Sport: Trying to Keep That Feeling

For Sarajevo, the problem, of course, was not that it was unknown, but the nature of its fame. Has a history test ever been drawn up anywhere in the world that did not require the answer: “The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo”? The people of Sarajevo have nonetheless stoically retained their fierce pride in a history rich–that is to say complicated–enough to explain even Princip. It is good, however, to have newer memories, though even recollections of the 1984 Winter Olympics touch on the subject of Princip.

“Have you noticed,” asked Ahmed Karabegovic, secretary-general of the organizing committee for the Sarajevo Games, “that all of the stores in the city still have the Olympic emblem in the windows and that many men wear this Olympic tie?” He thrust forward a cravat with a snowflake and five rings woven into its design. “It is a small thing, but it is significant. Before, our city was known as a town of ashes, the place where a war began. Now it is a town of the Olympics and of friendship; much has changed.”

One year after the closing ceremonies, Sarajevo clings to the Olympics with a tenacity that knows a turning point when one comes along. The Olympic emblems have not come down from store windows nor have the ties been retired to an appropriate bottom drawer because Sarajevo does not want to get over the Games. Reminiscence is everywhere. Hajrudin Cengic, president of the town assembly’s executive council and city coordinator for the Olympics, loses his managerial demeanor to a faraway look: “There is not a single day that passes that I do not remember the Olympics. The city looked really gorgeous to me, with people from the whole world here. Only now when I think back do I realize how beautiful it really was. We are trying to keep that feeling of the Olympics. Of course it’s impossible, but we are trying.”

They are trying with all the heart and skill that wrought an Olympics here in the first place. When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Sarajevo in 1978, the town had a third-rate mountain with a few lifts for recreational skiers and no ice rink at all. They built two rinks and a bobsled run. They also cut a road up a mountain previously traversed only by Tito’s Nazi-fighting partisans, and they built hotels, cross-country ski trails and a network of chair lifts to newly hacked-out downhill and slalom courses. They did it all for $125 million and produced a tidy, if not quite Los Angeles-size profit of $10 million.

The surplus is being used to flog the tourist industry generated by the bonanza of Olympic publicity and the banishment of Princip’s ghost. Sarajevo has devoted a $2 million fund solely to cementing the Olympic image by staging additional world-class sporting events–world speed-skating championships, European bobsled championships and the like–in hopes of attracting the fans and tourists who follow them. So far, the strategy is working. With round-trip air fare from New York and seven days in a hotel at the foot of Olympic ski runs costing just $680, the tourists are coming.

After all, an Olympian dream comes in the bargain. “I want to ski the down hill course where Bill Johnson won the gold medal,” states Philadelphian John O’Neil. Though he cannot understand the words, Rizo Uzicanin recognizes the glint in the American’s eye and beams at him from his stall in the old Turkish market. Such tourist fantasies are warmer to Uzicanin than the handcrafted woolens hanging from his shop front. “I’ve been on this corner 64 years,” he says, “since I was a boy of seven with my father. We have never seen the prosperity that we have here since the Olympics.”

That prosperity and the unrelenting reach for the big time have not eroded the wonder either of the Games or of what they brought to Sarajevo. The children who moved into the apartments built to serve as the Olympic Village strap on their skates and wobble up and down the hard-packed snow on the sidewalks and streets. There are fantasies here just as surely as in Philadelphia. They say with pride, “In school, the other kids call us ‘Olympians.’ ” A cab driver buzzes about town with his new CB radio turned up to catch a dispatcher’s grating squawk through the static. “We got this radio system new since the Olympics,” he boasts. “Now tourists can call for a taxi, and we come just like in other cities.” At the skating rink where Torvill and Dean once carved perfection, the jam-packed crowd of children looks like it is having recess on an oil slick: hardly a child in Sarajevo had owned a pair of skates until the Olympic rinks were built, but they manage to stay upright, so far more on sheer enthusiasm than grace.

In his restaurant and bar by the Miljacka River, Ferid Sultanovic settles his ex-weightlifter’s girth at a returning visitor’s table and tenders a drink on the house. “There have been many changes, but it is the mentality that counts,” he says. “We are an openhearted people, and perhaps the world came to know this from the Olympics. Many years will pass, but I do not think the people will change inside.”

On a free afternoon in the middle of the Games last year, a taxi driver was asked to take a first-time visitor to one of Sarajevo’s historical sites. He drove around the city and the hillsides above for more than three enthusiastic hours, then took her to his home for thick, black coffee with his family. On returning to the press village, he refused payment. At the end of a visit this year, another taxi pulled up to the modern Butmir Airport entrance, where the fare was paid. Gratefully a tip was offered, but the driver declined it. “Is O.K., is enough,” he said in English, with a huge smile. “Come back.” Sultanovic was right. Nothing has changed inside.