Here Comes the Olympics, Now That the Thrill Is Gone

The Olympic torch passed through New York this weekend. Crowds of people cheered former Olympic gold medalist Bob Beamon, the 1968 long jump champion, as he raised his torch and ran through the streets of his native Queens. More than 100 other torch bearers, including Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, passed the torch to one another on the torch's 34-mile sweep through all five boroughs, ending in a Times Square celebration. I wish I could say I was as excited as I was about the Olympics the year Beamon won his gold. Mayor Bloomberg is putting a full court press to get the Olympics here for 2012, and I don't fault him for trying. There was a time when the idea of having the Olympics here in New York would indeed have been exciting but when it comes to the games themselves - the thrill is gone. Trying to pinpoint exactly when the Olympics lost its allure for me is easy. In 1992, in Barcelona, the U.S. "Dream Team" of professional basketball players mowed down the competition, and the Olympics were no longer about amateur sports competition. It was about real gold - money. Endorsements for athletic equipment and sporting goods became the lure rather the thrill of athletic achievement. Soon the professionals in tennis and hockey were competing. Remember the excitement of the 1980 U.S. hockey team beating the Russians in Moscow? That was an amateur team whose remarkable win inspired the recent movie "Miracle." It used to be that professional sports found their up-and-coming stars among the amateurs in the Olympics. Now they've just crowded them out of competition. It's been years since we had a really authentic and exciting summer Olympics. The most memorable in my opinion were the 1968 and the 1972 games. The '68 Olympics came in a year that was filled with turmoil. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Cold War; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated; the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago shook the country, and Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. The country was ready for a breather and even though the games took place in October, they were still called the summer games. After winning their medals in track, runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos donned black gloves, bowed their heads, and held up their fists in a Black Power salute during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. This was interpreted by the U.S. Olympic Committee to be a political statement that did not belong in the Olympics, and it booted the two sprinters from the team. Aside from the societal drama, the 1968 Olympics gave us high jumper Dick Fosbury, who introduced his "Fosbury Flop." No one had ever cleared the bar on one's back after a faster than normal run. Now, of course, every high jumper jumps like Fosbury, but we saw the revolution of the high jump in '68. Bob Beamon's long jump of 29 feet, 2 inches broke the previous record by more than 21 inches. That record held for another 22 years. The 1972 Olympics had its own stars, like swimmer Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals and the petite Russian Olga Korbut winning the hearts of Americans with her spectacular balance-beam gymnastics. It also had the enchanting Dave Wottle, who ran around the track wearing an old beaten golf cap. Wottle was fun to watch because he would hang back behind the other runners until the last minute and then put on a burst of speed that eventually won him a gold medal in the 800m event. Nevertheless, these athletes and their feats were overshadowed by the dramatic events that took place in the midst of the Olympics. There is absolutely nothing in the history of the games to match the horror of the 1972 games in Munich, when Arab terrorists held the Israeli contingent hostage. The world watched the massacre on live television as a rescue mission ended in a fiery gun battle that resulted in the deaths of the hostages. We heard television anchorman Jim McKay speak those awful words: "They're all gone." Three of the terrorists survived the shootout and were arrested by the Germans, but Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa jet demanding their release, and the Germans capitulated. It was widely rumored that the Munich operation was ordered by Yasser Arafat's organization, Al Fatah, but he has consistently denied this. The Black September organization, a military offshoot of the PLO, claimed responsibility for the massacre. Security has been extremely heavy for this year's games, due to take place in Athens. But would-be terrorists should bear in mind that all the 1972 terrorists and plotters were tracked down and assassinated by a Mossad operation called the "Wrath of God." I hope and pray that we'll be spared any similar terrorist activity when the Games open in Athens this August 13. More than likely, the only drama will involve who gets kicked off the teams as a result of drug testing. So wake me up when that week is over because I have minimal interest in watching millionaire athletes compete for more corporate dollars.