CHARIOTS OF GOLD

Press, 14 August 1984, Page 21

CHARIOTS OF GOLD

Will Olympics be the same again?

HUGH McILVANNEY, the London “Observer” sports writer of the year in Britain, sees the marketing of Carl Lewis (right) as symbolising irrevocable changes in the Olympic Games and how we gauge our sporting heroes in future.

Cancel the Chariots of Fire and send in the Securicor vans. At the Los Angeles Games of the XXIII Olympiad of the modem era there were times when it seemed that what gold medals symbolised more than anything else was gold. Carl Lewis is a sprinter and long-jumper who looks and performs like a god, but the small, slightly hunched man in heavy glasses who appeared so frequently at his side tended to talk like a Wall Street analyst. Joe Douglas happens to have a legitimate athletics background as coach to the Santa Monica Track Club on the California coast, but it is as Carl Lewis’s manager that he is contributing to a revolution which may, before it is over, see the final, irrevocable absorption of sport’s major events and figures into the entertainment industry.

That merging of values has, of course, been under way for some time, and bringing the Olympics of 1984 to the City of the Angels, where the yellow pages list 70 columns of churches but Mammon will always have an edge, was calculated to accelerate the process. Yet it was still possible to be shaken by the terms in which Mr Douglas discussed the future that would open up for his client once the little formality of winning four gold medals had been completed. His phrases were occasionally peculiar but the message was clear enough: “We have had offers from various companies and corporations but we have not accepted any of these yet because, from a business standpoint, the visibility Carl receives during the Olympic Games can enhance his value to the companies, and we hope they will realise this at that time. “I feel that anybody at the apex of their particular field in entertainment should be worth as much as anyone else. I have frequently used the Michael Jackson analogy and I hope he is worth as much as Michael Jackson.”

The only notable jumping Michael Jackson does is upwards in the pop charts, but he and his group do nave a distinctly marketable visibility. If Carl Lewis can match it after being on four renderings of the Star Spangled Banner at the local Coliseum we may be sure that sport will never be the same again. Obviously there is nothing re-

motely new in using the Games to launch high-earning careers. Even' while the modern Olympic movement was still presenting itself unconvincingly as a guardian of the Corinthian spirit — long before the advent of what the great hurdler Ed Moses calls “enlightened amateurism,” an interesting creed which holds that being paid huge sums of money does not make you a professional — boxers in particular were in the habit of moving smoothly from the medallist’s podium into contracts worth big money. Floyd Patterson, Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and Leon Spinks all went on from success at the Olympics to become heavyweight champions of the World. Also, it was Sugar Ray Leonard’s flaunting of his virtuosity at the Montreal Games that laid the foundation of the brilliant welterweight’s drawing power as a paid fighter, an appeal so spectacular that he grossed $l3 million for one contest and accumulated substantially more than $3O million in purses before he retired. In Los Angeles, another welterweight, Mark Breland, an almost freakishly elongated 21-year-old from Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, a black ghetto where a man has to be tough just to open his front door in the morning, was being touted as someone who could earn on the same scale. But since Breland went to Los Angeles with

a record of 104 victories against a single defeat — the most phenomenal figures top-class amateur boxing has ever known — he would have been wooed to turn professional whether or not he had participated in the Games, as indeed would Ali, Leonard, and the others. The same goes for the clutch of college basketball stars who swept aside all opposition here on behalf of the United States and then began to negotiate personal deals with professional clubs that will each be worth several million dollars. All that represents fairly standard evolution of careers in sports where there is a long tradition of performers making fortunes from their talents. What is happening with Carl Lewis is categorically different and infinitely more significant. And it cannot be seen simply as the extreme example of the new affluence that has spread among track and field athletes since the international bodies, who are the arbiters of amateurism, agreed that performance fees could be paid through trust funds. Joe Douglas’s comparison with Michael Jackson is the key. In the context of his plans for packaging and merchandising Lewis it is reckoned that taking only one gold medal instead of making the clean sweep of the 100 and 200 metres sprints and the long jump, and

claiming a fourth medal from the 4 x 100 metres relay, would have involved the loss of as much as $lO million.

There was a time, when the most that even a gloriously gifted runner and jumper such as Lewis, was likely to take out of his triumphs in the arena was the status of a hero. It was nice, but it didn’t carry a lot of weight at the bank, which was why the late Jesse Owens, who dominated the Berlin Olympics of 1936 by winning the same four medals as Lewis captured, found himself racing against horses to pay the rent. Nobody is entitled to object when Mr Douglas seeks to make his man a marketable commodity as well. The trouble is that in doing so he may have to recognise that in America today being a hero matters less than being a celebrity. Ask the people who have been so thrilled by the sight of John DeLorean, currently on trial for conspiring to distribute 2201 b of cocaine, that they have applauded him down the steps of the Federal court house opposite Los Angeles City Hall. In these parts they don’t strain between themselves to distinguish between notoriety and fame. Of course, Carl Lewis enjoys the most wholesome kind of fame and to be among the 750 newspaper, radio and television reporters who

assembled in front of him for the biggest mass interview in the history of the Olympics was to be readily convinced that it can only increase. He was unforgettably impressive. Clad in a shiny red singlet and blue jeans, he emanated a sense of pleasure in his own physical well being so profound that it seemed to fill half an acre of conference room. The clearness of his eyes is striking at a range of 60ft and his smile is a dazzling declaration of a confidence that never comes across as feigned. His handling of questions as he sat alongside his dignified, quietly admiring parents and his sister Carol, one of the favourites in the women’s long jump, was witty, alert, and entirely controlled. Much is indefensible about the modem Olympics — a distortion of Baron de Coubertin’s dream, an idea whose time has gone. Ron Pickering, a British athletics official and former Olympic coach, wrote recently: “Virtue, like vice, is nowadays very much in the eye of the beholder, unrelated to rules, but at the moment the vices are winning out and sadly it may well be our particular generation that loses the ideal of sport being a sanctuary that we should jealously guard for the next generation. "Anyone like me who has gained so much from sport would surely want to protect it, but how? In our

heart of hearts we all know the difference between right and wrong, whatever the mitigating circumstances, yet our sport flounders on a wide range of moral issues. Serious political intrusion, addiction to drugs, violence, total disregard of existing rules, cheating, cant, hyprocrisy, and total acceptance of double standards is merely an abbreviated list of our ailments.”

Several of those afflictions are magnified at the Olympics. My own first-hand experience of the Games as a reporter goes back only as far as 1968 in Mexico City, but it is so shadowed by bleak memories that I can hardly believe the whole circus was set up here once again under the tattered pretence that the old ideal survives in good health. From Mexico I remember — even more clearly than the superb hurdling of David Hemery or the breathtaking long jump that gave Bob Beamon a record which still stands, or even the black power demonstration of the American sprinters — the chillingly orchestrated slaughter of dissenting students in a public square shortly before the Games began. It would be grotesque to blame the Olympics for such barbarism, but on their present gargantuan scale they are always at least as likely to be visited by disaster as by the joy they were meant to

create. And when Arab terrorists seized and killed 11 Israelis at the 1972 Games in Munich the horror was not diminished by the haste with which the ruling 1.0. C. President, Avery Brundage, who was 84 years old at the time but still a monster of blinkered vigour, organised a perfunctory memorial ceremony and then waved the show on. It was easier to understand the insularity of the many athletes whose concentration on the pursuit of medals was barely interrupted by the calamity, for they were young and had devoted years of their lives to preparation for those September days, but their selfobsession in the face of something that would have touched a stone will forever taint my impressions of what the Olympics have come to mean.

Theirs was an attitude not unconnected with the strange egomania that makes beautifully healthy young men and women bombard their systems with dangerous drugs to secure the improvement in performance that may bring fleeting glory. Now that anabolic steroids can be efficiently detected, human growth hormone has become the favoured means of building muscle at an artificial rate, in spite of warnings such as that delivered by Dr Joseph Fetto, assistant professor of sports medicine at New York University. “Taking growth hormone when it’s not medically necessary is serious business,” says Dr Fetto, “because you are fiddling with a very delicate chemical feedback mechanism, which may have very serious side effects.”

But there is no more immediate prospect of eradicating the drug problem than there is of curing the political ills that have seen the Olympics riven by boycotts in Montreal, in Moscow, and then in Los Angeles. On the issue of commercialisation the Olympic authorities are not in a position to complain too vehemently, because their own deal-makers set a pretty lively pace. ABC have just won an extraordinary auction for the rights to the 1988 winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, by contracting to pay $309 million, but in return for that extravagant fee (rights to these current Games cost ABC just $225 million) the organisers have agreed to stretch that event out over three week-ends. A similar willingness to fit in with prime viewing time in the United States may mean that the most exciting finals of the next summer Games in Seoul will be run off around breakfast time in Korea. The cost of exclusivity at Seoul

should be at least $% billion, but that should not worry ABC. By August of last year they had sold 430 million dollars worth of advertising time around their Los Angeles coverage, attracting $3O million from the McDonalds hamburger chain alone, $27 million from Coca-Cola and $2O million from each of two breweries. These big spenders are chipping in $l4 million a minute for the best spots. The avalanche of American medals has guaranteed good ratings, in contrast with the figures for the recent Winter Olympics, which were so bad that the network had to give customers rebates in the form of free commercials.

Already, the extension of the Calgary programme has intensified efforts to incorporate more sports in the Winter Games. Some people have even talked blithely of making indoor activities such as boxing an adjunct to the snow scene. Apparently they have not given much thought to the dubious pleasures of doing roadwork in the sort of temperatures that will be encountered in Alberta. Or perhaps they have and are not bothered. There is unmistakable evidence that boxing, beseiged as it is by swelling hostility from the medical profession, is increasingly considered an embarrassment by the 1.0. C. The decision to introduce headguards in the Olympic contests in Los Angeles was nothing more than a hopelessly ill-managed public relations exercise. Such protectors do nothing at all to diminish the risk of brain damage. “The only way they could do that,” says Ed Schuyler, the Associated Press ringside reporter, “would be if they were fitted inside the guys’ heads. ’ What the guards should do is reduce the incidence of cuts about the eyes, but that advantage was largely neutralised during the first week of competition by the practice of issuing the equipment haphazardly without any satisfactory check on how it fitted. The Americans, Canadians, and Puerto Ricans had their own taiior-made helmets, but others were lumbered with headguards that were likely to fly off like a boater in a gale or slide down over the eyes like a blindfold. Between those inconveniences and the ludicrous eccentricities of the judging, many a boxer must have wished he had missed the plane that took him to California. And enthusiasts on the sidelines were tempted to think that boxing’s removal from the Olympics would be a bearable hardship. The old game, they reckon, might be better off dead than misrepresented as it was in Los Angeles.