
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 8, 1994                   TAG: 9403080178
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By ROBERT RENO
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CORPORATE CULTURE

THE DIFFERENCE between Olympic figure-skating, mud wrestling, cow-chip tossing and belly dancing in cheap dives is, let's see ... well, who would worry that their daughter's values were imperiled, her innocence threatened, if she came home and announced she was taking up cow-chip tossing?

Maybe this is unfair to mud wrestlers and belly dancers. Their sports, so long disdained and banned by the pious mandarins of the International Olympic Committee, have remained relatively pure and are yet to be invaded by the scourges of knee capping, steroid popping, excessive medal lust, gratuitous nationalism and licentious commercialism.

Anyway, Nancy Kerrigan was riding on a fire truck with Mickey Mouse at Disney World last week when a microphone caught her complaining.

``This is so corny,'' she said. ``This is so dumb. I hate it. This is the most corniest thing I've ever done.''

It makes you wonder what the poor girl thought she was getting into when she abandoned all hope for a normal adolescence and entered what has become the brutalized, money-driven world of modern Olympic competition. It also makes you wonder what it has done to her when you listened to the ungracious, not to say catty, things she had to say about Oksana Baiul, the penniless Ukrainian orphan who walked off with the gold medal that - if you listened to some of the media hype that led up to Lillehammer - had been personally struck with Nancy's name on it.

Someone must tell Miss Kerrigan that when you're raking in the kind of money she is and appearing in infantile soup commercials, having to ride on a fire engine isn't the end of the world. Any more of this whining from Nancy, and it's going to be a much closer race with Tonya Harding as to who is really the water buffalo of ladies' ice skating. Can anybody imagine Tonya complaining about riding on a fire engine? Which of the two more typifies what the Olympics have become?

The Lillehammer Olympics have accelerated the depressing process by which the games have become a corporate event. The medals have become mere chits to be cashed in with the sneaker and soft-drink companies, the television coverage so vapid that even the cloyingly moronic Dan Rather-Connie Chung commercial - the one about the guy in the pickup truck - was a blessed escape. This at least, you thought, was the real world, the genuine article, the sincere fatuity of television news personified by two of its richest stars just saying what was really in their heads, which was drivel.

It is sobering to think that under the rules that governed the modern Olympics through most of its existence, most of this year's U.S. medal winners would have been disqualified in disgrace for violations of the amateur code which until just a few years ago was thought to be sacred to the very spirit of the games. Maybe the amateur concept was hopelessly flawed. Maybe the idea that you can be as competitive as these people are on a high moral plain is simply anti-Darwinian. Maybe the modern games have merely been carried to their logical and rather horrifying conclusion.

Robert Reno writes for Newsday.

Times-Washington Post News Service

by CNB