This backdrop of seemingly intractable wars could easily dishearten anyone who has ever bought into the notion that the Olympic Games really can further the cause of peace. But idealists shouldn't despair. On the snowy pistes and klieg-lit venues, the 2,500 athletes will carry on a far less ambitious but more practical sort of peace movement. U.S. hockey player Brett Hull will pal around with Russian hockey star Sergei Federov. They are, after all, both players for the Detroit Red Wings in their non-Olympic lives. A man on the French biathlon team will hold hands with a woman on the Norwegian biathlon team. (It's OK. They're married. To each other.) And Iranian skiers promise to live peaceably in the same Olympic Village as Israeli skaters.

The International Olympic Committee's goal of a worldwide truce during games does sound a bit unrealistic, admits Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. But, he adds, "as any athlete will tell you, nothing happens without a dream." In the meantime, he'll settle for whatever the athletes can do. "The bringing together of thousands of athletes from every country, race, religion, and culture for an Olympic competition is already a victory for peace," Annan tells U.S. News.

It was the organizers of the ancient games at Olympia, known as the Elians, who first placed peacemaking expectations on the festival. Some ancient texts say all Greeks laid down their weapons during their sacred games. Modern historians call that absurd. The long-ago Olympic truce, they say, simply ensured safe passage for those traveling to and from the games. That is still a remarkable achievement. The safe-passage pact was generally well enforced (with fines, mostly) throughout 1,200 years of nearly constant warfare. And it spanned the Greek Empire, which at its peak stretched from Egypt to India. The Olympiad, and its truce, ended in the fourth century. Earthquakes and floods soon covered Olympia with silt.

Fifteen hundred years later, a French physical fitness buff became fascinated with reports from archaeologists in Greece who had begun uncovering Olympia. Soon, Baron Pierre de Coubertin became obsessed with resurrecting the Olympic Games. After several years of speechifying, he persuaded Athens to host the first modern Olympiad, in 1896. De Coubertin designed the modern games around pie-in-the-sky ideals. Only amateurs could compete. No prizes of value would be awarded. The games would be played purely for love of sport. "The goal of Olympism," he explained, "is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society."

Pumped up. Grubby financial reality has since forced the Olympics to turn both professional and commercial. The greed of Olympic officials who accepted "gifts" in return for votes for Salt Lake City's bid to host the '02 games has raised further doubts about the organization's idealism. And it didn't take long for politicians like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin to turn de Coubertin's games into a field on which to pursue war by other means. Recently released Stasi files show how East Germany pumped its athletes full of steroids to boost the medal count and prove the superiority of communism. Ice skaters, among others, have long complained that too many judges vote by politics rather than merit.

In one case, athletes even started a brawl that echoed a real war. In 1956, just days after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian rebellion, Hungary's water polo team jumped into a pool in Melbourne, Australia, to take on the Soviets. One Hungarian athlete, Ervin Zador, remembers how he felt about the Soviets: "They had bombed Hungary. People were dying. I hated them." As soon as the Hungarians hit the water, they began taunting the Soviets, hoping to make them mad and sloppy. "We said what we would do to their mothers." It worked all too well. Hungary pulled ahead 4-0. The Soviets started a brawl. One viciously sucker-punched Zador. Dazed, he bled in the pool. Outraged Hungarian émigrés in the stands became so threatening that the referees called the game. Hungary took the gold. And several players, including Zador, defected.

In the worst threat of all to Olympic dreams of peace, terrorists began targeting the games. The Palestinian terrorists who attacked the Munich games in 1972, killing 11 Israeli athletes and officials, explained why they wanted to turn games devoted to peace into a killing ground. "Sport is the modern religion of the world," they said in a statement. "So we decided to use the Olympics, the most sacred ceremony of this religion, to make the world pay attention to us."

In the bloodiest century in human history, the modern games didn't stop any wars. (In fact, the world wars canceled three Olympiads.) But time and again, the most realistic of de Coubertin's hopes has been made real. Individual athletes have nudged the world a little closer to the brink of peace.

As tense as the world seems now, Bob Richards says conditions were far more worrisome when he went to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics as a pole-vaulter. "American soldiers were dying fighting communism in North Korea. Stalin was killing people left and right. And Russia was saying it would beat the hell out of America" at the games. The Soviets were so paranoid they locked their athletes up in a separate Olympic village. Nevertheless, Richards, an ordained minister nicknamed "the Vaulting Vicar," decided to be friendly. He would shout his one word of Russian, khorosho! ("good!") after Soviet practice jumps. They soon responded to his jumps with "boo-tee-ful," he recalls. After his gold medal leap, Richards ran down the field in glee. One of his Soviet counterparts ran up and wrapped him in a bear hug. Photographers sent images of that heartwarming scene around the world. Richards used his newfound celebrity to arrange dual track meets. There was no dramatic diplomatic breakthrough, but many such small raisings of the Iron Curtain led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. "How do you know what one gesture of goodwill does?" Richards marvels from his home in Waco, Texas.

Attempts to use Olympic bans and boycotts to further peace have had a mixed record. The Soviet Union didn't slow its war in Afghanistan because of Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 summer games. And there is still debate in South Africa over whether sports sanctions really helped end apartheid. But there is no doubt that a friendly gesture helped salve racial tensions.

Holding hands. In 1992, South Africa returned to the Olympics with its first racially mixed team. Elana Meyer, who is white, finished a close second to Ethiopian Derartu Tulu, who is black, in the 10,000-meter finals. At the tape, Tulu, the winner, grabbed her country's flag and Meyer's hand. Meyer wrapped herself in a five-ringed Olympic flag that South Africa had temporarily adopted as a politically neutral symbol. The two ran a victory lap hand in hand. The Barcelona crowd stood, cheered, and wept. "It was amazing to get on the track and think, 'Now! Now! It's for all of South Africa,' " Meyer said after the race. When she returned home, blacks and whites cheered her equally.

On the larger stage, Olympic officials have become more ambitious. In 1992, then International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch called for a modern version of the ancient Olympic truce: a cease to all fighting during the games. The truce movement has won some big-name diplomatic supporters, such as the U.N.'s Annan. Unsurprisingly, presidents and generals have been less enthusiastic. President Bush refused IOC President Jacques Rogge's call for an Olympic truce this year. The United States agreed only to sponsor a U.N. resolution calling for a safe-passage truce during the Salt Lake City games.

Athletes, meanwhile, continue to make small but important gestures. In 1996, Burundi pulled its attention away from the region's continuing tribal massacres and sent its first team to the Olympics. Venuste Niyongabo entered the 5,000-meter race even though he'd only run it twice before–and, amazingly, won. He dedicated his medal "to peace." Inspired by experiences in the Olympic Village, where the team saw people from all countries dining, dancing, and playing together, Dieudonne Kwizera, a fellow Burundian runner, tried to bring the Olympic spirit home. Last month, he helped mount a peace walk through the capital city. "Five thousand people. Women, men, young kids, Hutus, Tutsis," Kwizera said. "It shows sports can unite people."

A world just recovering from a devastating terrorist attack could sure use some uniting. So millions will look to athletes, once again, for examples of peaceful coexistence and gestures of friendship.

It is impossible to predict where the next gesture will come from, but the eyes of the world can't help turning to the few Muslims competing in Salt Lake City. Iran, which the State Department views as one of the world's worst supporters of terrorism, plans to send a ski team. Eisa Shemshaki, like many of his compatriots, considers Israel a "pariah" because of its conflict with Palestinians. Still, he plans to march in the opening ceremony just a few feet away from the Israeli team. (Teams march in alphabetical order.) And he is optimistic about the Olympic ideal. At the opening ceremony, he plans to set his eyes upon the five-ringed Olympic flag "and spend that special moment thinking about friendship and unity with the athletes."

Romantic drive. The Olympic peace movement will continue after Salt Lake. Officials are already looking ahead to the Athens summer games. In the drive for a global Olympic truce in the summer of 2004, the Athens-based International Olympic Truce Center has persuaded the foreign ministers of longtime rivals Greece and Turkey to sign a truce petition (as individuals, not as government officials, however). Stavros Lambrinidis, director of the center, is now taking the petition to athletes, performers, and politicians to garner further support. "It may sound crazy and romantic, but you have to be romantic about this," he says. "Cynicism won't get anything done."

Dreamers often don't get anything done either. No event reveals the limits–and the small but powerful promise–of Olympic peacemaking more than the 1984 winter games in Sarajevo. Adnan Dizdar, a onetime captain of the Yugoslav national handball team, remembers how wonderful his city looked and felt that year. The government had fixed things up. All the locals "tried to do their utmost to make Sarajevo a great place to be. Those were happy times, before anyone cared about who was what religion or nationality," the 50-year-old surgeon recalls.

Olympic goodwill didn't last in Sarajevo. Seven years later, ethnic civil war broke out. But Dizdar credits sport for preserving his hope for peace. With the war now over and the ruined city on the mend, Dizdar occasionally runs into athletes he played with. "Sometimes," he says wistfully, "we are of different nationalities, and our relationship remains the same. That shows we can move forward. That's when I'm the happiest."

Perhaps the official hype around the Olympic peace movement does the games a disservice. When lofty plans fail, it is too easy to dismiss the Olympics as nothing more than a bunch of athletic contests. But by enabling athletes to forge cross-border friendships, the games become much more than that. And because they are games played on a world stage, they teach us how powerful one person's gesture of goodwill–a khorosho, an outstretched hand, a shared meal–can be.

With Don L. Boroughs in South Africa and Alex Todorovic in Yugoslavia