Helsinki Visitors Beware

[roger/over]

My first visit to Helsinki Olympic Stadium (in 1972) brings back two special memories; one good, one bad. Make that one good and two bad: The tape I borrowed to measure my run-up for that masters meet turned out to have been broken and re-attached with two feet missing.

The good and the really bad had to do with discovery that there was a cozy, dark bar/cocktail lounge under the stadium! How can North America still be so far behind, with just beer served in our stadia a quarter century later?

The good was just discovering the bar. It might even have been good that all the walls of the bar were covered with full-size, back-lit transparencies of athletes in action. What definitely was bad was that each and every action-photo showed a vaulter plummeting to earth after his pole had just broken.

Just to warn you that the sadistic creature who designed that macabre display might still be at large.