Winter Games

Greg Gumbel has been paging through winter clothing catalogs lately. Not for Christmas gifts. He's bulking up his winter warbrobe for February 1994. CBS Sports yesterday named Gumbel, host of "The NFL Today," as the prime- time host for its Winter Olympics coverage from Lillehammer, Norway. Before Gumbel begins focusing on skiing, skating and the luge, baseball will be on his mind. He also will be replacing Dick Stockton as the play-by- play man on CBS baseball broadcasts next season.

The boys of summer wrapped things up last weekend. On deck: The fools of winter. With the end of the World Series comes the start of baseball's corporate season - when, for roughly five months, owners and front-office executives are arrayed against players and their agents in the sport's traditionally acrimonious contract negotiations. But this off-season promises a nastiness not seen in years. The owners, angered by what they see as a horrid escalation of salaries, are threatening a spring training lockout of the players.

Now that the Summer Olympics are upon us again and pay-per-view is a reality, a lot of people are probably asking themselves: Is this something I should do? Should I spend $125 for something I used to get totally for free, or should I put it toward a second air conditioner? Speaking as someone who once covered the Summer Olympics in person (Los Angeles, 1984) and found them to be as interesting as a lengthy discussion on lawn care, let me just say this: the Emerson Quiet Kool is a heck of an air conditioner.

Paul Tsongas almost got nuked yesterday. But it may be Tom Harkin who gets vaporized. Tsongas, the former Massachusetts senator who last week won a surprise victory in New Hampshire, finished in a virtual tie with maverick Jerry Brown in Democratic presidential caucuses in next-door Maine yesterday. Brown mobilized environmental activists by targeting Tsongas' support for nuclear power. Tsongas ended the day in South Dakota, taking shots from rival candidates during a cantankerous debate in Sioux Falls before the state's presidential primary tomorrow.

They are so big. The biggest. Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay. Ice dancers. Brother and sister. Top French attraction at the Winter Olympics. World champions. Cover of Time magazine's international edition. They hold a news conference. Flower boxes on the dais. Nameplates. Wait, don't start yet! Somebody rushes in to switch the nameplates. And the chairs. Plastic chairs won't do. Get the wooden ones. Isabelle and Paul wait offstage like rock stars. A door opens. In they come. Coronation music plays.

The worst thing that could happen to a Winter Olympics happened yesterday. Winter. More than a foot of snow fell in a blizzard in Val d'Isere, where the men's downhill is to be held Sunday. Snow is just what the French needed for scenery and the last thing they needed as they prepared to move 730,000 spectators to downhill races and bobsled runs spread over 13 venues connected by narrow mountain roads. "It will be terrible if the weather is like this," Claude Regis said as he wiped a red trickle from his nose and inspected the damage to his Audi station wagon after its collision with a snowplow on the road down from Val d'Isere.

In case you've never heard of this place, it's press central for the biggest winter party of 1992 - the Winter Olympics. It is also the "official" site of the Games. But if you want to see the alpine skiing events, don't - repeat, don't - come to this town in the Savoie region of the French Alps. And, most assuredly, don't book a hotel room here. Head, instead, for Bourg-St. Maurice, a charming town within easy commuting distance of three major venues for downhill events: Val-d'Isere, Les Arcs and Tignes.

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.

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.

CBS won the rights to televise the 1992 Winter Olympic Games yesterday - in part because ABC chose not to bid on a sports event it has long monopolized. CBS (on Channel 10 here) captured the 1992 Games in Albertville, France, with a winning bid of $243 million, easily topping an offer of $175 million from NBC. The winning bid was $66 million less than the $309 million ABC paid for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada. Two reasons caused the drop-off, which was the first decrease in history for Winter Olympics TV rights.