he fears that the Harding-Kerrigan affair could prove a distraction for U.S. athletes. But John Ruger, a former biathlete who serves as chairman of the USOC’s athletes’ advisory council, thinks not.

“It’s not their No. 1 topic of conversation,” he said. “It comes up, but it’s the third or 10th or 15th thing on their list of things to talk about. The Winter Olympics are so important to all 154 of our athletes that they’re concentrating only on their events.

“The Olympic Games are about hope and promise and fulfilling your dreams, and those are the elements that our athletes are focusing on. This is their moment.”

Today was supposed to be the moment for Ole Gunnar Fidjestol. Striving to one-up organizers of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, who commissioned an archer to light the torch with a flaming arrow, the Lillehammer Olympic Organizing Committee arranged for the former ski flyer to sail off the end of a ski jump with the Olympic flame in the crowning spectacle of the opening ceremony.

But after completing the jump in a rehearsal Thursday night, Fidjestol stumbled headfirst into a snowbank and suffered a concussion. Norwegians toasted him with a Sterno-like drink, aquavit, and partied into Friday. Stein Gruben will take Fidjestol’s place today.