COMMENTARY : In the Olympics, They Go for Gold--and the Green

In what could rank as one of her more truthful public statements in recent months, Tonya Harding admitted that when she thinks about the Olympics, she thinks more about dollar signs than medals.

While some purists may regard such an attitude as somewhere between disquieting and disgusting, you can hardly blame her. For Harding and other U.S. Olympians who haven’t yet struck it rich despite world-class athletic talents, Lillehammer is the chance they’ve been waiting for all their lives.

But as we settle in front of our TVs to watch 16 nights of Olympic elegance, some of us are put off by the notion that the Olympics is now squarely in the hands of professionals. Did you know that, for the first time, the U.S. Olympic Committee actually is going to pay our athletes $15,000 for a gold, $10,000 for a silver and $5,000 for a bronze? Michael Jordan wouldn’t walk across the street to earn such piddling sums, yet some people are horrified that the USOC could be so crass.

But in many cases, it’s not the $15,000 that Harding and others are dreaming of, it’s the chance to parlay a gold medal into millions of dollars from commercial endorsements and a celebrity career that awaits a charismatic returning hero. For many of our athletes, triumphing at the Olympics used to be an end in itself. Now it’s a means to the end.

We long for the days when our Olympic athletes competed not for money, but for the love of sport and the thrill of having that gold medal draped around their neck while the flag was raised and the Star Spangled Banner played.

We warmed to tales of the work and family sacrifices they made to bring home the gold, allowing us the vicarious thrill of sitting in the comfort of our living rooms feeling all goose-pimply, proud and patriotic.

And when our young men and women defeated athletes representing the Communist Bloc countries -- athletes that our media propaganda machine almost invariably portrayed as hard-eyed professionals -- that was even better, because it enabled us to feel smug and righteous. So what if we weren’t actually wearing the USA uniform ourselves? Weren’t we all teammates in showing off the superiority of that many-splendored thing known as The American Way?

Now, the USOC officially is endorsing prize money for medals and we have surrendered the higher moral ground, although the belief that we ever held it at the Olympics is mostly an illusion.

So, is this the end of Olympic amateurism? Are you kidding? The Olympics and amateurism have been divorced almost as long as Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher. As everyone who hasn’t buried their head in a sand dune knows, our -- and other -- Olympic athletes have been accepting money under the table for as long as your granddad’s hound dog has been accepting food. In lesser-known sports, such table scraps kept many an athlete’s career alive. In the glory sports, such feeding made the athletes fat and happy.

And what’s the matter with that? Forget the dictionary definitions of amateur and professional. Here on planet earth, the basic difference is that an amateur isn’t good enough at a particular task to be hired and paid, whereas a professional is. As kids, we played sports for the love of the game, but we weren’t good enough to be paid to play them, so we turned to other things to earn a living. In what hypocritical bible is it written that our best athletes only have the right to make the big money if they play a sport that has a major league or tour?

Money, in and of itself, is neither good nor evil. Like power, it’s all in the way you use it. Awarding prize money, or subsidizing an athlete via the federal government or a Fortune 500 company, does not pollute or debase the Olympics. Perhaps it takes away some of the romanticism, but most of that is in the eye of the spectator, not the athlete. Ask any of our former Olympic athletes in the so-called “minor” sports who trained while supporting themselves and a family on a part-time job: There is nothing romantic about starving.

In 1960 at Squaw Valley, Calif., and again in 1980 at Lake Placid, N.Y., the U.S. hockey team stunned the world by upsetting the favored Soviets and winning the gold medal. The 1960 team was an amateur bunch that the National Hockey League never coveted. The NHL in those days had only six franchises and Canadians, who manned it, regarded American players the way Americans of that era regarded goods made in Japan -- as third-rate.

In 1980, when the United States next won hockey gold, it did so because of the convenient dovetailing of several events. Happily, the caliber of American hockey had greatly improved, but also happily -- at least, for U.S. Olympic aspirations -- the NHL was only then beginning to take the ability of U.S. players seriously.

Also, the money NHL teams were offering rookies then was hardly astronomical. In today’s environment, do you think there is any way a defenseman like Ken Morrow, the backbone of the blue line on Herb Brooks’ team, would have resisted the Islanders blandishments until after the Olympics? No way. And without him, the U.S. almost certainly wouldn’t have won the gold medal.

This will be the last Olympics when college hockey players make up the U.S. team. Good. More than the outdated concept of amateurism, the essential idea behind the Olympics is timeless: To bring together the greatest athletes in the world, regardless of who and how much is getting paid. Anything that moves us in that direction is to be applauded. There is nothing evil, ugly or indecent about proving you are the best, and hoping to get rich for doing it. That, as much as anything, is The American Way.