Countdown To The Cowtown Hoedown

ABC will almost certainly lose money on its telecast of the Calgary Games. Its $309 million pact was signed in January 1984, at the peak of the sports television boom, when advertisers were falling all over themselves to pay record-setting amounts to have their products associated with athletes. Since then that market has weakened significantly. But OCO '88 has done everything in its power to see that ABC gets the most for its money. It has lengthened the duration of the Winter Games from 12 days to 16, so that it now spans three weekends, and 50% of its events have been scheduled for evening or weekend prime time The number of events has increased correspondingly from 90-some events at Sarajevo to 128 in Calgary And several of the added competitions are demonstration sports with television appeal—freestyle skiing, short-course speed skating and yahoo Olympic rodeo—which will help fill in ABC's 97 hours of coverage.

OCO '88 has also changed the format of the hockey tournament to better suit TV. Matches will be played every day (in the past hockey has been an every-other-day event) and the number of teams qualifying for the medal round has been increased from four to six, thereby making it easier for the U.S. squad to advance—and TV ratings to go up.

Furthermore, OCO '88 was able to convince the International Ice Hockey Federation—thanks to a reported $1.2 million under-the-table payment—to okay the concept of a prearranged schedule (as opposed to one drawn out of a hat), which will have the U.S. and Canada playing most of their games during prime time. Says King, "We've been able to solve a lot of our problems by throwing money at them."

The most dramatic example of that is the Olympic Oval, a $29.2 million wonder that, when it is finished this spring, will be the world's first fully enclosed 400-meter speed skating arena. (There is another under construction in East Berlin , which is due to be completed in midsummer.) Located on the University of Calgary campus, which will double as an Olympic Village, the Oval extends roughly the length of two football fields. "We knew that warm weather could occasionally present a problem in the winter months," says Dr. Roger Jackson, president of the Canadian Olympic Association and dean of the U of C phys ed faculty. "And we had the money, so we figured. Why not put a roof on it?" The Oval is therefore immune to the warm Chinook winds that can send Calgary temperatures soaring 60�, even 70�, in a matter of hours. It will be kept at 50�, and since skaters won't have to battle wind resistance or sunshine-softened ice speculation is that times will overall be faster than those outdoors.

The opening and closing ceremonies will be held at U of C's McMahon Stadium, one of only a handful of venues (the Stampede Corral, site of some of the hockey and figure skating, is another) not specifically built for the Games. Completed in 1960, McMahon Stadium is undergoing a $15.8 million expansion to increase its capacity to 50,000.

The great majority of hockey and figure skating events will be held in the Olympic Saddledome , the $73 million home of the NHL's Calgary Flames . The 3�-year-old Saddledome , which has an expandable ice surface to accommodate international play, is so named because its roof—the largest concrete suspended one in the world—is shaped like a saddle. It seats 17,000—about twice the capacity of Lake Placid 's hockey arena, which sometimes went half empty during the '80 Olympics—but it is not large enough to accommodate the appetites of hockey-crazed Canadians. All the hockey medal games and figure skating events have already been sold out, prompting the decision in January to add 2,600 seats to the Saddledome 's upper reaches, a $1.13 million project that should help put a few noses back in joint among ticketless Calgarians.

The rest of the venues are out of town. The closest of these, Canada Olympic Park, is a 15-minute drive west of Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway. It's difficult to miss. You tootle along through the foothills and nascent suburbia when suddenly, on your left, silhouetted against the sky, appear the naked twin towers of the 70-meter and 90-meter jumps. They are by far the largest objects around. There is hardly a tree over seven feet tall within a local phone call. And, horribly, they are surrounded by dirt. This has been the warmest winter of the century for Calgary , with more than 80 days of above-average temperatures, and the recently installed snowmaking equipment has, for the most part, been used only at night.

What these ski jumps now lack in aesthetics, however, they make up for in sheer brass. They bully the foothills. They dominate the horizon. The problem with this grandiose exposure is that there is nothing within 30 miles to deflect the wind. And blow she does: Statistics show that on one out of three days at Canada Olympic Park the wind whistles too fiercely for safe jumping. There has been talk of building a huge screen on the windward side of the jumps, but there is as much controversy about the eddies and backwash the windscreens would create as there is about the wind itself. "The fact is, you can handle the wind by having enough days to wait it out," says King. "Every ski jumping hill has the same problem, but one of the advantages of a 16-day Olympics is we have four more days to fight the elements."

Last November, Horst Bulau, Canada 's top jumper, caused a stir when he christened the 70-meter jump. After landing smoothly, he shot through the outrun and slid right out of the 50,000-spectator bowl, hurtling airborne off the lip of the counterslope and tumbling 30 feet down a dirt embankment. "The hill is great," the battered Bulau said afterward. "Unfortunately, the counterslope is a little too short."

Officials immediately modified the counterslope, adding more dirt to its upper portion and rounding off its lip. But the modifications were probably unnecessary. No other jumper even came close to skiing through the outrun, prompting speculation that Bulau, who lives in Ottawa , Ont. , hadn't tried his best to stop, perhaps with the purpose of discrediting the $6 million Olympic hill, which had supplanted Thunder Bay , Ont. , as the top training spot for ski jumpers in Canada .