Cowbells, Salmon Jerky: Is This Skiing Or Insanity?

LILLEHAMMER, Norway - I went to see cross-country skiing the other day, an Olympic event that - talk about your poor planning - was held OUTDOORS. This was very unfortunate, because the weather, in defiance of the known laws of physics, has gotten even colder. You have to walk very carefully for fear of tripping over body parts that have fallen off of visiting journalists without their noticing it. It is so cold that the Norwegians won't tell us the real temperature; they are using a secret temperature code, called "centigrade."

It was approximately 740 kilometers below zero when I arrived at the cross-country ski stadium, which was, needless to say, jammed with thousands of happy Norwegians, bouncing up and down, ringing cowbells, blowing horns and emitting cheerful puffs of salmon breath into the frigid air. Some of them had been there all night. They LOVE cross-country skiing. This is a huge event for them, very much like our Super Bowl, except that at the Super Bowl, you can actually see the game.

This is not the case in with cross-country skiing. You do catch a brief glimpse of the skiers at the start; they take off one at a time, 30 seconds apart, wearing their aerodynamic Spider Man outfits, while the crowd roars insanely. But the skiers immediately ski OUT OF THE STADIUM. Just like that, they're GONE, possibly to Sweden, and sometimes they don't come back for hours. It's as if you were at a football game, and on the opening kickoff, the player who caught the ball sprinted out the stadium exit, with all the other players running right behind him, and you spent the rest of the game ringing a cowbell and waiting for them to come back.

Speaking of freezing to death: I have formulated an alarming new theory as to why the Norwegians do not seem to notice the cold: They are eating radioactive reindeer. Really. According to the Norway Tribune, an English-language newspaper here, there is still a lot of radioactive material that drifted over after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and it is showing up in the reindeer meat, thus giving a whole new meaning to the famous song lyrics:

"And if you ever saw it,

"You would even say it glows."

I still want to tell you, too, about the opening ceremony, which was a spectacular and dramatic event that I will remember at least until my butt thaws out, which won't happen for a long, long time. Twenty years from now, when I go in for a physical examination, the doctor will say, "Mr. Barry, you seem to be perfectly normal, except for the fact that your butt is minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit at the core."

The problem was that the ceremony was held in a stadium where the specators sat for three hours on concrete benches covered with a thick layer of ice. My guess is that the Norwegians put the ice there on purpose. They probably had professional bench-icers working all night, because these people LOVE the cold. Even when it's really, REALLY cold, so cold that we visiting journalists are afraid to blink for fear that our eyes will freeze shut and we will be unable to fill out our expense reports, the Norwegians are walking around outdoors practically naked, happy as clams.

Maybe it's their diet. It consists almost entirely of cold food, mainly salmon, which seems to show up at every meal in virtually every form, including ice cream, coffee and cigarettes. You know how in some hotels, the chambermaids leave you a piece of chocolate? Well, the other day, the maids in the media village here left - I am not making this up - little packets of SALMON JERKY. This was in case you woke up at 2 a.m. thinking, as so many people do, "Whoa, I have not consumed any salmon for SIX HOURS!"

So as you can imagine, after being here for a while, a person can develop a fearsome case of salmon breath, which is difficult to get rid of inasmuch as the Norwegians probably use salmon-flavored toothpaste. Thus, no matter how cold it is, everybody is happier outdoors.

But back to the Olympic Games themselves: We here in the U.S. news media are all SICK AND TIRED of the whole Tonya Harding thing, and we are doing our level best not to let it overshadow the athletic events. Some of us have even taken the extreme step of actually talking to athletes other than Nancy Kerrigan (Yes! There are some!).

"So," we ask these athletes. "What do YOU think of this Tonya Harding thing?"