Henrietta Hay's Column

"At the time of the full moon of the month of Apollonius, in the year that we now reckon as 776 B.C. there was a great foot race in a meadow beside the river Alpheus at Olympia, and one Coroebus was the winner. He was crowned with a wreath of wild olive..." So says John Kieran in his book, "Story of the Olympic Games." That year the Greeks began to reckon time by the Olympiads, the four-year spans between the celebrations of the games. The race that Coreobus won was on a course approximately 200 yards long.

There was not a full moon, but there was everything else as the world watched the 25th modern Olympiad in Barcelona. This one had everything. In many ways it has succeeded the Barnum and Bailey circus as The Greatest Show on Earth. The opening and closing ceremonies were surely the most spectacular extravaganzas in the world. The dancing and the fireworks and the flow of colors were all beautiful. But it was the lighting of the Olympic torch with a flaming arrow that to me was absolute perfection. The ancient Greeks would have recognized a kindred spirit in that archer as he stood there with superb confidence and sent the Olympic flame into the air.

In addition to the finest athletes in the world, we have something the ancient Greeks did not have - television. There is some good and some bad to this. The advent of television has turned the Olympics into a major commercial venture and a showplace for commentators. As usual, the powers that be got carried away and chose to make it a TV spectacular with the emphasis on the talkers rather than the athletic events. They felt compelled to keep a running line of chatter through every second of the broadcast, telling us what we had just seen. Of course, they may be right. Maybe we are as dumb as they think we are. The effort to bring pure athletics into our homes with TripleCast was not a commercial success, possibly because of its high price. But wouldn't it be nice to watch a gymnastics event in which the announcer simply said, "Oops!" instead of, "She fell off the beam."

But also, thanks to TV, we get to know about the personalities of the athletes. We watch their agonies and their triumphs, and we have time to think about who they are and the paths they took to get to there.

In spite of all the pain and protests, the commercials and the chatter, it was wonderful to watch these wonderful athletes. These were men and women whose performances were so outstanding that you could only sit and marvel that the human body can be trained and controlled to do what they do.

Most of today's Olympians start as small children. When you take a child of 3 or 4 and start him/her on a rigid training regimen for the Olympics, the fun goes out of being a kid. Whether winning in the end makes up for a lost childhood only they will know, but I wonder what one unlucky fall might have done to Kim Zmeskal who was expected to win the gold. We all gasped when she tumbled off the beam and admired her courage when she came right back. But what was the emotional cost? Those child-woman gymnasts seemed more like automatons than girls. Anna Quindlen said that, "tying the ego of a child to a medal is like tying a rock around her neck and tossing her in the lake."

But there were so many wonderful moments. For some reason I found the swimming to be the most exciting this year. These were young adults who had trained for years, but who were mature enough to be having a good time. In 1988 I was fascinated by the skill and personality of the young, slender kid who was the team baby and mascot. Sixteen-year-old Janet Evans won three gold medals that year. Since then I have often wondered about her, what sort of woman she is becoming. We found out. A beautiful young woman of twenty, taller and heavier than in 1988, a student at Stanford, still a superb swimmer with the same dazzling smile.

And there was cynic Nelson Diebel's face softening as the national anthem was played, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee running the flag around the field, and Magic Johnson's exuberant smile and all the other brilliant moments. The old Greeks would have been proud. Look what they started.