Heart Of A Giant Diminutive Japanese Star Thrills Crowd With His Glide To Gold Glory

Hiroyasu Shimizu felt as if all of Japan had crammed into the cavernous M-Wave speedskating hall, eager to see whether one of its smallest athletes could fulfill the hopes of an entire nation.

“About a week ago, I started to feel an uneasiness,” said Shimizu, a 5-foot-4 sprinter who holds the world record in the 500 meters.

On Tuesday, he ran straight into the hearts of the Japanese. Shimizu burst to an Olympic record in the 500 to give his country its first gold medal of the Nagano Games.

Nagano welcomes NHL stars

Wayne Gretzky stepped off the bullet train at Nagano Station Tuesday morning and was mobbed. Girls were screaming, camera flashes were going off like strobe lights and the crush of people clamoring for his autograph was so intense that Canadian Olympic Association officials finally had to escort him off the platform.

The NHL has arrived.

“I’ve been a lot of places,” Gretzky told a phalanx of reporters who had also been lying in wait for the Canadian team. “But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

This is the first Olympic Games to include NHL players.

Most of the NHL players here will not begin competing until Friday, when the tournament’s main draw begins.

Mike Richter almost certainly will start in goal for the Americans in their first game against Sweden Friday, but his status is nowhere near as secure as Canada’s Patrick Roy.

Canadian coach Marc Crawford revealed Tuesday that Roy, his goalie with the Colorado Avalanche in the NHL, would be his starter throughout the Olympic tournament.

The Canadian Olympic Committee initially said Paul Kariya, suffering from a concussion, had accompanied the team to Nagano. But Canada’s GM Bob Clarke said Kariya stayed in Los Angeles where he would be examined today.

TV ratings down

When the snow keeps falling in Nagano, CBS pays the price in its ratings.

CBS coverage Monday night, hurt by the postponement of Picabo Street’s debut in the super-G, got a 14.8 rating and a 23 share, lower than any night of events coverage from the past two Winter Games. The rating is 34.4 percent lower than the 21.8 on the first Monday in 1994 and 22.5 percent lower than the 19.1 rating from 1992.

Wrong choice of words

A U.S. luge team spokesman says he used a poor choice of words by mentioning the “atom bomb” to discuss the flap over gold medalist Georg Hackl’s racing booties.

After Hackl took the lead in the first run of the singles Sunday, the United States and Canada protested the new booties that he and other German racers wore. Spokesman Sandy Caligiore told Nagano ‘98, the Games’ official newspaper, that Hackl probably would have done well even if he’d worn snowshoes.

“He’s just that kind of racer. It’s like giving a superpower the atom bomb,” Caligiore told the paper.

The protest was thrown out, and Hackl won his third straight gold.

“In using hyperbole, maybe I should have used a different analogy.”

Japan is the only country that the atomic bomb has been used against.

Adidas AG’s shoemakers are racing to get the world’s fastest luge booties to the U.S. team before the Americans’ final bid for a medal.

The German company made the decision after the U.S. claimed that Adidas violated luge rules by not making the aerodynamically superior boots available to the Americans. Hackl, who competes for the Adidas-sponsored German team, used a yellow pair of those booties to set track records in winning his third consecutive gold medal.

The company said it will “do whatever it takes,” to get four pairs of the new boots to the U.S. team Friday before men’s luge doubles.