Who Lost What Olympics?

Should the U.S. Winter Olympics team have done better at Innsbruck? Many a disappointed sports fan said so, for many a reason--perhaps none more strongly than the editorial writer for the New York Herald Tribune, who all but accused this country's athletes of being soft: "Even without forcing processes, rigid state discipline and special incentives, one would expect a better showing. It would seem that the late President Kennedy had a strong point in his alarm over the level of physical fitness among the youth of America."

That harsh judgment drew an immediate response from the Trib's columnist Walter Wellesley Smith. "In the first place," wrote Red Smith, "we did not 'lose the Olympics.' No nation, ever does, because the Games are not set up that way. They embrace a program of competitions among individuals and individual groups like hockey teams, not among national teams. In the events that interest American kids the United States athletes performed creditably. There was not a trace of evidence that any American kids were physically unfit. Indeed, we never had a ski team half so thoroughly prepared.

"Years of success in international competitions have given Americans delusions of grandeur where sports are concerned. We expect to win everything and are alarmed when we don't. We forget that in the Olympics it is America against all the other nations of the world, and that in many events we are trying to buck others at their own game. For example, these were the first Olympics to have racing on a small sled which the French called a luge, the Germans a rodel and the English a toboggan, which it isn't. Ours was a pickup team of utter greenhorns. It would have been preposterous to expect them to beat racers who have been riding these things since infancy.

"Self-appointed spokesmen in this country are curiously self-contradictory. They sneer at the Russians as professionals who traduce the Olympic ideal. Then, counting up the medals, they add, 'Maybe we ought to do the same thing.' We ought not to do the same thing. We have enough kids hired by colleges to play football or basketball or to run foot races."

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