Front Porch: Olympic spirit brings joy to all

I’ve been watching the Summer Olympics lately. A lot.

Both the summer and winter Olympics are Bruce’s and my favorite form of TV viewing. I love every element of it – new sports I learn about, the pageantry, the human stories, always “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” drama, and the rivalries, too, of course – but mostly the camaraderie, the peaceful mix of nations and the hard work of (mostly) young athletes striving to show us their best.

The predominant thing is that it’s two weeks of happiness, when at that one place and one time, the world gathers to cheer, intermingling with joy. We experience it at home in front of our giant TV screens, where the presentation is curated for us, but we feel it.

It’s a real feeling. I know, because I’ve been there, and I’ve felt it up close and personal. It was a long time ago, more than half a century, but whenever I see the Olympics on TV, I remember.

It was the 1968 Winter Olympics, held in Grenoble, France. The big names of that day are no longer easily recalled, except probably for one, and for the others, only by people who are deeply caught up in a particular sport. There are grandmothers and grandfathers among us who weren’t even born then.

It all began with a huge opening ceremony in which the president of France welcomed the world to his country. That man was Charles de Gaulle, who was world famous for leading the Free French forces in resisting capitulation in World War II. I was awe-stuck that I was in a place where I was breathing the same air that he was.

The name I think most everyone remembers from those Olympics is Peggy Fleming, the beautiful and graceful figure skater who brought home a gold medal for the U.S. She was elegance on ice. The athletic jumps of those times were smaller and with fewer rotations than those of today, but no mind, she was the best in the world then. And Bruce and I got to see her skate in what was her iconic and modest lime green skating ensemble.

This was the Olympics of Jean-Claude Killy, the French skier who won gold in what was then the three ski events – slalom, giant slalom and downhill. He wasn’t a one-discipline skier. He did it all. And because he was competing in his home country, the fervor and fever about him consumed conversations everywhere.

We were present in the arena when he was presented with the third gold, and I thought the building was going to come down on us with the eruptions of cheers and stomping and excitement.

In that same arena, we saw seated a few rows in front of us the Russian figure skating pair of Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov, who had a few days earlier won the gold medal in their event. The married couple was hugely famous in their day for having set the gold standard for doing a move known as the death spiral. If you watch skating, you’ve surely seen it.

As a side note, because it was easier to interact with people at the Olympics in those days, when we learned that athletes from the Soviet bloc countries were selling items of their clothing (definitely not a sanctioned activity) in order to acquire hard currency, we arranged with a Polish athlete to buy his coat, which was just my size.

We met him one evening, and the exchange was made. Cash for coat, a coat which I still have and still cherish and still has the athlete’s name on a label inside.

The best memory from the 1968 Winter Olympics was one day when we were walking down a street in Grenoble and saw a small group of people gathered in front of a store window. It was by a TV store, which was closed. The proprietor had put a TV in the front window facing out onto the street, and left it on so passersby could see the Olympics coverage.

What was showing on TV was the downhill ski race, in which Killy was vying for his third gold medal.

The crowd was animated. One French woman (who might have had a glass or two of wine) was so excited she could barely contain herself. I still remembered enough of my high school French at that time, so I was kind of able to talk with her. Others in the crowd were from a variety of countries, and we discovered that we had enough overlapping language skills that a group conversation and cheering session could be had.

I would repeat in English what the French woman said. A German man who spoke English took my words and translated them into German. Someone else repeated those into another language, so with about four translations going back and forth, a round-robin-of-sorts conversation took place.

We were our own mini-United Nations meeting and we were all rooting loudly for Killy.

When it became clear that the win was secured, the French woman went off into a flow of words I couldn’t keep up with, but they had something to do with elevating Killy to a deity of some sort, or at least emperor. We all cheered, jumped up and down and hugged each other, having our own celebration out there on that street.

I never felt so much a part of a world community as I did then.

That’s the Olympics for me – a time of joy, a time when love of nation can be expressed with happiness and kindness – and can also include support and love for the athletes and citizens of other nations.

And because we’re all in this together.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.