Maybe there should be gold medal for whining
These Olympics may be remembered more for complaints than competition
COMMENTARY
SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 21 ? Circle Thursday, Feb. 21 on your calendar and make a notation on the date. It?s the day the real world collided with the Olympics and everybody lost.
THE SOUTH KOREANS are filing suit in U.S. District Court. The Russians have issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the IOC in a scene more reminiscent of 1962 than 2002. Wayne Gretzky said the world is out to get the Canadian hockey team. France says its figure skating judge is the object of a witch hunt. The Chinese are no doubt angry that they?re now a day late in joining the litigious fun. And the world is ticked that American fans have the gall to cheer American athletes.
Welcome to the 21st century, sports fans, when the world is at peace, when there is no Cold War and no Iron Curtain and no Berlin Wall, when England and France are connected by a tunnel and France and Germany and Italy share a common currency.
Oh, yeah, and when greed and pettiness and spite are thriving like mold in a bachelor?s refrigerator.
Calling Dr. Rogge! Dr. Jacque Rogge! Report to Emergency! Stat! Make that triple Stat!
Not since the boycotts by the U.S. and friends of the 1980 Moscow Games and the return boycott by the Soviet Union and its pals of the 1984 Los Angeles Games have the Olympics been in such danger. Never has a rookie IOC president faced a bigger and more daunting task than the one dumped on the desk of Rogge Thursday.
The Russians are leaving! The Russians are leaving!
The Koreans are suing! The Koreans are suing!
And the bars in this city ? if you can find one ? close at 1 a.m.!
Little more than a week ago, many of us thought that Rogge had etched his name in history by demanding redress in pairs figure skating when it was demonstrated that at least one judge?s vote was influenced. Few of us suspected what would follow, mostly because we had the childlike naivete to believe that adults who have sworn to conduct themselves as sportsmen would conduct themselves, if not with complete dignity, at least with a grain of common sense.
In solving one problem, Rogge opened the floodgates to every country with a bone to pick, an axe to grind, or a quibble, beef, argument, disagreement, or protest about officials. Russia is angry at the hockey refs, the figure skating union, and the drug testers who had the nerve to take the blood of one of its cross-country skiers before a competition and disqualify her because it had more hemoglobin than the human body is capable of producing without help.
The doctor did not immediately respond, at least not publically. He sent Francois Carrard, the IOC?s director general, to face the media and tell them, in effect, that his was just another day in paradise. The Russian protests were referred to the appropriate sports federations, and nothing would change.
Carrard, a suave and unflappable man, said the figure skating decision had nothing to do with the current outburst of dissatisfaction. He had faith in the Russian commitment to the Olympics, adding that, ?We think the games are great games going fantastically well. There are a lot of emotions. We understand these emotions do create certain situations.?
He gave the impression there was nothing to worry about, either from Russians or Koreans or anyone else. As impressions go, it was better than Billy Crystal?s rendition of Howard Cosell. Whether his show of confidence is warranted remains to be seen.
The Russians aren?t protesting the test result. They?re protesting that the athlete was tested. You can draw your own conclusions, but I?ll just add this: The disqualification left the Russians without a full team in the relay event, which also happened to be an event they expected a gold medal in. And it just so happens that Russia is not doing as well as expected at these Games, and the fans back home are less than gruntled.
What choice did they have, what with all those nasty reporters asking them about the team?s relative failure? They could blame themselves or blame the judges and the American conspiracy to keep everyone but its very best friends and allies from winning anything. The first option was the brave and right action. The second was the coward?s way out, and the Russians jumped at it in a heartbeat.
They gave Rogge 24 hours to address the problem. If he didn?t, they would leave the Games and probably wouldn?t show up in Athens two years hence.
The Koreans didn?t threaten to leave over their dissatisfaction with not having won a gold medal in short-track speed skating. They did say they?re filing suit in U.S. District Court and they may boycott the Closing Ceremonies. And Korean fans, good sportsmen all, spammed the USOC computer until it crashed, and sent death threats to American skater Apolo Anton Ohno, as well as what I must presume was a long list of imagined enemies. I presume it is a long list because I just mentioned the name of a Korean skater in a column I did on Ohno?s first race, and did not suggest he did anything wrong, and I got a screen full of death threats, too.
In light of these protests, Wayne Gretzky?s recent recitation of the wrongs visited on his Team Canada hockey team seem at once both insignificant and terribly mis-timed. Insignificant because they were meant to rally his troops. Mis-timed because they are another log on a fire that is blazing hotter than an active volcano.
This isn?t sport, but I think you?ve probably noticed that on your own by now. We have national delegations trying to get what they think is theirs, but in the process they?re ripping gaping holes in the credibility of the Olympics themselves.
I?d ask them what they think this is doing to the psyche of the fans, whose tolerance for this sort of garbage is thinner than a hobo?s socks. You don?t have to kill the Olympics, fellows, because you?re killing the audience, and without them, you?ve got no games and no forum to posture and pout and whine and roar and threaten.
But if this is the way it?s going to be, I?m all for the U.S. pulling out of the 1972 Olympics effective immediately in protest over the bad refereeing in the gold medal basketball game. And I?m advising Canada to pull out of the 1988 games because the IOC had the audacity not just to test Ben Johnson for drugs after he set a world record in the 100 meters, but also to find drugs in his urine and disqualify him. Everybody should pull out of any Olympics in which the old East German steroid-factory teams competed on the grounds that we now know they cheated. Great Britain should pull out because no one?s come up with a sport yet other than curling at which they can win a medal.
Or, alternatively, let?s just give every athlete a gold medal when he or she checks into the athlete?s village, and let?s instruct the judges to give everybody perfect scores in everything, and let?s fix the timing clocks so that everyone, no matter how fast or how slow, finishes in the same time.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a book about things such as these. It?s called ?Welcome to the Monkey House.? If he wrote it today, he could call it, ?Welcome to the Olympics? and it would mean the same thing.
