Sarajevo Undergoes Olympic Tumble

Behind the summit house, the pure white mountain range stretched toward Yugoslavia’s eastern borders. Silent and white and crystalline bright in the morning sunlight, a winter’s snow covered the mountains’ ridges and craters and valleys. Imagine the moon after a blizzard. Just outside the summit house, a weather station’s skeletal antenna was encrusted with ice turning the tower into an eerie stalagmite. We were at the top of the world. We were at the summit of Mount Bjelasnica.

This was 10 years ago.

This was Sarajevo for the Winter Olympics.

This was the summit house an hour before the men’s downhill ski race. Two sportswriters had commandeered a ski-lift chair and made their way to a seat alongside Bill Johnson, a California ski bum, blond and handsome and proud to say he had never worked at any job more than a month. He was this kind of guy: When he said he lived in his Ford Pinto, we believed him.

In an hour, Johnson would throw himself off the mountaintop and down its icy walls at 80 m.p.h. on a pair of slats. We asked how he felt and he said, “You ought to be asking the Austrians how they feel. I enjoy sticking it to them. They’re rattling at the knees.”

Johnson had it right. He became the first American ever to win the downhill gold medal. He said, “It’s a dream come true.” And now, all these years later, we wonder whatever happened to the brash young man whose name is only a memory, a memory that comes back because we are on the way to Norway for another Olympics, this one 10 years after Sarajevo.

In 1984, Sarajevo was warm and sweet, a place where Marina Borak, a young English teacher from Belgrade, told an American sportswriter, “The world does not know where Yugoslavia is before the Olympics. A man in Argentina one time said to me, ‘Yugoslavia in Africa?’ I said, ‘No, in Australia.’ The Olympics, they make Yugoslavia a happy place now.”

Before Christ, the Romans took the land that would become Yugoslavia. Turks owned it later. The Austro-Hungarian empire seized it in the 19th century. World War I began after a Sarajevo teen-ager, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the foreign ruler, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Decades of factional wars spread a national darkness followed by the hell of Hitler. Then came Josef Tito after World War II to win with arms the independence that in 1994 has been transformed into a new kind of hell.

Ten years after Sarajevo’s Olympics, I can feel the snowflakes against my cheek.

It was lovely on the chair lift, floating toward the top of the hill where the ski-jump ramp sits. Snowflakes the size and softness of cotton balls touched our faces. Floating in snowy space, we felt a beautiful silence. Far below we saw people looking up. We saw a pine forest decorated in snow. They had cut a landing space in the pines for the jumpers. We would never forget that snowscape.

Late in the Olympics, we walked down Vase Miskina, the busiest street in Sarajevo’s 500-year-old market district. Though police carried machine guns against the possibility of terrorists, they were unfailingly polite. “Loaded?” a journalist asked a policeman at 3 one morning. The man made a soft, gentle noise of affirmation, as if regretting the truth of his country and the times.

A sweetheart of a place, Sarajevo. Taxi drivers gave back tips they considered too large. A supermarket had an English-speaking clerk walk the aisles to help tourists. At 2 in the morning, a restaurant owner told his customers to wait while he ran two blocks up an alley to fetch them a taxi.

We talked to an American living in Germany who had driven to Sarajevo. Iris Zimmerman started on the Autobahn. He said, “But in Yugoslavia we got on a one-lane road with potholes all the way. It hits you like a brick wall. I thought, ‘My God, what kind of country is this?’

“But then you get to Sarajevo. It’s like their oasis. Everything had been drab and dreary until Sarajevo. Here there’s color. You don’t feel like you’re in an Eastern bloc country.”

Ten years, no time at all, can be forever when those years become terror on the hour. Sarajevo today has no color except the color of blood. Mount Bjelasnica is an artillery site. The ice-skating palace, Zetra, has been destroyed by shelling. The Olympic stadium is rubble. Yugoslavia is gone, replaced by Bosnia Herzegovina. Joy is gone, replaced by war.

Ten years ago we visited Vraca, a memorial to the country’s dead from World War II. Thousands of names were carved into stone on the place’s walls: names of Jews and Christians and Moslems taken from Sarajevo to die on madmen’s orders.

Logoriu 6060. Concentration camp dead.

Stratista 597. Executed by firing squad.

From Sarajevo, 9,103 people died in 16 Nazi concentration camps in Yugoslavia. We asked a guide about words engraved in stone above Tito’s signature. “Tito say this war is very bad in history,” the guide says. “He say do not let tragedy like this happen again.”

Snow fell beautifully in Sarajevo 10 years ago. We walked through the Old City where Moslem mosques with towering minarets stood alongside narrow streets with cobblestone sidewalks. We saw a young man using a dust pan to remove snow from his doorway.

“Speak English?”

“Some,” he says.

“What do the Olympics mean to you?”

Edid Babic didn’t know the words. With his index finger, in the dust of a gray, gritty, dirty wall, maybe three miles from Vraca, he drew the outline of a heart. He turned back to us and smiled.