Sochi Olympic Mania!

WINTER OLYMPICS!

The 22^nd 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 25^th 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 10^th 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 10^th 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!