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Sporting News, The, March 7, 1994 by Michael Knisley

In '98 at Nagano, it should be a case of out with the cold and in with a truly professional Olympics

These really were the Games of ice and snow. Real ice and snow, everywhere. And cold. Real cold. Could be that all those fast times turned in by U.S. skiers and skaters happened because the athletes were in a hurry to get somewhere and warm up.

Norway didn't scrimp on the winter it provided for its Olympics.

Japan no doubt will do a nice job with the 1998 Games, but Nagano, at a considerably more southern latitude than Lillehammer, won't come close to matching Norway's wintry weather. Of course, the Japanese aren't concerned that Mother Nature might not give them the real thing. Akio Yoshida, the chief adviser to the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee, spent his last few days in Norway talking up Japan's artificial snow-making capabilities.

Lillehammer gave us the environmental Games; Nagano will give us the technologically advanced, man-made Games.

Nagano also will likely give us the first truly professional Winter Games, once the NHL signs up and the International Skating Union irons out the kinks in its eligibility rules for figure skaters. The move toward open Olympic eligibility, which took its biggest leap forward with the NBA Dream Team two summers ago in Barcelona, managed just a baby step in Lillehammer.

For the first time, professional figure skaters were allowed to apply for reinstatement of their Olympic eligibility. Only a handful actually competed in Norway, however, and a majority of the ones who did struggled for approval from the sport's judging system.

Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist from the United States and the skater most often associated with the push to allow professionals back in the Games, didn't have a happy return. He didn't skate well, didn't score well and finished sixth in the men's competition.

"But I still think it's good for the sport," Boitano says. "I think the next step is that all professionals will be back in figure skating. Within two years, I think it'll be open to everybody and I think that'll make it great for everybody."

In 1990, the ISU changed its rules to allow amateur figure skaters to earn money for their training. But then the change was made, the international governing body didn't grandfather in those skaters who recently had left the amateur ranks to earn a living with their sport.

The change in eligibility rules for the '94 Games only allowed those athletes, such as Boitano and Germany's Katarina Witt, 28, to apply for reinstatement. Witt's return was as rocky as Boitano's experience, as the judges apparently penalized her failure to keep up with the technical difficulty in the jumps performed by the younger medalists -- the Ukraine's Oksana Bayul, 16; the United States' Nancy Kerrigan, 24; and China's Chen Lu, 17.

"There are some skeptics who feel that Katarina didn't add anything to that competition," says Claire Ferguson, president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association. "I totally disagree. I think she added a lot, by her maturity, her strength, her ability to take a piece of music and work through it so well, and by her sporting desire to try and do the very best she could.

"We have some skiers and speedskaters who have been in the Olympics for 10 years now. And if that kind of dedication is there to do they very best they can, and if they can get through the ranking system in their nation, then I think they deserve to be here. I don't know why it seems like figure skaters have to be in the Olympics at 20, and then move on. I don't understand that, and neither did Brian Boitano."

Ferguson is the administrative force that pushed the so-called "Boitano Rule" through the ISU. Her next mission, starting with an ISU meeting this summer, is to do away with all restraints on Olympic and World Championship participation.

She will find some opposition. For one, Vitaly Smirnov, an International Olympic Committee vice president and the head of the Russian Olympic Committee, isn't in favor of open eligibility.

"It's a big mistake, if we don't have any kind of regulations for the professionals coming back to the amateur competition," Smirnov says. "For example, we are taking children everywhere, 3 or 4 or 5 years old, in skating, and their parents are thinking, |What is the best age for the Olympic Games?' The children are becoming better and better, and the parents are sacrificing. They are going to the skating rink with them at 5 o'clock, getting up, bringing them there and thinking, |In the year 2010, my son or my daughter could be an Olympic champion.'

"And then, in the year or months before the Olympics, after five or 10 or 15 or 16 or 20 years of absence, someone says, |Maybe I will come back.' Do you know how many tears we hear in my country? And how many children we are losing because of this?"

Smirnov might welcome the Dream Team concept into the Olympic hockey competition, though, in view of Russia's disappointment in Lillehammer. The Soviet Union/Unified Team/Russia had won a hockey medal in 10 consecutive Winter Olympiads dating to 1956 in Cortina, Italy, and eight of them were gold. But in Norway, a Russian team decimated by defections to European and North American professional teams lost in the semifinals to Canada and then in the bronze-medal game to Finland.