Commercialized Games Still Exciting

Would-be purists can’t stand this year’s summer Olympics, which mark the end of amateurism in the contests and the beginning of unabashed professionalism.

Traditionalists say the games should extol the virtues of endless work, fierce discipline, Spartan self-abnegation and poverty. Their ideal champion strolls out of the fields penniless and returns home with a gold medal, an empty wallet and a few foreign friends.

But here’s a news flash: Excellence costs money, now more than ever. The Olympic Games have become a megabucks spectacle because the couch potatoes of the world will pay lots of money to see the youngsters go farther, higher and faster.

NBC will commit nearly 200 hours this month to Olympic coverage. Commercials alone will gobble up more than a full day’s worth of air time. The Atlanta Olympic Organizing Committee has set aside $1.7 billion for a fete that will last barely more than a fortnight. (Note to Ross Perot: This sum exceeds what Americans have spent on all political races since 1980.)

But nobody will go broke. Olympic sponsors expect more than 1.4 million visitors to this year’s affair and have sold 11 million tickets for events in 30 major sports. More than 11,000 athletes will compete in everything from traditional track-and-field events to more marginal stuff, such as beach volleyball, mountain biking and rhythmic gymnastics (one of five sports in which the United States has never won a gold medal, the other four being baseball, badminton, table tennis and team handball).

Think about how nutty someone must be to do this. Atlanta in the summer is like living in a steam bath. Dozens of spectators fainted during the U.S. Olympic trials in June. Imagine what will happen this month, when the heart of Dixie gets truly hot.

Yet, that hasn’t stopped the flood. Local merchants have sold accommodations to the highest bidder. Al Joyner, a former gold medalist and coach of his sister, heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, says one hotel in the city raised its rates from an off-season low of $59 per night to more than $450.

While hoteliers get rich, athletes get a few doubloons of their own. Under the terms of a program dubbed “Operation Gold,” the United States Olympic committee will pay each American who finishes in the top four of an event. A gold medal will bring home an extra $15,000, a silver medal nets $10,000, bronze commands a $7,500 bounty, and a fourth-place finish carries a $5,000 reward. Some sports organizations sweeten the pot. Swimmers get an extra $50,000 for winning; basketball players get $100,000 just for showing up.

This may not seem impressive, considering the fact that most National Basketball Association teams now carry payrolls roughly equivalent to the U.S. defense budget. But the sudden outlay of cash increases the pool of potential competitors and helps propel victors to even greater heights.

Think of the Olympiad as a capitalist fable, then. It features the tackiest forms of commerce, beginning with Izzy, the idiotic mascot for these games, and continuing on to the ubiquitous advertising for the contests. One can’t even log on to the Internet without being accosted by somebody vending some Olympic goodie or other.

But commerce begets new ventures from people who want a piece of the action. Get a load of some sports that have acquired official recognition by the International Olympic Committee, the first step toward making it into the games: aerobatics, ballroom dancing, lawn bowling, hang gliding, kortball, orienteering and surfing. How far off can Olympic bungee jumping be?

The games also highlight the limits of greed. Nobody will undergo the tortures necessary for a championship just for chump change. People who win medals train maniacally. They display a devotion few kids or adults can muster. They surrender experience in the larger world in order to pursue a calling - a special brand of perfection.

We learn two things from watching them. One is that such excellence carries a high price. Some people who look godlike on the field of competition turn out to be lamentable dopes. Remember how disappointing it was to hear Mark Spitz or Nancy Kerrigan talk?

But the more important lesson is that excellence is possible. Athletes deserve their glory because they have become the very best in a large and voraciously competitive world. Complain all you want about the money, the trinkets, the endorsement contracts. These folks have earned it - and I, for one, will gladly contribute to their cause by moldering in front of a television and saying: “Wow.”

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