Toward A Good Koss Norwegian Olympic Speed Skating Champion Working For Ideals; He’s Seen The Suffering

The temptation is to make too much of Johann Olav Koss. In a land overrun by baseball millionaires who won’t play, hockey players who’ve only recently started to skate and football players who reward themselves with Ferraris for interceptions, it’s hard to resist clapping on to Koss’ broad shoulders for a flight to clear Scandinavian air.

There’s much to clap on to. The Norwegian speed skater won three Olympic gold medals and smashed three world records a year ago in Lillehammer, then donated his $35,000 prize for one medal to Olympic Aid, a Norwegian organization that shipped sporting supplies to war-ravaged children around the globe.

Koss went a step further and headed up a post-Olympics drive to other used equipment from Norway’s young and ship it to Eritrea, having visited the African nation before the Games and having seen what 30 years of war can do to break a people and what a little joy can do to make them whole again.

“I trained 6, 8 hours a day to gain a few 10ths of a second,” said Koss. “They struggle every day for life. I saw what sport could do - the joy when they got a soccer ball.” So Koss auctioned his medal-winning skates to help raise money, then loaded 15 tons of balls and shirts and sweat pants in a chartered jet and flew to Africa to deliver it all in person.

By then he’d retired from speed skating a national hero and returned to studying medicine at Oslo University. But he took time off last summer to run the New York Marathon with a friend, Ketil Moe, who is battling cystic fibrosis. It took them 6-1/2 hours to run the 26 miles, with Koss bringing up the rear, rubbing his sick friend’s shoulders, prodding Moe, rallying the crowd to cheer.

So much to clap on to. Last month Sports Illustrated named Koss Sportsman of the Year; he’s in New York to receive the 15th Jesse Owens International Trophy as the “World’s Most Outstanding Athlete” this week. The last time he was here he spent a day helping at a soup kitchen - and was horrified by conditions there.

It would have been much easier for Koss to pat himself on the back, find an agent, settle into some soft career and watch the years go swiftly by. But Norwegians are made of stern stuff, and anyway he doesn’t care for agents and never has had one. “We are an idealistic people,” he said. For Koss, life’s achievements are yet to come.

“This has been an education for me,” said the 6-foot-2, 200-pound 26-year-old of his Olympic success and the global experiences it spawned. “To have known all this, I feel I must learn more and reach out and tell what I have seen.”

So Koss has allied himself as a special representative for sport with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and has been pushing officials of the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta to sponsor an “Olympic Truce” under which nations in armed conflict would halt war for the 16 days of the Games while UNICEF stepped in to immunize their young against disease.

How many wars would stop? “All, I suppose, is asking too much,” said Koss. “Today there are 96 military conflicts in the world, more than at any time since 1920,” the numbers tripping off his tongue in practiced cadence. “Some say we should be happy to stop one. I would like to stop 10 or 15.”

And while the forces of good are at work, he’d like to see Atlanta’s youth immunized too. “Did you know that only 30 to 40 percent of children in Georgia are immunized?” he asked.

The temptation is to make too much of Koss, a voice of reason and hope in the selfish whirlwind of bigtime sports. But he’s no hero. Ask him. He’s the recipient, not bearer, of blessings. Knowing what he knows, having seen what he’s seen, anyone would do the same, he says.

“If it would be possible for lots of athletes to have the same experiences, to go into the fields and see another part of life, they would realize more. To see it (war and hardship) in the newspaper, it’s easy to forget. To see it yourself, it’s not.”

Koss got his eye-opener in September 1993. His Olympic training was going poorly, he needed time off and when he was invited to make a trip to Eritrea for Olympic Aid, his coach said, “Go.”

“You go in an orphanage and see 20 kids in eight beds and you say, `What is this?”’ said Koss. “As an adult, you are surrounded by kids who have lost all contact with adults. You think, `What will happen to these kids if they get no attention, no education, if they can’t find their family?’

“I saw a boy of 10 waiting at the gate of an orphanage for his parents. He had been waiting five years. His mother was dead. His father was dead. He didn’t know. No one told him. And this happens everywhere, all the time, all over the world.

“If 100 kids died in an airplane crash,” said Koss, speaking to a half-dozen reporters gathered to interview him at his hotel suite, “it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. But 35,000 kids die every day in conflicts around the world and there is not one WORD.”

This week, Koss accepts the Jesse Owens International Trophy in person while a second prize, the Jesse Owens Global Award, goes to South Africa President Nelson Mandela, who will check in via video hookup.

They are not unlike, these two. But Koss, son of two doctors, rose to global prominence from middleclass comfort in one of the most civilized societies on earth, while Mandela sat in jail for decades before rising to liberate his own people and their captors.

In that context, the temptation is to make less of Johann Olav Koss, who has seen human suffering with his own two eyes and is doing his part to stop it with his own two hands. Isn’t that what any responsible human should do? Would do?