Winter Games

A real-life action adventure yarn starring Olympic champions should serve as a solid foundation for a successful movie. But its filmmaker, Wayne-based MegaSystems, didn't stop there. "Olympic Glory," the first-ever 70 millimeter film about the Olympics, is the new movie at the Franklin Institute Science Museum's Tuttleman Omniverse Theater. The movie is MegaSystems' first foray into what's called large format film production. Under that three-dimensional format, the audience can feel like its surrounded from top-to-bottom and side-to-side by the film.

Now that another Olympics has come and gone, fortunately without any major disaster - except a controversy about doping, the protests of the Aborigines and the arrogance of a few American athletes - we can turn our thoughts to 2004 when the games return to their original locale, Athens. The International Olympic Committee's retiring (hurrah) president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, is threatening to move the games if the Greek committee doesn't get its act together. I believe we should take another look at how and where they're held.

The February sweeps, which start today, will be as competitive as the United States vs. the Taliban. NBC will dominate with the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics starting Feb. 8, and for the most part, its competitors will respond feebly. Yet what could be the least suspenseful sweeps competition in memory could actually benefit viewers, breaking up the usual logjam of high-profile programming and resulting in fewer reruns through the remainder of the season. A combination of factors has NBC's rivals fearing 17 nights of extraordinary Olympics ratings.

The novelty of being the only girl on the ice has worn off for Penncrest senior Vicky Graham. Frequently the only female player on all-boys' teams while growing up, Graham has a poster on her bedroom wall of the United States Olympic hockey team, gold-medal winners at the Lake Placid Games in 1980. That U.S. success fueled many of Graham's dreams as she gathered her equipment to go from one practice to another. Graham, a 5-foot-3, 125-pound winger, would like to play for the U.S. women's ice hockey team in the Olympics someday.

So you've watched every minute of the Olympics thus far, your heart stirred by the spectacle of the world's finest amateur athletes in competition while the rest of your body has gone numb from sitting in front of the TV for so many hours each day. Before your vital signs totally subside, perhaps you should take advantage of the example set by the athletes in Seoul. During the next commercial break, get off the couch, slap on your sweat suit and jog over to your personal computer.

The rough-and-tumble freestyle event of skicross is in for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Women's ski jumping will have to wait to be considered for 2014. The International Olympic Committee yesterday approved skicross - similar to snowboard cross - for the Vancouver Games, but rejected women's jumping and five other events. The IOC executive board also overhauled the process for selecting sports for future Summer Games, and partially lifted its freeze on payments to the international amateur boxing association to encourage reforms in judging and scoring.

Yesterday the top echelon of CBS Television executives seemed solidly happy for perhaps the first time this year. The reason was CBS's capture of the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France. And they revealed, among other things, that CBS plans to exploit the six- hour France-America time difference by airing Olympics events live on weekday mornings, in competition with NBC and ABC's popular morning programs. The 1987-88 TV season was a disaster for CBS, which finished last among the networks in the prime-time Nielsen ratings for the first time.

Stow those footballs and sharpen those skates, it's time to switch sports. No doubt the non-fans among us, beaten and battered by Super Bowl hype, were hoping they would get a break from any sport for at least a week. But time and TV ratings wait for no man; we're skiing fast into the Winter Olympics, that quadrennial attempt to persuade the American public that it cares about luge. Actually, it's the very obscurity of most Winter Olympic events, coupled with the alpine beauty of their locations, that gives the Winter Games their laid-back, small-town charm.

Even before last week's ruckus over the judging of the pairs figure skating, I had a problem with the Winter Olympics. I could never get past the obvious fact that most of these sports seem to have been created by bored Scandinavians with way too much time on their hands. Every four years, I sit down gamely and try to make sense of it all. I'm man enough to admit that for years I thought the Nordic combined was an intermarriage between a Swede and a Dane. And when I first heard about the "skeleton," I naturally assumed the event owed its name to the bony remains of the competitors at the bottom of the course.

Through 11 days of competition, they have handed out 90 medals at these Winter Olympics. East Germany has won 17 by itself. This would be an excellent total for a giant nation. The Soviet Union, for instance, has 22 medals to lead everyone. Big country, big number - makes sense. But East Germany has only 16.64 million people. On a global scale, that's a real pittance of population. In other words, East Germany has much less than one-tenth the population of the United States, but it has more than four times the medals.