This Is a One-Time-Only Deal

Watching the Winter Olympics on TV, I am struck anew with how we in this country prize the second-rate in our athletics.

I mean, I can do without the luge or the two-man bobsled, and I don’t have to go to Nagano to see the New York Rangers play hockey, but I marvel at the pressure-packed implacability of the events for athletes on snow skis or figure skates.

Look! You think a World Series is throat-choking pressure? A Super Bowl? Even a golf Open? Wimbledon?

Forget it. You get three strikes in baseball. You get four downs to make 10 yards in football. You get three to five sets in tennis. You get four rounds of 18 holes in golf.

These people get -- what? -- 25 seconds? A minute?

It’s incredible. They work and even slave for years, all their lives striving for perfection. Nothing less will win. Then, their skate or ski edge slips a matter of inches and it was all for naught. They have sometimes only split seconds to validate their whole personas.

I watch in open-mouth amazement at the micrometer precision of the pairs skaters, melding their athleticism into one whole as if there were only one person performing these complicated routines.

I was not surprised to be told that one pairs skater had her skull laid open by a partner’s blade edge whirling too close to it in a practice routine. I shake my head that there haven’t been more.

Consider those young women spinning down the mountainsides in the snow, twisting and turning past the slalom flags at exactly the right angle. One sideways slide, one moment of imperfection, and a lifetime of training goes down the drain. There is no reprieve, no rerun. I can remember one year, at Grenoble, the great Jean-Claude Killy had apparently won his third gold medal, in the slalom, when the Austrian, Karl Schranz, claimed his run had been interfered with in the fog of Chamrousse by a French policeman. He had to abort the run, he said.

They reluctantly gave Karl another run and he apparently bested Killy, but then someone remembered that the Olympic creed is one-chance and one-chance-only. No penalty for pass interference. No balk rule.

Schranz was overruled and only later was it learned he had missed a gate long before the fiasco with the flic -- if it happened.

That’s the Olympic ethic. Get it right the first time or go home and brood on what might have been. Sometimes, a gold-medal run is wrested from you at the last gate or your skates slip out from under you and you hit the boards just as you are winning the 500 meters.

I don’t like to rap my own racket, but I remember one time a colleague was waxing rhapsodic over a center-field catch made by Terry Moore or Billy Bruton or Curt Flood and he was shrieking that no one but a Hall of Fame ballplayer could make that play. And I begged to disagree.

“Look,” I told him. “They probably got an acrobatic troupe touring in a circus in Yugoslavia, any one of whom could make that catch for you with their feet. And juggled three oranges at the same time.”

“Yeah,” he countered. “But they couldn’t hit the curveball.”

I was ready. “But you get three to five chances to hit the curveball. They only get one to do what they do.”

So it is with Olympians. Look, you fumble a football in the Super Bowl, you get it back later to make amends. You boot a ground ball in the World Series and, maybe, the worst that can happen is a guy gets to first base. Either way, you don’t necessarily lose the ballgame. Miscue on the pistes of Nagano and it’s Sayonara!

You can hit a bad golf shot, but you have the next shot to recover and still birdie or make par.

Miss a gate in the giant slalom and you might as well sit down and take your skis off. And you can’t say, “Wait till next year!” Your cry is, “Wait till four years from now!”

Is there any sport that puts such demands on its practitioners? A brain surgeon almost has a lot of leeway, compared to these icemen or ice women. Perfection is their goal. Sometimes, their imperfections are not even visible to the naked eye. A bend of the knee or a flip of the hip detectable only to expert judges can cost critical points, can cost a medal.

Now, that, I have to say, is pressure. Suffocating, hyperventilating pressure.

Look. You can throw a wobbly pass in football -- and Jerry Rice might go up and get it anyway. No receivers bail you out on the slopes and ice of Nagano. It’s you against the world. No substitutes. No margin for error. Get it right or get a flight.

I have this vision of this old gaffer or aging grande dame sitting in a living room 60 years from now, in 2058, leaning forward from a wheelchair and thumping a cane on the floor and exclaiming, “I came within an inch of the gold in 19 and 98. In Nagano, it was. That’s in Japan. My skate caught this little slush puddle in the middle of the ice as I was going into my triple salchow and I fell on my backside. When I close my eyes I can still see my skate edge slipping in that.”

And a listener rolls her eyes, winks at a companion and sighs, “Oh, sure, Auntie!”

And still they keep coming. Every four years, a fresh batch, daring their all for a piece of metal.

It was Napoleon who once said, “I have made the most wonderful discovery. I have discovered men will risk their lives, even die, for ribbons!”

Well, the Olympian doesn’t risk his life. Just everything else. His future peace of mind for a shot at a piece of gold. It’s the cruelest of sports.