Just What’s So Bad About What Went Wrong at Calgary?

It’s all over but the pouting.

With three hours of dead time suddenly on our hands every night, where once there was skating and skiing and warm TV vignettes about Olympic heroes and their dogs, we Americans will sit and ponder what went wrong with our kids at the Winter Olympics.

Why did our entire country get outmedaled by tiny Austrian villages and Nordic teams from Upper Lumbago?

Certainly we do not lack for spirit and enthusiasm, as typified by Paul Joseph Grant, the hockey fan from Paducah, Ky. When the U.S. team scored a goal against the Czechs in a televised game, Grant got so excited he accidentally shot himself through the hand with a .38-caliber pistol.

Biathlon scouts were dispatched to Paducah to find out if Grant can ski, too.

And certainly we do not accept losing meekly. When it became apparent that America’s Olympic effort was falling short, a la Eddie the Eagle, we called in the big gun. We appointed George Steinbrenner, the Human Chinook, as chairman of the commission to evaluate the effectiveness of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

This is like putting Bernard Goetz in charge of transportation hospitality.

Steinbrenner’s first suggestion, according to one rumor, was to send Billy Martin around to the various U.S. training venues to institute a Happy Hour.

Actually the situation isn’t as grim as it may seem. Television’s heavy coverage magnified the shortcomings of our Olympians. ABC carried 94 1/2 hours of the Calgary Games. Americans won six medals, two of them gold. That breaks down to one medal every 15 hours 54 minutes.

The obvious solution is to cut down the TV schedule. Next Olympics, if we trim the TV package down to one hour total, it will appear that our athletes are racking up medals at a terrific clip.

Also, it’s important to remember that our team’s performance wasn’t disappointing, since nobody anticipated that we would need a dump truck to cart home all the medals. Ours was the only team that set out for the Games waving banners that proclaimed “Calgary And/Or Bust!”

Still, Olympic contributors will want to know where their money went. Here’s one clue: We sent 166 athletes and 180 coaches to Calgary. Of those 180 coaches, 178 got outcoached.

How many people does it take to coach a bobsled team? A ski jumping team? Do we need a takeoff coach, a flight coach and a landing coach?

Our hockey team showed the right spirit, saving money by not hiring a defensive coordinator, but other events were obviously not as frugal. What and who the heck were all those coaches coaching? What would happen if next time we took more athletes than coaches?

Before we indict the American way of life for producing this bumper crop of Olympic failures, we should step back and look at the big picture. Critics love to point out that countries with populations smaller than that of Montana win more medals than we do.

They fail to note that a lot of Americans live in Las Vegas and Chattanooga and other places where a lot of the kids don’t naturally gravitate to bobsledding and speed skating.

The critics also fail to point out that the greatest American athletes go for the gold, literally. They go into professional sports. How many all-pro linebackers has Switzerland produced?

What if Michael Jordan had taken up figure skating instead of basketball? In your face with a quintuple-spin reverse salchow. What about Walter Payton as a slalom skier? Or Pete Rose in the luge, without a sled? Or Richard Petty driving the bobsled?

Let’s not forget that our losses were mostly narrow ones. Allow our U.S. contingent to trim a total of just one full second off the also-ran times, and we would have won about 19 more gold medals. The U.S. bobsledders missed a medal by .02 seconds, or was it .00002? That’s like losing a horse race by a nose pimple. We would have won the gold medal if the bobsled driver had stuck out his tongue.

Naturally, the Olympic people will get around to blaming it on us, pal, on you and me. We didn’t donate enough money. After being asked to bankroll the Summer Olympics and then the America’s Cup, we are leaned upon to give more to the Winter Olympics fund.

It’s as if America’s No. 1 problem is bad bobsledding. Isn’t the country going downhill fast enough? And have you ever seen a truly needy skier?

If some fund-raiser for the giant slalom or the midget biathlon comes to my door, I’ll tell him: “Look, we gave you George Steinbrenner. Isn’t that enough?”