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By Jayne Spencer
If the Winter Olympics warm your blood, they start tomorrow (Feb. 7) in Nagano, Japan. And if you are interested in how global politics, history and circumstance have influenced Olympic play for more than a century, warm up your computer while the television commercials are on and travel to Indiana University Southeast Professor John Findling's USA TODAY Online's "Findling's Findings" Web site. (You'll find the address at the end of this story.)
Despite a whopping price tag of $10.5 billion, nearly twice that of the 1996 Centennial Summer Games in Atlanta, Ga., "medal play" for the first time in curling, snowboarding and women's ice hockey, and continuing fears of what El Nino might do to the deep powder on competition slopes, the Winter Olympics will be "fairly standard," the IUS historian predicts. Findling is the co-editor of the Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996) and notes that Japan hosted the Summer Games at Tokyo in 1964 and the Winter Games in 1972 at Sapporo.
And curling, you say. What exactly is it? Well, it's a team sport on ice, quite popular in Canada. An unscientific survey by the Home Pages finds that only one out of every 18 Hoosiers has ever heard of it. But it's not at all uncommon to have new sports introduced, either as "demonstration" (or exhibition) sports or as "medal sports" at the Olympics, Findling said. At Atlanta, for example, women's soccer was contested as a medal sport for the first time.
At Nagano, curling makes its medal sport debut, and according to Findling's colleague, Bob Barney, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario, curling was an exhibition sport at the Lake Placid Games in 1980 and again at Calgary in 1988.
While there is no clear-cut procedure for bringing new sports into the Olympic games, the initial request usually comes from the international federation governing that sport. For each Olympics, the national Olympic committee of the host nation may designate a new sport to be placed on the program, either as an exhibition sport or, in some cases, as a medal sport. Whether a sport comes in as an exhibition sport or a medal sport depends on the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC scrutinizes each sport for its viability; the most important official criterion is the number of nations that participate in that sport. For example, curling is a medal sport this year because at least ten important Olympic nations compete in the annual World Curling Championships (United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, France, Switzerland, Japan and Scotland).
"As the Olympics have become more commercialized in recent years, the
attractiveness of the sport to television audiences has become an
unofficial criterion as well," said Findling. "Thus, moguls and other forms
of acrobatic skiing have been added to winter games in the 1990s."
One might suspect that curling became a medal sport this year because of
the political influence of Canada's Richard Pound, the vice-president of
the IOC and a possible successor to IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch.
But Barney believes that politics were not a significant factor in curling's ascendancy. Pound doubtless was a voice in support of curling, but in all likelihood, he did not bully the IOC into accepting it; curling is a well established international sport.
Of course, politics have played a part in the gamesmanship of the Modern Olympics even though it was international harmony and educational motives at the center of Pierre de Coubertin's revival of the Olympic games in 1896. And the IOC Council, initially representing nine Western countries, followed Coubertin's lead in establishing criteria for the persistence of a pure competition. But as Findling points out in his dictionary, "ideals and dreams have not always overcome the complex realities of nationalism and opportunism."
Findling notes that the agreement to hold the Olympics every four years in different cities did not anticipate the momentous events that took place from 1936 to 1940: the awarding of the same Olympics to Japan and then to Finland, with bombs rather than athletes leaving their marks at the unfinished Helsinki Olympic facilities.
Findling is a member of the North American Society for Sport History and the International Society of Olympic Historians.
Get to "Findling's Findings" at this site: