Sports Watch
Now that the Centennial Games in Atlanta are over, I'm looking forward to the New Millennium Games in Sydney when it hosts the Olympics in the Year 2000.
It also means farewell to the word, "repechage," which can be found in your daily newspaper only once every four years -during the Olympics. Repechage is French for a second chance. Well, I sure hope that there's no repechage for beach volleyball in the next Olympics.
It was one of the sports added to the Atlanta Games, along with softball. But unlike softball, which provided a great story, beach volleyball only detracted from real volleyball. It got to the point where some of the media started referring to the latter as indoor volleyball. Give me a break.
Knowing the Aussies - and with Sydney home to 30 beaches - it's very likely that beach volleyball might reappear again. I hope not. Instead, I wish the Aussies would opt for rugby, Australian Rules Football or even surfing. And I'm sure that if Greg Norman had any input, golf would be introduced. It's the closest that Greg will ever get to seeing his world tour happen.
There was a restaurant ad in the paper the other day saying that "sushi rolling is not an Olympic event ... yet!"
But nothing that the International Olympic Committee does would surprise me. It is, after all, still considering ballroom dancing. Even cricket was once an Olympic sport.
Beach volleyball gives all esoteric sports hope for their day in the sun.
I don't know what the Aussies will have in mind as their sports of choice, demonstration or otherwise. But taekwondo will finally be an official sport at the Sydney Games after being a demonstration sport in the Seoul and Barcelona Olympics.
The Korean martial art figures to become firmly entrenched as an Olympic sport, as judo did after it was first introduced in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
Certainly, taekwondo is more of a legitimate sport than say synchronized swimming or rhythmic gymnastics, two events that the Olympics could do without. Anything that needs background music isn't a sport.
Despite the bombing and the tacky commercialism, the Atlanta Games were marked by memorable athletic performances - most notably Michael Johnson's 200-400 double - and record-breaking attendance.
But ultimately, the 1996 Games will be remembered as a landmark for women's sports - not only with the record number of female athletes (3,779 was the official count, thanks to the addition of softball and soccer) - but for gold-medal victories in basketball, softball and soccer by the American women.
They are all scholarship sports, by the way, a testimony to the success of Title IX. Unfortunately, NBC didn't show an inning of softball or any live soccer action.
ONE team gold medal was not achieved by the Americans - the men's 4x100 sprint relay. The question whether they would have won it with Carl Lewis will be asked for years to come and will hound U.S. track coach Erv Hunt for a long time.
If anything, Hunt should be faulted for only one thing - not having the flair that made Casey Stengel the great baseball manager that he was. Stengel always believed in helping destiny along whenever he wrote out his lineup card.
Hunt had a chance to do just that. By giving his OK, Hunt could have set the stage for Olympic history to happen. Lewis would have had a chance to become the first to win 10 gold medals.
Destiny never got an assist this time around. Too bad.
Maybe Carl Lewis can take up ballroom dancing ...