37 Ways to Define U.S. Olympic Festival

As you might have seen advertised on billboards scattered throughout the Southland, the 1991 U.S. Olympic Festival is scheduled to begin one month from tonight with an opening ceremony at Dodger Stadium.

OK. So what is the U.S. Olympic Festival?

That is one of the most difficult questions the U.S. Olympic Committee faces in each year of the Festival from those unfamiliar with the event, which will be held this summer--July 12-21 in Los Angeles--for the 11th time since 1978.

The simplest answer is that it is competition held in non-Olympic years for U.S. athletes in many sports that are included in the Winter and Summer Olympics and Pan American Games.

Beyond that, the Olympic Festival has as many definitions as it does sports--37.

That is because each sport’s national governing body determines its own agenda for the Festival. What’s good for ice hockey may not be good for field hockey; what’s good for swimming may not be good for diving, and so on.

As a result, “We end up with a pleasant mix of elite, developmental and younger athletes,” USOC spokesman Mike Moran said. “That is exactly what it always has been, nothing less, nothing more. We’ve never tried to blow any smoke about what it is.”

Yet, the USOC each year is put in the position of defending itself against criticism, primarily in the press, that the Festival does not attract the best athletes.

USOC President Robert Helmick was so concerned during the 1990 Festival in Minneapolis-St. Paul that he appointed a task force to address the problem. After almost a year, the task force reported earlier this month that, essentially, there is no problem.

The perception, however, is likely to persist because of the low-profile approach that some high-profile sports take toward the Festival.

Officials from the national governing bodies for summer sports often refer to basketball, boxing, gymnastics, swimming and track as “the big five” because their athletes usually receive more time on television and better play in newspapers than athletes in other Olympic and Pan American Games sports.

As a result, champions in those five sports, such as Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton and Janet Evans, often become as widely known among sports fans as stars in professional sports.

But of those sports, only boxing requires that its elite, ready-for-prime-time athletes participate in the Festival. The first four boxers in the USA Amateur Boxing Federation’s rankings will compete in a two-day tournament at the Festival to determine teams for the Pan American Games in Havana, Cuba, Aug. 2-18, and the World Championships in Sydney, Australia, Nov. 13-25.

National governing bodies of the other major summer sports prefer to choose teams for other competitions from among veterans and send developing athletes to the Festival, although gymnastics and track and field give their national champions an option.

U.S. Swimming, Inc., for instance, will send its first team to the Pan Pacific Championships in Edmonton, Canada, Aug. 22-25, and its second team to the Pan American Games, splitting its third team--the older athletes competing in the World University Games in Sheffield, England, July 14-25 and the younger ones in the Festival.

USA Basketball will send teams consisting almost entirely of college upperclassmen to the World University Games and Pan American Games, inviting the previous season’s best high school seniors and college freshmen to the Festival. Several McDonald’s All-Americans, including 6-10 center Cherokee Parks of Marina High School, have accepted invitations this year.

The U.S. Gymnastics Federation will send its first team to the World Championships in Indianapolis Aug. 6-15 and its second team to the Pan American Games, but also has invited those athletes to the Festival.

The Athletics Congress, which governs track and field, will invite winners from the USA/Mobil outdoor championships this week in New York to attend the Festival and the Pan American Games but expects most to bypass those competitions to focus on the World Championships in Tokyo Aug. 24-Sept. 1.

“Scarce will be the person who crosses the finish line in New York and says, ‘Thank God, I just made the Festival team,’ ” TAC spokesman Pete Cava said.

But, shining the most positive light possible on the situation, Moran said that the more elite athletes who do not attend the Festival, the more opportunities there will be for the inexperienced to gain exposure to multisport competition and the national press.

Who knows who will emerge?

Although they might not have been as well recognized at the time, athletes who have competed in the Festival include basketball’s Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Joe Dumars, Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing; track and field’s Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner; swimming’s Rowdy Gaines and Sippy Woodhead; gymnastics’ Retton, Bart Conner and Peter Vidmar and baseball’s Will Clark and Danny Tartabull.

According to the USOC, 90% of U.S. athletes at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, participated at one time or another in the Festival.

That does not mean, as some officials of the local organizing committee have said, that 90% of the athletes in this year’s Festival will compete in 1992 at the Winter Games in Albertville, France, or the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

But a significant percentage will, particularly in sports such as archery, boxing, cycling, diving, fencing, field hockey, figure skating, judo, modern pentathlon, shooting, synchronized swimming, table tennis, tae kwon do, team handball, water polo and weightlifting.

The festival also will serve as the Olympic trials for ice hockey, but that will take place June 18-29 in St. Cloud, Minn., because the organizing committee could not afford 10 days of ice-time at the Forum or Sports Arena, the only two local facilities acceptable to USA Hockey.

In other sports, the 1991 Festival is one of the first stops on the road to the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, or the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

Whether Los Angeles will support such an event as enthusiastically as cities such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, Oklahoma City, Okla., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., did in recent years remains to be seen.

“L.A. is a more discriminating sports town than any other that has ever held the Festival,” Moran said.

Pitching for it, Jan Palchikoff, the local organizing committee’s vice president for operations, said: “The Festival might not always have the very best athletes in all the sports, but it’s still fantastic competition. It’s like going to see a concert. You might not have heard of the conductor or any of the performers, but the music is still beautiful.”