OLYMPIC NOTES

The International Olympic Committee got nine new members Thursday, including two former Olympic gold medalists and two European princes.

Polish sprinter Irena Szewinska, winner of seven Olympic medals, including three golds, and Morocco’s Nawal El Moutawakel Bennis, gold medalist in the women’s 400-meter hurdles at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, were elected at the close of the IOC session.

El Moutawakel is the first woman from a Muslim country to join the IOC, which now has 118 members.

The appointments of Szewinska and El Moutawakel bring the number of women on the IOC to 12. That exceeds the 10% quota the IOC has set for itself and other Olympic organizations.

The new members also include Prince Henri of Luxembourg and Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

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Philip Boit had not seen snow until two years ago. Now he’s competing in the Winter Olympics, part of Kenya’s first entry.

The Kenyan national anthem echoed through the Olympic Village as this year’s answer to the Jamaican bobsledders arrived.

Boit, part of the two-man Kenyan cross-country ski team, did interviews, signed autographs and posed for pictures, smiling broadly all the while.

“This is a start,” said Boit, a former runner who swapped his sneakers for cross-country skis. “We are moving forward.”

Boit and teammate Henry Bitok were distance runners until 1995, when coach Mike Kosgei wondered if their running skills might translate into cross-country skiing success.

The runners were intrigued by the idea, and received their first taste of skiing in a February 1996 training trip to Finland. Two years later, Boit is competing in the Olympics and Bitok is his back-up.

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It’s called pachinko--a noisy, mesmerizing kind of pinball gambling game that the Japanese just can’t seem to get enough of.

But police in Nagano apparently don’t think this particular pastime is up to the standards of an Olympic host. So when the Winter Games open Saturday, every pachinko parlor in town, all 57 of them, will be closed for business.

And police vans will be filling most of their parking lots.

“This is something that isn’t going to happen again in this town for another 100 or 200 years,” said Sakae Kayama, who owns a pachinko parlor near the stadium on the outskirts of Nagano where the games’ opening ceremony will be held. “We want to do our part to help.”

Kayama said police requested that pachinko parlor owners close their shops for both the opening- and closing-ceremony days. Police say they want the parlors to close because they believe that will help lighten the traffic in town.

Pachinko parlors also tend to have big parking lots--a prized commodity in this congested country--and Kayama said police want to use those lots themselves.

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A German skier’s complaint that IOC members took up hotel rooms near the slopes in Hakuba that could have been better used by skiers was rejected by a top IOC official.

“This is totally wrong, if not a lie,” said Marc Hodler, an IOC executive board member and president of the international ski federation. “The IOC has reserved only three or four rooms in Hakuba. These are for members in charge of supervising events in the area.”

Katja Seizinger, the 1994 Olympic downhill champion and this season’s overall World Cup leader, has been critical of lodgings in the Olympic Village in Nagano.

Speaking to reporters in Germany, she said the skiers would be better off staying closer to the venue in Hakuba but the accommodations had been reserved for members of the IOC.

Hodler said he did agree with Seizinger’s complaints that pre-Olympic ski events had been marred by poor weather conditions.

“She’s right,” he said. “We have very, very bad weather for the test events.”