Sport: A Time for Underdogs

If the first week of the Winter Olympics belonged to favorites, the second —except, of course, for Jean-Claude Killy—belonged to underdogs and sentimentalists.

Nothing tickles a satellite nation more than turning the tables on Mother Russia. And last week at Grenoble, a pro-caliber Russian hockey team that had not lost a game in international competition since 1963 got its comeuppance from a gang of slam-bang Czechs, who spotted the Soviets a 1-0 lead, then struck back to win 5-4 and pull off the biggest upset of the entire winter games. Russia still managed to salvage a slightly tarnished gold medal when the Czechs could manage no better than a 2-2 tie in their final game against Sweden.

That was not the only embarrassment for the Russians. They also took it on the chin in ladies’ cross-country skiing from a blonde Swedish snow bunny named Toini Gustafsson. A gymnastics teacher, Toini already had won the 10-kilometer cross-country; in the 5-kilometer, trailing Russia’s Galina Koulakova by 4 sec. with one kilometer to go, she made a kamikaze dive down the last slope to earn a second gold medal.

For sentimentalists, there was Eugenio Monti, 40, Italy’s “Red Devil” of the bobsled run, a nine-time world champion but never before an Olympics gold-medal winner, who finally realized his lifelong ambition—twice over —with victories in both the two-man and four-man events. The U.S., too, had someone to cheer in Michigan’s Terry McDermott, ten pounds heavier and four years older (at 27) than he was when he astonished everyone by winning the men’s 500-meter speed-skating race at Innsbruck in 1964. This time, on a rink that the sun had turned into slush, Terry surprised the experts again by finishing second in the 500-meter—barely .2 sec. behind West Germany’s Erhard Keller.

There was nothing nostalgic about what happened in the ladies’ luge competition: a clear case of cheating—and stupid cheating at that. Ranking first, second and fourth going into the final run, a trio of East German women tried for a little extra edge by illegally heating the runners of their sleds. They were caught and disqualified.

The opposite approach—pure Olympian effort—paid far better dividends for Canada’s pert, blue-eyed Nancy Greene, 24. Although she was the defending ladies’ Alpine skiing champion, Nancy’s chances seemed hopeless after she fell badly last month and strained the ligaments in an ankle. Last week, vowing “I’ll either win or I’ll fall,” she strapped on her white helmet with TIGER emblazoned across the front and slashed through the giant slalom course with such abandon that she beat Runner-Up Annie Famose of France for the gold medal by almost three seconds.