At a crossroads….

That’s how United States Olympic Committee CEO Jim Scherr recently summed up the current status of the Olympic Movement. A fairly valid and telling comment in a year where stars faded, ratings busted and the hype far exceeded the results.

“In many ways, we’re a movement in crisis,” Scherr told a crowd of U.S. Olympic athletes, officials and employees at an event this past summer. “There are issues with visibility, relevance, competition, doping in sport and other issues that detract from what we do on the field of play.”

It should be noted that the Olympic Movement has pretty much always been a “movement in crisis.” The Ancient Olympiads ceased as part of a campaign by Theodosius to impose Christianity on the Greeks. The Modern Games have seen Nazi propaganda, political boycotts, massacres in both Munich and Mexico City, a bankrupt Montreal and a bombing in Atlanta. That goes without mentioning the bid scandal, judging scandals and doping scandals galore.

But this time the crisis doesn’t revolve around some secondary issue like bankruptcy, politics or even security. Instead, the Olympics themselves have become the issue. This might be the first time that the Olympic Games have seemingly had their front-page prestige and marketability called into question, and there was no greater sign of that than the fact that the primetime telecasts from Torino were consistently slaughtered by the likes of “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars.”

Which leads us to the crossroads.

How does one go about solving problems of visibility and relevance? And what exactly has happened to cause such a decline in the Olympic Movement.

It’s probably a good idea to start with the end of the Cold War…

There’s great irony that the Olympic Games are an event that prides itself on peace, unity and togetherness, once served as a battleground for some of the most memorable battles between the world’s two premier superpowers. The gold-medal basketball game in Munich. The Jimmy Carter-led boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, which was of course followed by the Soviet Block boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

There was a little something called “The Miracle on Ice” somewhere in there, an event which Sports Illustrated labeled the greatest sports moment of the 20th Century. I’d call it our greatest Olympic triumph but that would serve as an insult to the thousands of U.S. Olympians that have overcome their own adversity and struggles to represent the red, white and blue on the world’s biggest stage. 

One could spend days, if not weeks and months, dissecting and analyzing the lasting legacy of those three periods of hockey in Lake Placid and what they meant to this country. I’m going to take the short-cut and recommend that interested readers rent HBO’s “Do You Believe in Miracles,” Disney’s “Miracle” or read “The Boys of Winter.” I wasn’t alive at the time so I’m not at liberty to comment on what that game meant to me as an American outside of watching Mike Eruzione milk the thing for the better part of the past 26 years.

There are of course, plenty of reasons why he’s been able to do just that, with approximately 99.99 percent of those reasons having nothing to do with the Olympic Games -- with the last .01 percent reserved for those who know that a) the Americans had to beat the Fins to secure a gold medal, b) the medal round of the tournament was round-robin with each team playing the two qualifying teams from the other group, c) The U.S.S.R. would have won the gold medal if the U.S. had lost or tied the Fins, despite the fact that the U.S. beat the Soviet Union (the tiebreaker for a gold medal was victories, not head to head) and d) the Americans tie with the Swedes carried over from the first round to the medal round, thus the Swedes took home the bronze medal over the Fins by virtue of tying both Finland and the U.S.

That makes the BCS look pretty darn simple, doesn’t it…

(Author’s Note: Mike Eruzione is still the man….twenty-six years later.)