Starr Gazing: Raising Hall of Fame Standards

Olympics: You're Out!

I wrote last week about how the anti-American sentiments at the International Olympic Committee--not stemming from the war in Iraq, but from U.S. missteps in the Olympic movement--gave New York virtually no chance to win the 2012 Olympics. A lot of readers reflexively (and not at all reflectively) accused me of America-bashing. I wasn't. I was just reporting the truth. Now the IOC has put an exclamation point on it by booting baseball and softball, arguably the sports, along with basketball, most identifiable as American, from the Olympic Games starting in 2012.

Former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, writing in The New York Times this week, blamed the stunning rejection on steroids and arrogance. Major League Baseball never made a serious effort to accommodate the Games by sending its best players, at least in part because Olympic drug-testing was so much more stringent than MLB standards. Vincent regards the ouster as a grievous blow to the development of the international game and urges a power play by American officials to somehow reverse the decision.

But he is not exactly clear, in explaining and apportioning the blame, whether he regards the arrogance as theirs or ours. But if you want a clue as to why the IOC's distaste for us has become rather pronounced, just read Vincent's concluding message: "How can a serious argument be made that baseball and softball are not as popular as sports with deep Olympic roots like rifle-shooting, archery, sculling and Greco-Roman wrestling, whatever that is?"

Well, sir, "whatever that is" is a sport with connections millennia back to the ancient Greek Olympics. It has, at least within my memory, produced a pair of super heavyweight American heroes: Jeff Blatnick, who in 1984, two years after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, battled back to win the gold medal, and Rulon Gardner, who somersaulted his way into our hearts after beating the unbeatable Russian champion at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Neither wrestler made much money off his Herculean efforts. Neither shirked from drug tests. But raising the question at least clears up the matter of whose arrogance was responsible for this latest Olympic debacle.

© 2005