GOING TOE TO TOE

America, we have met the enemy in these Winter Olympics, and there’s a new Red Menace out there, one disturbingly close to home.

The Russian bear of old is in deep hibernation, supplanted by a tuque-wearing moose with Molson Golden on its breath.

The hammer and sickle have been junked and melted down, refashioned into a skillet now frying back bacon somewhere in Manitoba.

This year’s Evil Empire, the insurgent threat to our very way of life atop the Olympic medals podium, is the same country that gave us Wayne Gretzky, John Candy, Neil Young and several of its finest hockey teams, where people are so polite and friendly that if you ask if they can change a dollar, they give you $1.35.

But don’t let those shivering smiles fool you.

Beware when you shake the mitten-clad hand poking out of the sleeve of the plaid flannel shirt.

Canadians are out to steal our gold medals. They are planning to hoodwink us in hockey, fleece us in figure skating, swindle us in snowboarding, frisk us in freestyle skiing.

The United States would be well on its way to a double gold-medal sweep in men’s and women’s hockey in Nagano . . . if not for Canada.

American Todd Eldredge would be primed for glory in the men’s figure skating competition . . . if not for a husky lad from Newmarket, Ontario, named, of all things, Elvis.

Jonny Moseley of Tiburon, Calif., would be bumping and running his way to a sure-fire championship in men’s moguls skiing . . . if not for Canada’s reigning world champion, Jean-Luc Brassard.

In no fewer than eight events at the Nagano Games, which begin Friday--it will be Saturday in Japan--and run through Feb. 22, the competition is adhering to the same plot line: Americans with gold-medal designs, confronted by all these bothersome Canadian speed bumps.

In men’s freestyle aerials, American Eric Bergoust is the current World Cup points leader, with 1997 Canadian world champion Nicolas Fontaine looming as his main competition.

In women’s freestyle aerials, another American, Nikki Stone, finds her path to a potential gold medal blocked by Canadians Veronica Brenner and Caroline Olivier.

Canada and the United States are formidable in the new Olympic sport of snowboarding--especially in the halfpipe event, where Americans Ross Powers, Todd Richards and Shannon Dunn will be battling Canadians Trevor Andrews, Tara Teigen and Maelle Ricker for big air and bigger air.

There is a new black hat in these Winter Olympics, and it hails from Medicine Hat.

The old dread initials from Olympics past--CCCP--now stand for Crass Canadians Crashing our Party.

This may come as news to many Americans, who never realized we had a rivalry with Canada. Not so in Canada. Last year, when Canada’s Donovan Bailey beat the United States’ Michael Johnson in a gimmicky 150-meter “World’s Fastest Human” run-off in Toronto, the Canadian media treated the victory as if it were V-E Day and the Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup rolled into one.

Most Americans, meanwhile, saw the clip on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and shrugged, “You see that guy from the Olympics pull his quad?”

Pierre Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, once remarked, “Many Canadians feel like a mouse living next to an elephant.”

North of the border, the rivalry is very real, fueled partly by an inferiority complex, partly by the relentless Americanization of Canadian culture, and partly by what we’ve done to their national pastime.

The Quebec Nordiques are now known as the Colorado Avalanche.

The Winnipeg Jets are now the Phoenix Coyotes.

The entire roster of Canadian hockey teams left in the NHL--six--is smaller than the league’s Atlantic Division.

And the once-prestigious Canada Cup has been co-opted by Americans and transformed into the World Cup of Hockey--whose trophy Team USA heisted from the Canadians in 1996.

That defeat was particularly galling to Canadian fans, who took to throwing beer at the U.S. bench during a semifinal played in Ottawa and jeered Team USA’s Canadian-born star, Brett Hull, with chants of “Traitor! Traitor!”

After the United States clinched the best-of-three championship round with a 5-2 victory in Montreal, the front-page headline across the top of the next morning’s Montreal Gazette groused, “Damn Yankees.”

“It’s still a knife in the stomach,” says Detroit Red Wing forward Brendan Shanahan, a member of the Canadian Olympic team.

For that reason, this Olympic tournament, the first to permit NHL professionals, has become a national obsession in Canada.

“It’s our game,” is the slogan one Canadian brewery has adopted on its television commercials.

Another TV ad proclaims: “The three most feared words in Nagano this winter: I am Canadian.”

When the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team was announced, another ad featured a foreboding caricature of Paul Kariya and Eric Lindros glowering behind sunglasses, above the words, “Men In Red.”

Clearly, Canadians are fired up.

“It’s Canadian pride on the line,” Edmonton Oiler General Manager Glen Sather says. “Canada is a country that exports hockey players. A lot of our identity comes because we are such good hockey players.”

Stirring the pot from the other side of the border, Team USA Coach Ron Wilson, himself a Canadian native, points out that “the pressure is on Canada, because the whole country is watching. Canada must avenge its World Cup loss.”

So much pressure that one of the greatest Canadian hockey players of them all, Mark Messier, was squeezed out of the picture. Team Canada General Manager Bobby Clarke cut Messier--and eight other members of the vanquished World Cup squad--in order to assemble a team that might match up better with the younger, faster Americans.

Why else would Rob Zamuner, a blue-collar grinder from the Tampa Bay Lightning, make the roster ahead of Messier? Zamuner is not headed for the Hall of Fame, but he is a penalty-killing specialist who helps size up a weakness the Americans exploited in 1996.

From its inception, the international sport of women’s hockey has been dominated by Canada and the United States. This rivalry has been intense from the start, featuring bruising head-to-head encounters that consistently shatter preconceptions that women’s hockey is a softer, smaller version of the real thing.

In their 13 pre-Olympic meetings, Canada’s women’s team won seven times, the United States six--with eight games decided by a single goal.

Four of those Canadian victories, however, have been in the World Championships, prompting Canada’s Coach Shannon Miller to surmise about the Olympic tournament, “I think we have the edge, because we’ve been successful. We’ve won time and again when it counts. That gives us the edge mentally.”

Responds U.S. forward Katie King, “Deep down, we know we can beat them. We really feel we are a better team. We can outskate them. We’re faster, even stronger. If we use our speed and our passing together, no one can stop us.”

Another troubling statistic from the Canadian point of view: The country has yet to produce its first male Olympic figure skating champion and hasn’t had a women’s gold medalist since Barbara Ann Scott in 1948.

Elizabeth Manley, who had the misfortune of peaking as a skater during the second stage of Katarina Witt’s Olympic dynasty, won silver for Canada in 1988, the last figure skating medal won by a Canadian woman at either the Olympics or the World Championships.

In Nagano, the women’s figure skating medal race could very well be all-American. Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski have traded U.S. and world championships the last two years and should again finish 1-2 in Japan--with Nicole Bobek, world bronze medalist in 1995, a distinct possibility for third place.

The men’s figure skating competition, however, shapes up as another USA-Canada showdown, assuming Russians Ilia Kulik and Alexei Yagudin do not go bounding into Olympic quadruple-jump history.

Skating for Canada: Three-time world champion and 1994 Olympic silver medalist Elvis Stojko.

Skating for the United States: Five-time national champion, 1996 world titlist and runner-up to Stojko at the 1997 world championships, Todd Eldredge.

It is important to clarify the national affiliations up front, because it would be difficult to tell from the skating styles alone.

Stojko is loud and brusque and as subtle as an Oliver Stone movie--big leaps, big gestures, big finish, all played out to the cadence of a kick-boxing exhibition. His long program is figure skating’s equivalent of a Fourth of July fireworks show--lots of oohs and ahs, the pyrotechnic quadruple jumps bursting in air.

Eldredge, meanwhile, skates polite. He is smooth and precise and unassuming--easy to overlook--and, to his periodic detriment, unadventurous. Among the world’s elite male skaters, Eldredge was the last holdout in the mad rush to quad Valhalla. He gave in at last month’s U.S. nationals, mainly because he was tired of being asked about it, but landed his first competitive quad on the seat of his pants.

Typically, Eldredge says he hopes to lie low in Nagano, draw a late skating assignment, wait to see what Elvis hits and Elvis misses and improvise from there. Maybe Eldredge will need to step up with a quad of his own--or maybe he will only need to stay on his feet for 4 1/2 minutes.

Leave the envelope-pushing acrobatics for the snowboarders and the freestyle skiers and the more excitable soldiers in this border dispute.

Such as the curlers.

“The Canadians absolutely hate to get beat by us,” American curler Erika Brown says. “They can’t stand it. They get really fired up to play against us.

“It’s always a big brawl out there.”

A curling brawl?

With the contestants already armed with wooden-handled brooms and 42-pound stones?

One way or another, U.S.-Canadian relations are about to be pushed into places never before imagined.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Records Since 1960

How top ice hockey countries have fared in the Winter Olympics since 1960. Russia was Soviet Union until 1992 (Unified Team) and ’94 (Russia). G=GOLD, S=SILVER, B=BRONZE:*--*

Country Record Pct. G S B Russia 60-10-2 .860 7 1 1 Canada 39-17-2 .696 0 3 1 Sweden 38-18-9 .679 1 1 3 Czechoslovakia 44-25-1 .638 0 3 3 United States 34-26-7 .567 2 1 0 Finland 35-28-6 .555 0 1 1

*--*