BEIJING — Nathan Ikon Crumpton will make his official debut in men’s skeleton here Wednesday morning, whizzing headfirst down the track with his helmet hovering inches above the ice. But his first event of these Winter Olympics simply involved getting dressed.
It started in an indoor staging area before last week’s opening ceremony, where Crumpton shed his street clothes and donned a traditional Samoan outfit featuring a tapa cloth made from mulberry bark; a pale fuiono headpiece adorned with nautilus shells; a feathered kiki fulumoa around his waist; and armbands fashioned out of wild boar’s tusk. It continued as he hustled outside to join the procession of athletes on a 20-degree night, only to duck away near the entrance to receive a full-body coating of baby oil applied by two American Samoa National Olympic Committee officials. “Just to get me nice and shiny,” Crumpton says.
And it culminated when he soon strode into the stadium as a one-man, no-shirt, only-sandals-on-his-feet delegation, gingerly waving a metal flagpole (“I gripped it and thought, ‘Holy cow, that’s pretty freezing,’” he recalls) while proudly representing his Polynesian roots in a glistening tribute to Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua and other barechested Pacific Islander athletes.
