After the Games

We came for the abandoned Olympics. Sarajevo’s 1984 Winter Games left a trail of ruins scattered across the mountains above the city, and a few of us spent a trip chasing them down — the bobsled track snaking through the forest, the ski jumps, and, best of all, the hotel built to put the world’s visitors somewhere with a view.

The bobsled run is the kind of thing that doesn’t feel real: a concrete serpent curling downhill through the trees, every metre of it bombed with graffiti, banked turns you can walk straight up the inside of. But the hotel was what I’d come to find. You climb to it through the pines and it resolves slowly out of the green — a long, low, stepped thing in raw concrete, terracing along the slope the way good mountain architecture does, windows dark, balconies holding saplings instead of skiers.

Inside, it’s found a strange second life: people play airsoft in it now. You can read the game in the place — little barricades, spent BBs, sightlines worked out between the concrete pillars. I loved that. A building made for one perfect week, then a war, then left for dead, and now a bunch of locals running around it on weekends, keeping it used. Better that than silence.

It was built to host the best week of the mountain’s life. It spent the years after being shelled, then forgotten — and now it gets to be a playground. Of all the afterlives, that’s not the worst one.

It also brought me home. The whole scene — pine slopes, alpine quiet, big serious concrete left to the weather — looked exactly like the mountains I grew up around in Ukraine, and exploring it with friends had that same easy, half-feral energy of being young in the hills with nowhere you had to be.

The climb you earn

Getting up to the top of the ski jump was not easy. The track climbs steeply, and by the time you’re at the launch you’ve properly worked for it — but the view back down is the whole reward, the valley and the far range laid out exactly as the place was built to frame them, free of charge and short of guests.

I went down before the light did, friends ahead of me on the path, the hotel sliding back into the trees step by concrete step. The pines are taking it at their own patient pace, a season at a time — and somewhere inside, on the right weekend, someone is still using it.