Competition spread across breathtaking Alps

TURIN, Italy — The made-for-TV ceremony that launched the XXth Winter Olympics closed with an almost-too-perfect crescendo: Luciano Pavarotti, a massive red curtain and flames dancing in the night.

But the real show started more than 12 hours earlier.

Maybe it was kismet. Maybe just luck. But early Friday in Turin, Italy's first capital and latest renaissance project, a magic thing happened.

At dawn, the sun sliced through fog and smog that had hung over the city all week. If you stood in a high place at dawn and looked west, the real reason the world is here hit you like a bucket of water in the face.

The Alps. Sky-piercing peaks standing white and stark, bathed in blood-orange. You could see it slowly paint the hills holding the Alpine villages that for 17 days will play host to the world's swiftest and strongest: Sestriere, Bardonnechia, Pragelato.

Staring at all that cold, vertical majesty, you remembered why we're here.

You remembered why the world puts up with the security hassles, the transportation headaches, the venue costs, the years-long imposition on hundreds of thousands of locals.

It's all about gravity and air so cold it burns your nose, and the juiced feeling you get the first time you jump on a sled or strap on skates, skis or a snowboard and let your spirit override your brain.

It's all about getting to the bottom and not being able to wait another second to do it once more, better and faster. It's all about wearing out and wanting to quit but hearing, deep in your soul, the voice of the late "Miracle on Ice" hockey coach Herb Brooks, taunting and demanding:

"Again." "Again." "Again."

Trust this: Standing 10 feet away from Sophia Loren at Stadio Olimpico is as close as your average Winter Olympics athlete ever gets to sparkle and glitz. "Glamour" doesn't enter your vocabulary when your day job is in the weight room and night work is in the tool-rental desk at Home Depot.

For most of these athletes, it's all about the next 16 days, and what they leave on the ice and snow in the city of Turin and mountains that surround it.

Like their predecessors in Salt Lake City, the Turin Games organizers seem to get that. They could have gone for style over substance Friday by having their flamboyant national ski hero, Alberto Tomba, light the caldron in the south end of the city. They handed the torch instead to Stefania Belmondo — a practitioner of one of the most thankless tasks in sport, Nordic skiing, who owns 10 medals from four Games.

Turin's opening ceremony deftly mixed its hopes for these Games — melding the lifestyle of the rugged mountain terrain of northwest Italy with the art, culture and history of the flatlands below.

From a stadium seat a stone's throw away from the president of Italy, first lady Laura Bush and other dignitaries, the show was refreshing in its simplicity, its respect, its sense of humor.

A crowd of about 35,000 yelled itself hoarse for its hometown athletes, sang and swayed to John Lennon's "Imagine" and stood in silent awe of the Olympic flag. Italians cheered loudly for the Americans, a group that included flag-bearing long-track speedskater Chris Witty, figure skater Michelle Kwan and skier Bode Miller. But charmingly, they were just as juiced over the entrance of Philip Boit, a cross-country skier and the one-man Olympic team for Kenya.

The night felt, above all else, like a welcome respite for the Olympic movement, which has struggled through the malfeasance-turned-terrorism fears of Salt Lake City and the fly-by-night preparations of Athens. It felt like the Games of the XXth Olympiad, in spite of the expected headaches, logistical glitches, doping and now gambling scandals and other foibles, at least had a chance to return the focus where it belonged.

When it all ended and the smoke cleared, skaters and skiers and hockey players from 80 nations lingered on the stage, swapping hats and lies and digital-photo duties. When security guards finally booted them out and the stadium went dark, a mostly full moon hung over the city, illuminating, in the distance, the real reason to care about these Winter Games, or any other.

The mountains. The ice. And a bunch of young people who live to master them like no one before them.

Bravo, Torino. And let the Games begin.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com