Countdown To The Cowtown Hoedown

The bobsled and luge track is a short walk from the ski jumps. Designed by a team of East Germans, the course is laid out like a tuning fork—one prong containing the starting ramps for the men's and women's luge, the other the start of the two-and four-man bobsleds. The track is refrigerated by 48 miles of pipe, and this winter it has needed every inch of them. In January strong winds blew an inch of dust over the track, fouling the ice so badly that a meltdown was required to clean it. The park now sprays the barren slopes surrounding the track with water to keep the dust down.

The most interesting feature of the luge and bobsled run is the 98 photoelectric eyes that have been installed at critical locations throughout the course. As a sled passes, the photocells register its exact position, then feed that information into a central computer: the computer compares the line taken by the sled with the fastest theoretical line of descent. Armed with this information, a driver can adjust his next run accordingly. Don't be too shocked if, next February. Canada takes home its first bobsledding medal since 1964.

The cross-country and biathlon competitions will be held in the town of Canmore, 55 minutes west of Calgary . A mini-Olympic village will be set up in Canmore for 600 athletes and coaches, with lodging provided by 15 outsized trailers (although OCO '88 officials call them modular housing units and visibly cringe at the word "trailer"). Life won't be bad in them. The person-to-bathroom ratio at the Canmore village is 4.6 to 1, better than in some of the dorms at the University of Calgary village, which will house the other 2,000 Olympic athletes and coaches. And Canmore will be equipped with saunas, a swimming pool, a movie theater, a curling rink and a video arcade to amuse the athletes. If, that is, they aren't too exhausted to enjoy them. The Canmore Nordic Centre has a bear of a cross-country course, with hills so steep that speeds of 80 kilometers (48 miles) an hour are estimated on the downhills. "You could find yourself eating a trail here really quick," says Canadian Nordic coach Marty Hall. After skiing in a World Cup race at Canmore in January Sweden 's Torgny Mogren, third in the World Cup standings called the 15-kilometer course "the toughest I've competed on," and added "I was tired the whole way." His teammate World Cup leader Gunde Svan, tilted his hand at a crazy angle when describing Canmore: "The hills are like this. Not normal."

The same could be said of Mount Allan, the site of the Alpine skiing events, and easily Calgary 's most controversial venue. Nakiska at Mount Allan is the precise name. The site was named for the Games after the Cree word meaning "to meet." As in, "to meet" criticism.

The Nakiska ski area is 54 miles west of Calgary , down a long stretch of highway that never quite makes it to the mountains. Albertans are none too happy with this project, since it cost $19 million of taxpayers' money to build. No private developer would touch it. Mount Allan, a molehill by western standards, gets little snow, necessitating $3.75 million in snow-making equipment, which can cover 80% of the trails. When Marc Hodler , the Swiss president of the F�d�ration Internationale du Ski (FIS), first skied Nakiska in 1985, he moaned. "This mountain is in the foothills!" Later Hodler assessed the men's downhill course—the showcase Olympic event for European athletes—as "borderline" and threatened to move the race elsewhere. Serge Lang, the founder of the World Cup tour, was even more forthright: he called Nakiska's downhill " Mickey Mouse ."

The most damning assessment, however, came from Hans Gmoser, affectionately known as the father of North American helicopter skiing, for which the nearby Bugaboo region of the Rockies is renowned. "We won't have to worry about nuclear conflagration if we have the Olympics on Mount Allan," said Gmoser. "The whole world will die laughing."

So what did OCO '88 do in the face of such ridicule? Throw money at it. Since Hodler first expressed his concerns, a team of FIS technical experts headed by Switzerland 's Bernhard Russi , an Olympic gold medalist in '72 and silver medalist in '76, has molded Mount Allan like a lump of clay. The problem with the men's downhill had been that it was too steep at the top and too flat in the middle: so for the past two years chain saws and bulldozers have widened the course, added rollers, changed contours and created bumps. The result is a world-class downhill venue. "Unanimously my friends on the inspection team are of the opinion that we are on the way to making Mount Allan one of the top mountains existing today," Hodler gushed after watching a Nor/Am event there in December.

"It'll be the best downhill at an Olympics since '76 at Innsbruck ," says Ken Read, one of Canada 's top racers at the last two Olympics and an early critic of Mount Allan. "At Lake Placid and Sarajevo , most of the downhillers went away with kind of a bad taste in their mouths because the course dictated the winners," says Read, referring to the gold medals won by Austria 's Leonhard Stock and America 's Bill Johnson—two racers who had difficulty winning before or since. "You don't want a downhill where the winner is just the guy with the fastest skis. This Mount Allan course is intimidating at the top, and busy all the way down. There's a lot going on up there."

The top is so intimidating—at one point the pitch reaches about 50 degrees—that when officials asked workers to set up safety nets near the wind-whipped summit for this month's World Cup downhill, the workers refused. Too dangerous, they said. As it happens, the starting gate for the race will be lower anyway because of a lack of snow at the top. But you can bet that for the Olympic downhill the skiers will start from the summit if Russi and Hodler have to climb up to set the safety nets in place by themselves.

The women's downhill is also challenging. Canada 's top woman racer, Laurie Graham, a World Cup winner this season at Val-D'Is�re, describes the Mount Allan course as "the steepest downhill I've ever been on. And it's narrow. It doesn't have real flowing turns. It's a survival type of thing."