I attended my niece’s 2nd party party yesterday.  When I went over to my brother’s  home and they had the Olympics on.  Other than newscasts this was the first live Olympics coverage I had seen since the games began.  I was on a self imposed boycott of Olympics coverage.  I had begun to lose interest in the Olympics every since the “Dream Team” won their  basketball gold in the 1992 games.   The problem is that I am stuck in the 80′s.  I remember sitting in the television room of my dormitory at Penn. State University in 1980. I was cheering wildly as the undermanned, unknown and all amateur United States Hockey Team convinced me that miracles do happen.  At the time I did not realize that at least from a United States standpoint, the age of Olympic miracles would soon be coming to an end.  In 1989 the Olympic committee voted to allow professionals to compete.  Interestingly the United States voted against it.  That was the day at least for me that the Olympics stood still.

I have no idea whether the Winter Olympics were all about money and ratings in 1980.  I was to young and naive to care. I know they became a slave to politics later that same year.  I was even younger and more innocent in 1972 when the  world was riveted to their televisions watching the United States men’s basketball team take on the more experienced Soviet team. They took the Soviets to the wire in a wild controversial loss that almost caused the breakout of war.   What I do know is that after 1989  I began to  see professional athletes playing for countries they have not lived in for years. I began to watch athletes who make millions playing for pay turning the Olympics into the NBA/Europe summer league or the NHL/Europe Winter League while the “miracle makers” of the future sit at home and watch along with me.  I now put in my dvd of the 1980 Olympic Hockey team and reassure myself that at one time I was young enough to be deluded that it was about miracles and the hope that we could stick it to the Russians and other countries who had been using their professionals all along. I never cared that they were doing that because it meant so much more when we beat them. Do those rivalries even exist anymore?   Most people old enough to have watched the Winter Games in 1980 can recite the coach and many of the players on the 1980 hockey team.  How many people can name the coach and players on the last mens basketball  gold medal team in 1996?  Probably not as many who can name the Olympic Bomber.

There is no question that stories such as Michael Phelps are great Olympic feel good stories that makes us all feel patriotic although it is a different type of patriotic feel than the battle against the evil Soviet empire in 1980. Never underestimate the power of a good “cold war” to bring the masses together.  There are still sports in the Olympics that have not been distorted by million dollar mansions and Mazarattis. I hear Donald Trump has purchased the naming rights to the next Summer Olympics.