Olympic talk.

NEW YORK, JULY 19

Many years ago I wrote advocating that the Olympic Games abandon their insistence, progressively abandoned by competing athletes, on amateur standing. This view was arrived at not because the idea of amateur competition isn't appealing, but because the temptations to cheat overwhelm men and women born with Original Sin. The price we paid back then was especially galling inasmuch as the eyes of the world inevitably focused on Soviet and American athletes. As good Marxists, the Soviet leaders thought of success in sports as a revolutionary goal, to which end baby girls and boys were treated like geese prepared for p"te. We did okay, and of course other nations won individual events, but the Soviet Union regularly amassed the great pile of gold medals, which proved nothing much more than that if you train very young people to perform athletically, they will do so, if the natural material is there.

A subtle point arose, momentarily disquieting. The Olympic ideal, as fashioned when the competition resumed a hundred years ago, asked of the young athletes that they struggle to achieve glory for themselves, to be sure, but above all for their country. The Transylvanian athlete fought and won for the glory of Transylvania. What rankled, in the Soviet years, was the force-fed assumption that young athletes were joyously shedding their bloody sweat for the glory of the monstrous government that tyrannized them.

The paradox was made possible by a careful refinement of cultural lenses. You begin by accosting the unchallenged fact that soldiers tend to fight just as hard, just as courageously, for Adolf Hitler as for Winston Churchill. The kamikaze Japanese war pilots thought themselves fortunate to be chosen to glorify their Emperor and their religion.

Well then, why the surprise that an athlete, engrossed in his activity, proceeds to do his best irrespective of the political ends he is serving? But of course if that were entirely true --that the sponsoring country means nothing -- then the depoliticization of the Olympics would have been achieved.

Richard Grenier reminded us in these pages that what formally ended Olympian hypocrisy about amateur athletics was a scholarly book, The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics, published in 1984. Its author, David Young, is a classics scholar, and his research taught us that in the great Olympic days about which so much has been said in poetry and in song, contestants were professionally trained and demanded professional compensation. When the Games resumed in 1896 (the Olympics were banned by the Emperor Theodosius in 393 A.D.), so fixed was the idea of the amateur that one Princeton undergraduate petitioned Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Olympics' guiding light, for advice. He thought to enter the discus contest but acknowledged that he had just one time thrown an Olympic discus. Would Baron de Coubertin think it frivolous to compete under the circumstances? -- He won the gold medal.

The malcontents tell us that the Olympics is destroyed by the commercialization of the event. But one's eyes become inoculated to commercial aggressions. If the America's Cup contender can put up a spinnaker advertising Preparation-H, then why not permit the McDonaldization of the food concessions in Atlanta? And if Sports Illustrated is willing to pay $40 million to become the official program guide, what's wrong with that, if it was the highest bidder? It can be objected that obsession with a sport can ruin a life. We are given the forlorn vision of the runner one-thousandth of a second behind the winner, the one man lionized and a multi-millionaire at twenty, the other ignored.

But life is as it is. The young music student who applies himself for six hours every day to his art and somehow, for some reason, does not succeed -- how to shelter him? In sports there is the unique advantage: There can be a perfectly reasonable division of opinion as to who should be given the Tchaikovsky piano award. But there is no arguing with a stopwatch.

And finally there is the consoling liberty. Those who wish to do so can ignore the Olympic Games. The line being bandied about is: "Fifty per cent of the people of the world will watch the Olympics!" But another line creeps into the act, and gets quiet attention: "Fifty per cent of the people of the world will not watch the Olympics!"