Hero in the Dock

Some time before the Winter Olympics, Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, accosted Colonel Marceau Crespin, France's director of sports, and asked: "I hear that half the skiers on the French team don't live up to our definition of amateurism. Is that true?" Replied Crespin: "You have been misinformed, Monsieur. No one on the French ski team lives up to your definition." Brundage thought the Frenchman was joking.

Last week no one was kidding about Jean-Claude Killy, 24, hero of all France when he swept three Alpine-skiing gold medals at Grenoble. Le Monde, France's most influential newspaper, accused Jean-Claude of selling an exclusive picture story about himself to the weekly magazine Paris Match for $7,000 "after he imprudently offered it before numerous witnesses to the highest bidder." The Communist daily paper L'Humanite followed with another charge: that Killy last year agreed to use a brand of Italian ski poles exclusively in exchange for an unknown sum of money--and that Crespin later paid the manufacturer $6,000 to keep mum about it. Still other stories circulated that Killy makes up to $75,000 a year out of skiing. Although Killy hotly denied all accusations of professionalism, the International Ski Federation last week launched an investigation to see whether or not Jean-Claude should be stripped of his amateur status --and his Olympic medals.

Stain of Shamateurism. The Killy case evoked memories of Jim Thorpe, who won the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics, then was forced to give back his medals because he had once accepted a few dollars to play semipro baseball. And it illustrated how deeply the hypocrisy of "shamateurism" stains the fabric of sport. If Killy did accept money for a story, is he any less an amateur than the tennis star who collects under-the-table payments from promoters? Or the basketball ace who gets discounts from the" stores and restaurants in his college town? And how about the "amateur" Communist athletes who make little pretense of working at their cover occupations?

The fact is that there are hardly any amateurs left, at least by Olympic standards--which rule out even athletic scholarships (a ban that is obviously ignored) and prohibit any financial remuneration whatsoever from athletic ability. The trouble with that philosophy is that it ignores the labor and expense necessary to produce a Jean-Claude Killy, who has been training full time since he was 16.

"I'm fed up with all this hypocrisy," says Killy. "Not a single competitor at the winter games could have taken part if the rules of amateurism had been applied to the letter. As for returning those three gold medals, never. They are a symbol. I won them fairly on the slopes on equal terms with all the other skiers. And that nobody can morally take away from me."

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