Not crowded

Before you know it, the 2020 Olympics will be on TV disguised as the 2021 Olympics because of the C-19 pandemic. The games that will be taking place starting on Friday will be without fans, like sports were a year ago. I’m not sure if the stands will be full of cardboard cutouts. We will just have to wait and see.

As a young lad I used to get excited about the Olympics and couldn’t wait to see some of the track competition or basketball games, boxing or even gymnastics. There were so many athletes who had great stories to tell and worked so hard to be there. This was back in the day when athletes would train in the morning, go to work and then train several more hours just to turn right around and do the same thing the next day.

We hated the USSR and East Germany because we knew they were cheating. Anyone my age can tell you that the East German women track members and weightlifters had to have ingested enough steroids that could have killed a good size horse. As my brother once said, “I exaggerate to clarify!”

I remember that there were judges for diving competition and gymnastics and it seemed like an American would always get the lowest score from one of the communist country judges. I could never figure out why the USA judge always seemed like the one that would be the most reasonable judge. I guess they really didn’t want to start World War III.

Through the years the USSR, East Germany and Cuba would do their best to promote their ideologies through athletics. If you were a good athlete your job would change to becoming a great Olympic athlete. The incentives were pretty good ones, since the athletes had access to gyms and were taken care of. No bread lines for these folks.

The rest of the world could see what was happening, especially when some of the athletes and coaches defected to the free world. Some of these coaches would help improve the USA teams for future Olympics.

For a lot of years there were complaints that the USSR and East Germans were actually professional teams, since that was basically their only job and the government was taking care of them. At some point in time the Olympics changed from amateur athletes to all athletes. We all remember the first dream team for basketball with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and John Stockton, just to name a few. The rest of the world didn’t have a chance against these elite basketball players.

The rest of the world is trying to catch up with the USA in this sport and I must say that the rest of the world has made more improvement than the USA but only because they had a lot of ground to make up. Will the USA lose to the rest of the world in basketball this year? I doubt it, but at some point in time there will most likely be a great team from Europe with pro players, and there will be a bunch of Americans that will want to take some time off between the NBA seasons. Rest and recuperation is important to sustaining a long and well-paid career. A person would need to weigh the long haul of a pro career and a gold medal, which at one time was a highly valued memento.

In the last ten years or so, I haven’t been as interested in the Olympic Games. I miss the amateurism of the games. I miss the stories of people traveling 120 miles each and every day so that their child could be an elite gymnast, swimmer, hammer thrower or what-have-you. Families sacrificed a lot to hopefully get to see their kid compete against the world, but a lot of those stories won’t be told anymore because of how the athletes are more on the professional side.

Sure, there will still be a few stories, but with no fans or family in the stands how meaningful will it be? Will I tune into some of the competition? We’ll see.