AS the flame ignites the final Olympics of the second millennium, it illuminates a sporting world apparently gone mad - the most southerly Winter Games ever, in a host city where palm trees grow in the snow, and where the yakuza, or gangsters, have struck a deal with local police: they will not be harassed provided they keep call-girl activity discreet.

The XVIIIth Olympiad, costliest ever, summer or winter, will launch new technology skis and skates, faster than any ever witnessed before. Yet the guardians of the flame, rulers of this world, decline to spend enough on research to exorcise the spectre of drugs, increasingly employed by those inclined to be less white than white.

At least 20% of hockey players from the NHL, making their debut here, regularly use banned medication to boost performance, according to a new survey, while Britain has in its medal-contending four-man bobsleigh team the controversial former track sprinter Lenny Paul. His lawyers successfully appealed against a positive steroid test - hushed up by the Sports Council - on the grounds that brakeman Paul ate contaminated beef, a verdict which has melted the fragile fabric of the anti-doping movement.

The advent of new sports (snowboarding, ice hockey for women, and curling for both sexes) presents Scotland with the realistic aspiration of Douglas Dryburgh and Kirsty Hay overturning the previously preposterous notion that Britain might claim any title. We have won only six winter golds, the last in 1984.

It is also a world in which Kenyans, who had never glimpsed snow two years ago, far less stood on skis, are now at home.

Amidst all of this, perhaps most improbable of all, Norwegians with a sense of humour. Pigs might fly, or wake up in your bed.

Bjoern Daehlie, the most successful cross-country skier in history (five Olympic and nine world golds, five overall World Cup titles, three Olympic silvers, four world championship silvers and two bronzes) is predictably an obsessive trainer.

Obsessive? When given a Hawaiian holiday, as reward for success in Albertville six years ago, he rose at dawn to go running. In training, over the past decade, he reckons to have logged 90,000 miles - the equivalent of almost four trips round the world - on skis, foot, and bike. Less predictably, he and his colleagues are Machiavellian practical jokers.

Team-mate Vegard Ulvang was presented with a live three-stone pig for a World Cup victory. He dumped it in Daehlie's bed while he slept. ''It squealed and grunted terribly,'' recalls Daehlie.

The pair then toured the hotel, inflicting their smelly bed-hopping pal on a succession of victims, including a team manager who ended up with trotter scratches on his chest and an implausible explanation for his wife.

Such extrovert behaviour is rare among obsessive athletes, but Daehlie has a further way of endearing himself to the media - home-made cherry brandy, which he serves to reporters after winning gold. He has a litre of some he prepared earlier, ready in Nagano, and for that journalists are truly thankful. It presents a far more palatable alternative to his professed favourite drink - the raw heart of a grouse, laced with vodka. It is good to see extrovert excess survive while some of the more outrageous exponents conform in pursuit of gold.

Snowboarding makes its debut against a backdrop of serious friction between its governing body ISF, and that of skiing, FIS.

Millions are at stake, with some authorities predicting that by 2000, some 40% of those heading for the slopes will do so with boards, not skis. Currently it is 8%.

Snowboarders, anarchists of the piste, resent the discipline imposed by the older, traditional federation, the only one recognised by the Olympic movement. The rebels are epitomised by Martin Freinademetz, a flamboyant Austrian who holds the world slalom and giant slalom board titles. He, and some of his ISF mates, showed up at ski events with placards saying: ''Bomb FIS headquarters.''

FIS wanted to ban all snowboarders from slopes worldwide, but when they grasped its exploding popularity, not to mention the money involved, they suddenly took an interest, and when Freinademetz realised Olympic gold, and more money, were at stake, he also kow-towed.

Gone is the gorilla suit in which he often competed, and the black and white leopard-patterned speed suit. Perhaps only his bleached eyebrows and goatee beard, contrasting starkly with his dark hair, will survive.

Speed skaters expect the record books to be rewritten with the slap skate, hinged at the toe and releasing the heel to allow a fuller stride with less friction. With them, European 1000m champion Nicky Gooch hopes to go one better than the silver which was stripped from him for impeding in Lillehammer four years ago.

Amid all the hype, however, it emerges that a Canadian and a German took out patents on slap skates more than a century ago. Yellowing sketches, dated 1894, were gathering dust until Dutch academics at Amsterdam University turned the idea into digital images. Obsessed with locomotion on ice, they poured tax guilders into the project, and more than a dozen stunning world records have been set on them during the past year.

It is amazing what you can get research money for. Try coverting Kenyan runners into cross-country skiers, an appropriate sequel to the Jamaican bobsleigh team which inspired the movie, Cool Runnings.

A shoe company has invested #150,000 in a Finnish project which has resulted in Kenya's first Winter Olympic entry. Neither Henry Bitok nor Philip Boit (cousin of former world No.2 800m runner Mike Boit), had ever seen snow when they arrived in Helsinki two years ago this week. It was minus 33, and within a week their toe nails had blackened with the cold and unaccustomed boots. Soon they were falling on just about every acre north of the Arctic Circle, and former navyman Bitok was describing the ''white mud'' to his daughter back home.

Now they have shuffle-on roles in the white circus.