"It's reached a point where I think it's time to take a deep breath, after the Olympic Games in Atlanta next year, and say, 'Where do we go from here?' But don't write the obituary on the Festival just yet," said John Krimsky, the USOC's executive director.
If not dead, the Festival is at least comatose. The 1997 version, which had been the next one scheduled, has been canceled, and the Festival won't re- emerge until 1999 at the earliest.
Inside the USOC, opinion is split between a faction that wants to kill the Festival entirely and use multi-sport international competitions such as the Goodwill Games and World University Games to take its place, and a faction that merely wants to downsize it.
With 3,000 athletes competing this year, the Festival was enormously expensive to stage, and the operating loss is expected to be between $1 million and $2 million. Only 300,000 tickets were sold, producing $1.9 million in ticket revenue. The deficit will have to be offset by contributions from sponsors and other USOC funds.
The main problem is that the competition is generally sub-elite and therefore attracts few ticket-buyers. Only one event - the Saturday track and field meet that featured long jumper Carl Lewis - drew more than 10,000 spectators.
Yesterday's individual women's gymnastics finals, usually a major draw, attracted just 8,727 to the Coors Events Center in Boulder. The men's gold- medal basketball game, on Saturday night in McNichols Arena in Denver, drew 4,538.
GYMNASTICS. Nursing a sore ankle, Kerri Strug won the gold medal in the women's uneven-bar competition yesterday. Strug, a member of the 1992 Olympic team, competed in just two events yesterday because of the injury. She also took a bronze in the balance beam despite falling during her program.
