Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201190080
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE WILSTEIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ALBERTVILLE, FRANCE LENGTH: Long
1992 OLYMPICS MARK TURNING POINT IN GLOBAL SPORTS
THE LAST TIME the Olympic Games were held there was still a Soviet Union and there were two Germanys. A lot has happened in the world since 1988, and it willhave an impact on the Albertville Winter Games.\ Snowstorms blow capriciously through the majestic French Alps, freak avalanches threaten the chic resorts, but there is one certainty about the Winter Olympics: The Soviet Union will not win the medals race.
Which is not to say that its struggling successor, the United Team - a.k.a. the Commonwealth of Independent States, a.k.a. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan - will be a pushover.
Count on Soviet, er, United Team athletes to take a large share of the golds and overall medals, just as they have at every Winter Games for three decades when the Olympics served as one of the battlegrounds in the Cold War. The U.S.S.R. finished no worse than second in every Winter Games since 1956.
A unified Germany should leap to the top this year if it can overcome dissension between its former rivals on the east and west sides of the now-destroyed Berlin Wall. At Calgary in 1988, East Germany finished second with 25 medals and West Germany was eighth with 8 medals. The Soviets that year won 29 medals.
The blending of East and West German athletes, coaches and development systems has not been without rancor. Some, such as Jutta Meuller, the coach of two-time figure skating gold medalist Katarina Witt, simply have been frozen out.
The United States, invigorated by a lean, mean Olympic money machine and recovering from U.S. Olympic Committee scandals and a shakeup in leadership, isn't quite ready to crash the German and United Team party. The U.S. team's most realistic hope is a rise from ninth place four years ago, when it won six medals, to third this year by exceeding its own record of 12 medals. America's best chances for golds are in figure skating and speedskating.
The former Soviet team remains a favorite in hockey, and will rack up plenty of medals in sports like the biathlon and cross-country skiing. Rather than accepting the medals under the hammer-and-sickle flag, the athletes will take them just as proudly under the five-ringed Olympic flag while the Olympic anthem plays in the background.
Bankrupt though their sports ministry may be, and bereft of support from their former Baltic brethren and other breakaway republics, the United Team still has enough talented athletes to compete for dominance at least through this year. After that, the republics will learn first-hand about laissez-faire sports, and no doubt search for a Peter Ueberrothnikov or George Mikhail Steinbrennerski to put together a marketing scheme to pay for developing athletes.
Whatever the former Soviet republics call themselves, this may be the last great stand for an empire that ruled international sports for most of the past three decades and used gold medals to promote its political philosophy, self-image and international stature.
The effect of the Soviet breakup on sports is likely to be much more evident on the playing fields and courts of the Summer Games in Barcelona. The new United Team may compete as one again in July and August, but athletes in the summer sports were much more dependent on help from the now defunct Gossport, the Soviet sports agency that once financed 23,000 athletes and 1,200 coaches.
These Olympics, then, in Albertville and Barcelona, mark a historic turning point as athletes gather in a world transformed so radically by peaceful and violent revolutions since last they gathered in Calgary and Seoul in 1988.
Imagine an Olympics free of politics, devoid of ideological clashes, where winning medals does not represent the superiority of one system over another, and all athletes - amateurs and professionals - are free to compete.
A century after a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, revived the ancient Greek idea of bringing warring nations together in peace through sports, and 68 years after the first Winter Games in the French town of Chamonix, the unimaginable is close to reality.
It is not, to be sure, quite there yet. Fighting still rages in Yugoslavia, the shape and destiny of the former Soviet republics is still uncertain, and other countries continue to cope with the changes unleashed by the collapse of communism.
Sports federations still quibble and maintain different rules about professionalism - skiers can race for money, NBA multimillionaires can play this summer, yet, absurdly, Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt can't skate for gold again because they tour in their own ice shows.
But if fans want to see most of the world's best athletes compete, nearly unfettered by political baggage, this year's Olympics are the places to watch.
New atlases and road maps, plus a fortune in francs, are the necessities at the most extravagant and far-flung Winter Games in history.
It will be tough enough figuring out whom the athletes represent - Is that skier from Croatia, Yugoslavia, Carrera or Rossignol? - and even tougher trying to get to the events.
These $740 million Games are strung out over 13 indoor and outdoor TV stage sets across 640 square miles in the French Alps because every bickering resort craved a piece of Olympic prestige and cash.
Ignoring the worldwide recession, the French are proceeding with pomp that would make Louis XIV proud, even if the locals have to eat bread for a decade to pay for the feast. Fears of a return of the "curse of Grenoble" - bills that took the French more than two decades to pay off - haunt these Games as the costs mount by the minute.
Freshly paved roads winding through the rugged mountains are prone to closure and traffic jams from snowstorms and avalanches. The only way to see all the sports is to buzz around with organizing committee co-president Jean-Claude Killy in his private helicopter or stay home and watch them on TV. A lot of fans, put off by the high prices and hassles of getting around, are choosing the latter, resulting in an embarrassingly high vacancy rate in hotels and an abundance of unsold tickets.
Not that the arenas and bleachers will be empty. More than half the seats at all the events will go to the 17,000 accredited athletes, officials, sponsors, advertisers and journalists, leaving the rest to tourists with the temerity to show up.
American fans shouldn't expect any miracles - certainly not another Miracle on Ice like the 1980 hockey triumph. The United States would need a total breakdown of both the former Soviet teams and the Germans even to come close to winning the medals race.
Four years ago, Americans seemed to be slipping all over the place - Dan Jansen, Debi Thomas, hockey players, skiers. The only golds went to Boitano and speed skater Bonnie Blair, who is back and favored to win again.
Boitano, still a spectacular skater, is likely to challenge the international figure skating federation's rules, either privately or in court, and return to competition in 1994 at the Games in Lillehammer, Norway. Until then, his absence will be deeply felt at the Olympics, where no other men's figure skater can match his blend of artistry and athleticism.
It was in the middle of the Calgary Games, when bad luck and poor preparation plagued the Americans, that the U.S. Olympic Committee panicked and turned to Steinbrenner, charging a committee headed by him with the task of boosting performances through fund raising and better organization. The resulting changes helped, though the USOC recently suffered through embarrassing conflict-of-interest scandals and changes of leadership. Now it is up to the athletes to show whether the changes will result in any improvement in the medals count.