Host City So Flexible the People There Bend Over Backward

“Where are the giant inflatable Gumbys?” some wiseacre wondered as the media bus crawled its way through the streets of Nagano.

Or, for that matter, the giant inflatable Coca-Cola bottle, the renegade T-shirt vendors, BudWorld and the rest of crass capitalistic spillage that turned Atlanta into the world’s largest and tackiest county fair for three weeks during the summer of ‘96?

How can you possibly expect to hold an Olympic Games without them?

Nagano, bless its chilly, earnest heart, is giving it a go. On the eve of the opening ceremony for the 1998 Winter Olympics, Nagano is already outpacing Atlanta in almost every category on the organizational scorecard.

Bus drivers? Advantage, Nagano. Nagano’s actually know their way around town.

Volunteers? Nagano again. Here they nod a lot, smile a lot, are forbidden to utter the phrase “I don’t know” and, on a whole, speak a clearer, more precise form of English.

Computer system? Nagano one more time. The running joke is that the IBM results system in place here, known as “Info ‘98,” has the same working title as the Atlanta results system of two years ago.

Eyesore quotient? Nagano is not the prettiest of cities--it’s an industrial town, bathed in drab brick and gray--but it could fill the sky with Fuji film blimps and still win the aesthetic war with Atlanta ’96.

Traffic?

Buck up, Atlanta. The jury here remains out on that one.

Punctuality is a point of pride in Japan, which is why early complaints about late-running buses have shaken Nagano like a temblor.

“I think transportation is one of the biggest problems,” said Simon Clegg, head of the Great Britain delegation. “These Winter Olympics are the largest ever, so it is quite impossible to organize everything perfectly. [And] transportation was the main problem in almost every Olympic Games before.”

Nagano organizers respond by pleading patience, please. Special designated lanes for Olympic traffic--athletes, officials and media--will open Saturday in an attempt to ease the bottleneck congestion.

At an International Olympic Committee news conference Thursday, IOC Secretary General Francois Carrard addressed the traffic issue, allowing that, “It is correct--it has not yet improved. But it is not yet fully implemented. There will be reserved lanes for Olympic traffic starting on Feb. 7. It is now February the fifth.

“All the systems will be in place Feb. 7. Your observations are correct. All this has been taken into account by the organizers. They have planned, organized, done all that they can do.

“It remains to be seen whether it will be solved. We will find out on Feb. 7. Not Feb. 5.”

It is no small concern, because traffic has been sluggish between morning and evening rush hours, with no snow to be plowed from the streets, days before the expected crush of spectators descends on the city.

Nagano is nothing if not eager to please. Outside the Yanagimachi Media Village on Thursday morning, a throng of reporters waiting for a bus was told by an apologetic volunteer that one of the buses had been involved in an accident and there would be a delay until a replacement could be dispatched. “Please go inside and wait, because it is cold,” the volunteer told the group.

Before he could complete the sentence, however, a new bus pulled into the parking lot, drawing laughs and a round of applause from the press corps.

“They have been immediately responsive to problems,” U.S. Olympic Committee official Mike Moran said. “A lot of little glitches have been brought to their attention by our committee, and their response has always been, ‘OK, how can we fix it?’ ”

Whatever it takes too.

When a light winter snowfall threatened the success of the Alpine and Nordic ski competition, a religious service was held at the ancient Zenkoji Temple so the priests could pray for more snow.

Then, in mid-January, when the snow came, blanketing the city in a heavy layer, another service was held to pray for the snow to stop.

Flexibility has been the key in Nagano’s ability to turn its Olympic organization around, nearly a full 180 degrees, in the span of 12 months.

In February 1997, most One Year to the Games media reports were filled with gloom and doom. Venues were too small, hotels were unsatisfactory, operational expenses were soaring, the International Ski Federation was threatening to cancel all ski events unless the men’s downhill course was lengthened.

“If it continues like this,” Japan Olympic Committee President Hironoshin Furushashi said at the time, “I think the Nagano Games will not be successful.” Moran says the USOC was thinking much along those lines.

“There were a number of issues--the downhill start, a lot of early concern about traffic--that obscured what to us appeared to be a pretty good plan,” Moran says. “We were always comfortable, but we got caught up. . . . We were leery after all our problems in Atlanta.

“But [the Nagano organizers] worked very hard since Lillehammer. They are one of the most accommodating organizing committees we’ve ever dealt with. . . . Since we arrived here, everything we’ve seen has been very positive.”

The downhill crisis was solved when Nagano organizers and the International Ski Federation settled on a compromise starting gate outside the national park at Hakuba, a park Japanese environmentalists had fought to protect from the skiers.

A seating shortage at the Big Hat hockey arena also was remedied by compromise, at a considerably higher cost.

Initially, 6,000 plushly upholstered seats with padded armrests were bolted in place inside Big Hat. When NHL officials toured the facility and fretted about the need for at least 4,000 more seats, Nagano organizers nodded, tore out the comfy chairs and replaced them with simple bench seats, bringing capacity to well above 10,000.

To every problem, a logical solution. In this case: less comfort, more seats.

On the eve of Nagano’s Games, grumbling has been reduced to a whimper, with everyone from the athletes to the visiting officials to the seldom-content media blissfully enjoying Japanese hospitality, sake and steaming soba soup.

As Nagano Organizing Committee spokesman Ko Yamaguchi happily put it, “Everything is ready, including the snow.”