U.S. Olympic Festival : It’s More of the Same With a New Name

HOUSTON — The Goodwill Games are over. Ted Turner has come down off his soapbox, for the moment. World Cup fever, for those of you who had it, has abated. The legions of tap dancers from the Statue of Liberty celebration have packed up their sequins and gone home.

Now, just when it seemed safe to turn on the television again, the U.S. Olympic Festival begins.

What you are now hearing is the collective groan of Americans who have grown weary of multi-sport extravaganzas and can’t tell much difference between them. It’s all running together.

Didn’t we just have the World University Games, and the World Cup and the Global Cup Trials Zonal Challenge and the International Student Friendship Games and Spelling Bee?

When will it end?

Never, and it’s going to get worse. For anyone with enough money and enough media pull, international sports today is like one of those old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland movies--”Hey, kids, let’s put on a multi-sport international world-class competition and sell lots of commercial time to television.”

Tonight’s opening ceremonies of the Olympic Festival will start the cycle again. One thing, though, that the U.S. Olympic Committee can say is that its party has been going on longer than some of the upstarts. You may remember it as the National Sports Festival, which until this year was the name of this competition since its inception in 1978.

The festival has been going strong since then, held in various cities every non-Olympic year. This year, however, USOC officials upped the ante in the TV sport sweepstakes by adding the magic word, Olympic, to the title.

It is mostly a superficial change. This Olympic Festival will likely be what the Sports Festivals have been for eight years--a chance for athletes in 34 winter and summer Olympic sports to compete under Olympic-like conditions. The 10-day competition will have more than 3,000 athletes and will continue through Aug. 3.

In some sports, such as figure skating and basketball, the festival serves as a proving ground for young athletes lacking national and international experience--the Olympians of tomorrow. In others, such as diving and track and field, the festival offers an opportunity to hone skills already well developed.

As for television, the true measure of success of ventures such as this, ESPN is crossing its corporate fingers and hoping that the sports audience isn’t burned out on amateur sports competitions. With a commitment to about 37 hours of coverage, the cable sports network may be trying to gain prestige by proving that it can pull off a telecast that is a logistical nightmare.

Still, being known as “the network of the Olympic Festival” may not carry as much weight as ESPN would hope.

Among the major no-shows are hurdler Edwin Moses and figure skaters Tiffany Chin and Brian Boitano.

Despite the absence of those names, the festival will feature some outstanding athletes, especially in track and field. Carl Lewis, who lives in Houston, is scheduled to long jump and run a leg on a relay. World record-holder Evelyn Ashford will run the 100, and Jackie Joyner, who just set the world record in the heptathlon at the Goodwill Games, will compete.

The diving competition features Greg Louganis, a double Olympic gold medalist.

The festival competition for the swimmers and divers will serve as the U.S. team trials for the World Aquatics Championships in Spain, Aug. 15-24.

The boxing competition features the young national team. The United States won nine gold medals in boxing in the 1984 Games, and, as happens every Olympiad, the sport has to rebuild after its stars turn pro.

The Soviet boxers will join a contingent of Soviet cyclists and take part in exhibitions in conjunction with the festival. The boxing exhibition is scheduled for Aug. 2 and the cycling for July 29.

The visit of the Soviet athletes is one in a series of sports exchanges agreed to in the Accord of Mutual Understanding and Cooperation in Sport, signed by the USOC and the National Olympic Committee of the USSR Sept. 15.