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To be an Olympian
?As the Vancouver Olympics built to their grand finale on Sunday afternoon, one of the recurring questions in the sporting press was whether, four years from now, when the sliders and skaters reconvene in Sochi, Russia, the men playing hockey will be the same NHL multi-millionaires who battled this week, or whether they’ll be replaced, once again, by a platoon of second-tier athletes. International Olympic Committee chair Jacques Rogge firmly supports the former scenario (with visions of plummeting TV contracts dancing in his head), but NHL boss Gary Bettman won’t commit himself. The Olympics already put a major brake on the momentum toward the playoffs, he argues, like a bobsled skidding to a stop halfway down the hill. If, instead of quickly jetting up to Vancouver, the boys of winter are obliged to fly for hours to a remote locale like Sochi (who among our readers can walk up to a globe and pinpoint the place?), the NHL schedule will take an even worse hit.
It’s not of course, a matter of professional versus amateur (if the NHLers don’t go in 2014, they’ll be replaced by lower-paid pros, not college kids). But the discussion in the press inevitably brought up the decades-old argument of whether it was better in the good old days, when a rigid “amateurs-only” standard was enforced for Olympic participants.
Get serious, folks. There were no “good old days”. Not in ancient Greece, not when the Olympics were revived late in the nineteenth century, certainly not when the Soviets and East Germans were winning everything in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Olympians might not have received paycheques as such, they were heavily subsidized in virtually every aspect of their day-to-day lives. They might not have been millionaires, but they certainly didn’t have to take a 9-to-5 to survive, either. Their life was their sport, just as it is for 90% of Olympians today.
Heck, the NHL boys weren’t even the highest-paid of the athletes in Vancouver. There was a feature on NBC which detailed the annual incomes of some of the participating players. Topping the list was the Flying Tomato, American snowboarder Shaun White, who apparently pulls in some eight million per year in endorsement money. Messrs. Crosby and Ovechkin might make close to that, but they’re slaves to a grueling 82-game schedule, and get beat up by opposing players every night. All the Tomato has to do is play on his private mountainside in the Rockies somewhere.
A legend like Romanian gymnast Nadia Comenici, the darling of the Montreal Olympics, despite her official “amateur” status, never had to work at a Bucharest McDonald’s, either. Maybe she didn’t blatantly wear logos like the Tomato does, but Nadia did just fine, thank you. All she had to do, for many years in a row, was train.
So even if we could go back, which we can’t, there’s no Olympic “amateur” fantasyland to go back to. And Mr. Bettman should know that far from distracting fans from the NHL grind, the Olympics invigorate their interest in it. For the rest of the season, the press will be asking if Ovechkin will get his revenge on Sid the Kid for bouncing him from the Olympics without a medal. And in Sochi (where Ovechkin has vowed to play no matter what Bettman says), you can bet your best pair of skates that Sid will be right there in the Athlete’s Village beside him.
