WINTER OLYMPICS!
The 22nd
Winter Olympic Games get underway on Feb. 7 and the eyes of the sports world will turn
to Sochi, Russia, for over a fortnight. As usual, attention will focus
on skiing, figure skating, and hockey. But there are many other winter sports
as well—including curling!
Curling always begs the question as to
whether or not this activity is really a sport. It’s kind of like billiards on
ice, only with fewer and bigger balls. Actually they’re polished stones which
curlers slide towards the center of concentric circles, while also seeking to
knock out opponents’ stones. It’s weird, but it has a cult following. I can’t
help but watch.
Among the other sports that some may
consider weird is the biathlon, which involves skiing and shooting. Cool. The
biathlon always brings back memories of training in Norway with A-Company of the
reserve 25th Marine Regiment in 1993. We were in the Arctic that
March as part of a NATO exercise and our reservists from Maine and New
Hampshire really shined. A reserve outfit doesn’t always compare well to an active
duty unit featuring full-time servicemen. But our company was full of northern
New England woodsmen, hunters, and skiers who knew how to deal with frozen
conditions. Many of the active duty Marines—who hailed disproportionately from
places like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida—were absolutely miserable. But the northern
New Englanders were always ahead of schedule as we whipped around the training
areas on our cross country skis.
One day we received a surprise visitor—retired
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who appeared at our camp with a CBS-TV film crew. Most
of us had served under Schwarzkopf two
years earlier during Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. Being forward
deployed, we never saw the general in the desert. But the “Most Admired Man in
America” somehow found his way to our Arctic bivouac. His mission was to get
video footage of Marines in the snow for a feature that CBS would run the
following year when it covered Norway’s 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. He’d
apparently heard that our guys were adept at skiing and shooting and his crew
got lots of footage. I was thrilled to see some of my men in the feature which
aired during those Lillehammer Games (yes, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan
Olympics).
The military actually deserves much credit for the development of winter
sports in America, beyond the biathlon. The 10th Mountain Division
specifically trained for winter warfare and thousands of its men became
proficient skiers who after the war pushed for the development of new ski areas
all over the country, including several in N.H.
The 10th Mountain Division’s very first volunteer was Private
Charles McLane, Captain of the Dartmouth College ski team, who enlisted a day
after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Dec. 8, 1941. His ski coach, Walter Prager,
later enlisted as well.
A recent VFW Magazine article also mentioned Lebanon’s Bob Townsend, who
overcame a war wound to ski in the 1948 Winter Olympics. Keene’s John Morton, a
Vietnam veteran, qualified for the 1972 Olympic Team while another former
soldier, Peter Dascoulias of Franklin, skied in the 1976 Olympics.
The proficiency of New Hampshire’s military men in the snow is nothing
new. The legendary colonial scouts known as Rogers Rangers were adept at winter
warfare, using snowshoes to ambush and defeat a French force south of Lake Champlain
in 1757. (In 1940, Finnish ski troops successfully held off a huge Soviet army
by using swiftness and mobility to ambush and decimate road-bound Soviet
forces.)
So while ice hockey and skiing will get big TV ratings from Russia over
the next two weeks, you can be sure that some of us will be watching the
biathlon with special interest and appreciation.
And yes, for some reason, I’m sure I’ll
be watching the “fierce” curling competition as well.
USA! USA! USA!
