The Winner: The Weather

It is Day 3 at the 1998 Nagano Winter Games . . . and do you know where the Olympics went?

Downhill skiers aren’t skiing.

Snowboarders have stopped snowboarding.

Lugers are whining when they should be luging, working themselves up into a frothing lather over (repeat after me: This is real sport, this is a real sport . . . ) a pair of booties.

Cross-country skiers--the poor, lost souls of Nagano--were last seen mushing off into the blizzard, hoping to someday be seen alive again.

Say this much for the Atlanta Olympics: They may have been an organizational nightmare, an operational disaster, a hellish confluence of paralyzing gridlock, over-run subway cars, clueless volunteers and bus drivers who couldn’t read a street map, but at least they never had an event snowed out.

At this pace, the Nagano Games very well could be the first Olympics to be called on account of cabin fever. Nothing’s happening, no one’s moving.

Somewhere on a mountain top in snow-bound Hakuba, Austrian super-skier Hermann Maier is drumming his fingers on his bedroom window sill, looking at his watch and dreaming about the old days of passion and excitement, when he was a mover and a shaker, when he went out outside and got things done, when he laid bricks for a living.

The men’s downhill, postponed due to heavy snow and fog, has been rescheduled for Wednesday.

Weather permitting.

The women’s giant slalom snowboarding competition, postponed due to heavy snow and fog, has been rescheduled for Tuesday.

Weather permitting.

To this point, the weather hasn’t permitted much of anything. If it isn’t done indoors, it isn’t happening--with the sadomasochistic exception of cross-country skiing, or as it is known in Nagano, Nordic Winter Survival Training.

The cross-country skiers have become the postal carriers of these Games, bound--and cursed--by their determination to press onward through rain or sleet or dark of night or freezing snowstorm.

Each morning, they trudge off into the swirling winds, disappearing into the white wilderness.

How many of them will make it back?

Stay tuned, CBS will show it to you, provided the lenses on the TV cameras are frequently de-iced.

We are seeing, first-hand, the fundamental problem of the Winter Olympics: They are held during the winter. Snow happens. And when it happens, and happens again, and happens some more, the snow tends to stack up, and the regularly scheduled Olympic competitions tend to back up.

“You can’t predict what will happen on a mountain in Nagano,” Rick Gentile, executive producer of CBS’s Olympic coverage, said before the Games. Which, in itself, was a sage prediction. Sure enough: After spending all of December and half of January fretting about the lack of snowfall in the region, Nagano now can’t find enough snowplows to go around.

Within hours of Midori Ito’s tearful lighting of the Olympic caldron, the Olympics have ground to a halt. Maybe Ito knew something. Maybe Akebono, the grand champion sumo wrestler, didn’t stomp hard enough when he was supposed to be stomping out all those evil winter spirits.

The bad weather has been an annoyance for the athletes and the journalists in Nagano, but it has been near-catastrophe for CBS. With no men’s downhill to air on Saturday in the States, CBS’s prime-time broadcast got buried under, drawing only a 12.2 rating and a 21 share--the lowest-rated night in the Winter Olympics since 1988.

So desperate was CBS to fill air time, it actually dispatched a camera crew to Tara Lipinski’s practice session. That’s what these Games have come to: Prime-time telecasts of figure skating practice.

What next?

Tara goes shopping for a stuffed Snowlet doll . . . and CBS is there!

Tara tries eating sushi with chopsticks . . . and CBS is there!

The new CBS Winter Olympics slogan: All Tara! All the time!

(At least until Michelle Kwan gets here.)

The weather has everyone in a funk, including those competing indoors.

In Sunday night’s pairs short program, figure skaters dropped like snow salt. Twenty teams skated and nine of them fell--the Japanese duo stumbling twice.

It was as sloppy and unsightly as the gray sidewalk slush outside, enlivened only by that perennial favorite Olympic storyline: Plucky Americans get jobbed. That would be the U.S. tandem of Kyoko Ina and Jason Dungjen, who skated cleanly and engagingly, and were ranked behind six other pairs by the German and Australian judges.

Women’s hockey, which was supposed to inject some new enthusiasm in the Winter Olympic program, debuted with a yawn. Final scores from opening night: 13-0, 6-0, 5-0.

Curling also made its Olympic debut here and, well, what more do you need to know?

Luge was going to provide an American success story--Wendel Suckow wins first U.S. luge medal--but delivered instead an American protest over the “aerodynamically enhanced” booties worn by the first round leader, Georg Hackl of Germany.

In Winter Olympic terms, this is known as missing the point. Memo to Team USA: Hackl could win this thing wearing Army boots. Get back on your sleds now. Grown men carrying on about booties, it isn’t good for the American image overseas.

Everyone here seems to have gone a little stir crazy, waiting for a break in a weather, or the arrival of the NHL Dream Teams, whichever comes first.

Until then, the 1998 Winter Olympics remain on hold, entering their fourth day.