We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you this Olympic Moment. It's sponsored by Bob's Grub and Snub, your haute cuisine in faux-rural setting restaurant of choice and a proud supporter of the 17th Winter Olympiad.

Ooops, sorry. The promo ran too long, we missed the Olympic Moment.

It's time for the Winter Olympics again. That time once every two years when we feel obligated to forego watching our favorite CBS sitcoms in order to dust off our tattered vestiges of patriotism and wear them around our heads while whooping loudly at incomprehensible sports that we never care about during the time between Winter Olympics.

And at this point, I must commend CBS for their stellar coverage of the historic international event. Oh, I'm not talking about the Olympics now, I'm talking about the baited breath of the crowd, the fingers poised on camera shutters, the tense nail-biting as Tonya Harding stepped off the plane onto Norway's beloved asphalt.

I wasn't going to do it. I was not going to add to the Harding/Kerrigan hub-bub. But, I feel compelled to. I have to. Heck, it's my civic duty to.

As I'm writing this, only the technical portion of the women's figure skating is over. Kerrigan is in first, Harding in 10th.

Guilty or innocent, I don't know. But thinking about this whole thing has led me to some conclusions.

First off, the thing that Harding is first and foremostly guilty of is marrying a goon like Jeff Gillooly. The plot to disable Nancy Kerrigan was the stupidest plot since that of "Look Who's Talking, Too".

It's one thing if Nancy Kerrigan was all that stood between Tonya and a gold medal. But, judging from tonight's performances, Gillooly would have needed to hit like Babe Ruth on uppers if he wanted to take down enough Olympic hopefuls to pave Harding's way on the Olympic Trail of Dreams with shattered kneecaps. What a win that would be: "And the only skater left standing is Tonya Harding, I guess she gets the Gold."

What an amazing lack of confidence in Harding's abilities. Barring a counter-attack by Kerrigan's Dad, she was assured of a place on the Olympic Team and a chance to prove herself to the world. Gillooly had about as much faith as a buddhist at the gates of hell.

Kerrigan has the most goody-goody reputation of any professional athlete the world has ever seen. The way the press makes her out, she's joined by all the animals in the forest in a musical number a la Disney everytime she powders her nose. She's the perfect mastermind for an extremely cunning plan.

See, it works like this. Bad-girl skater Tonya Harding who has only seen one endorsement deal ever (it didn't even feature her name or overly-made-up face) needs a way to make a living when her skating career is over (read: two weeks from now). Kerrigan, who has a few endorsement deals, wants to make money hand-over-fist-over-hand instead of just hand-over-fist, and at the same time feels sorry for her white-trash teammate. She and Tonya cook up a plan to have Kerrigan seemingly clubbed. They need a patsy. Who better than the low-brow, non-thinking ex-husband of Harding? Harding convinces the goon to do it without telling him of Kerrigan's part in it. Harding slips the bodyguard a fiver at the crucial moment so that he softens the blow. And what happens? National scandal with piles of dough for everybody.

What Kerrigan gets: She gets a little ouchy on her knee which she can pretend is nearly disabling. She adds the words "victim" and "fantastically sportsmanlike" to the list of adjectives that describe her. She makes a bundle in new endorsement deals. Any way you club her, Kerrigan wins.

What Tonya gets: She probably realized that she would never place in the Olympics. So, instead of being second in nationals, biffing at the Olympics, and fading into obscurity, she gets a juicy story to milk in the press for years. She gets to sell her story and video-tapes of herself dancing topless to A Current Affair for brain-deadening amounts of money. She gets goon-boy Gillooly out of her life for good. She still gets the all-expense paid trip to Norway. And, to top it all off, Kerrigan gives her a chunk of the dough Kerrigan's making on endorsement deals.

But back to the rest of the Olympics. You may not have realized that there were other events besides the Women's Freestyle Weapons-Optional Figure Skating. That's my main problem, CBS doesn't seem to realize it either. For the first week of the Olympics we got scenarios like this one:

"So, if you're ever in Lillehammer, come to each of the 48 cafes we've profiled on tonight's telecast. Now, over to the men's downhill for the last five seconds of competition."

Shoosh!

"Wow. Breath-taking, isn't it? Oh, we won a gold by the way. Go America. Now a commercial announcement."

Even when the coverage isn't dominated by up-to-the-minute reports on the 31 Flavors where Tonya Harding binged before competition, it still seems to have very little to do with the actual sports.

KIRO's Olympic Insider, Bob Brannom, personifies the incredible lack of any sporting savvy shown by the hordes of press members sent to Norway. Just this evening I was witness to the incredible spectacle of him babbling aimlessly on the air to tell us that, although his Norwegian wasn't very good, he was pretty sure the headline of the Norwegian Moose-Grotto Daily read "Nancy beats Tonya." Well, thank you for that earth-shattering and insightful comment on the Olympic Games. When you have an intelligent comment and can come on the air without downing a three-martini lunch, then let us know. Sadly enough, I think we've seen better commentary from David Letterman's mother.

And how many polls does the press have to do where they find out that people don't want to hear about Harding and Kerrigan before they realize that their programming should actually be changed to reflect this. Apparently, quite a few more.

Of course, I don't think it's entirely the press's fault. They probably feel a bit out of place in the midst of all that sporting drama. Some of the events are a definitely a little strange.

I can understand the skiing. That serves a purpose. You want down from the top of the mountain, and you want to do it really fast. That makes sense to me. I applaud Tommy Moe, Diann Roffe-Steinrotter, Picabo Street and any others winning medals in this highly practical sport.

But the Luge, and especially the two-man Luge, concern me greatly. Doesn't this just seem like sledding at Grandma's place gone horribly awry? All that's missing is the tree at the bottom of the run that forces them to a sudden teeth-jarring stop. I think the only thing you need to do to win this sport is to be aerodynamically-shaped and actually obey the laws of gravity, and that's just not something we should encourage in today's impressionable youth.

Well, I better finish up here. I have to catch the end of the women's speed-skating in which Bonnie Blair picks up her 5th gold medal (setting the American women's record) before they go back to showing Tonya wobbling her way to 10th place for the thirteenth time.

I think the truly Olympic Moment for me will be when they show a full half an hour of an event without commercial breaks, in-depth profiles of moose, or any references whatsoever to that wacky United States figure-skating duo. It'll never happen.

Copyright © 1994 by Robert T. Bakie