WINTER OLYMPICS : Notes : NHL Had Its Chance--Arledge

A “golden opportunity” was wasted, literally and figuratively, by North America’s Olympic hockey teams and by the National Hockey League at the 15th Winter Olympics, Roone Arledge, president of ABC-TV news and sports, said here Friday.

Arledge still does not understand why the NHL continues to keep its best players from competing in the Olympics, even after the International Olympic Committee two years ago cleared the professionals to take part.

Only a few players with pro experience competed here for Canada, which has not won a hockey gold medal since 1952, and for the United States, which experienced its second straight seventh-place finish. With their season in progress, NHL officials only went so far as to permit teams to protect 10 top players, then free others to play Olympic hockey.

“The NHL, for years, had talked about the unfairness of the fact that the United States and Canada do not get to use their best players in the Olympics and other international tournaments, particularly the Olympics, and the IOC moved specifically to help the North Americans out, because you can’t make amateurs out of the Russians,” Arledge said.

“You’ve got to find a way to let us have our best players. Every other country in the world, that I know of, where they have professional leagues, they build in a hiatus during the Olympics--the Swedish, the Czechs, the Russians, whoever it is--and the idea that having been able, finally, to get some of our top players in this tournament from the NHL, and then for purely their own commercial reasons refuse to let any but the ones below the top 10 participate . . . well, I may be putting it on a patriotism basis, but I just think it’s dumb business.

“I told (NHL Commissioner John) Ziegler, ‘Tell me, tell me the last time the NHL had the kind of exposure like the exposure it would have had in these Games.’

“It’s shortsighted,” Arledge went on, “because the reason they’re not on network television is that there’s no national appeal to it. Nobody follows hockey as a national sport. There are hotbeds around the country that follow it. And here was a golden opportunity for the two countries who support the NHL. I told him (Ziegler) that it just strikes me as good business. If I can expose my product for two weeks, in everybody’s living rooms . . . well, look at how gymnastics benefited. Hockey could have taken off as a super major sport in our country, and I just think it’s dumb.”

More from Arledge on:

--The longer Olympics: “I was opposed to, and I’m still opposed to, stretching it out over 16 days instead of 12. There have been conversations about going back (to 12) in the future. But, our (ad) sales people like it the way it is now. And, it hasn’t seemed to hurt the coverage or ratings at all. We’ll have to see.”

--The $309-million investment: “The economy has changed. It even changed before Seoul. If you remember, they were talking there about $1 billion at first, then $500 million, and NBC eventually got it for $300 million. The economy didn’t work out how we hoped, and nobody wants to lose money, but there are still certain advantages to having the Olympics. We won the last two weeks, we won the sweeps for the first time in four years, and we might finish in second place ahead of CBS for the first time in a long time. There are a lot of activities on which networks lose money.”

Arledge foresees much lower bidding for the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France, and Barcelona, Spain, with no rise again until “the next time it comes back to this continent.” The chances of a network, such as ABC, sharing the Games with a cable partner, such as ESPN, are certainly a possibility, he added, mentioning, “We’ve already done that with the NFL.”

An Italian journalist approached a Los Angeles journalist. Handsome, devil-may-care skier Alberto Tomba had just won the giant slalom.

“Do you know any Hollywood producers?” he asked.

“One or two,” the Californian said.

“Do you think you could call one of them and get him to say he is interested in Tomba?”

“No, I don’t think it works that way,” the L.A. writer said. “A producer has to say he’s interested in somebody, and then we write about it.”

“What is the difference?” the Italian said. “It’s only a newspaper story.”

Despite a raft of weather-caused postponements, competition is back on schedule with two days left in the Games. Even so, unseasonable warmth remains a major factor in the swift completion of things here.

The starting times of the bobsled competition have been moved up from 10 a.m. to 8 today and Sunday so that the sliding will be over before the noonday sun gets at the track.

Today’s men’s slalom on Mt. Allan at Nakiska will start half an hour early, at 10, and the 70-meter ski jump portion of the Nordic combined event will start three hours early, at 10:30.

A figure-skating spectacular scheduled as part of the Closing Ceremony also is in danger.

A million-dollar artificial ice rink put in specifically for the closing is having trouble keeping its ice. The rink turned into a pool of water last week and, Wednesday, a rehearsal had to be delayed until after dark because of soft ice.

The rink has been covered with plastic foam and tarpaulins to keep it from the sun.

Two weeks ago, before the Opening Ceremony, officials here were warning spectators to dress in warm clothing to avoid frostbite. Now, they’re telling folks to watch out for sunburn.

The criticism of OCO, the Calgary organizing committee, over the location of the ski jumps at Canada Olympic Park on the western outskirts of town, has extended all the way to the International Olympic Committee.

Canadian Dick Pound, vice president of the IOC, told George Gross, corporate sports editor of the Calgary Sun: “Knowing what we know now, I think the ski jump should have been built at Canmore (about 70 miles west of Calgary and site of the other Nordic skiing facilities).

“By putting the ski jump on top of a hill, the organizers were asking for trouble. Calgarians are claiming the bad winds were unusual, but we shouldn’t have been dependent on the weather.”

Pound also took a shot at the International Ice Hockey Federation for allowing TV to determine the scheduling of the hockey games in the medal round.

“To put it simply, the International Ice Hockey Federation let us down,” he said. “We had an agreement that after the preliminary round, they’d let us know the schedule, but they reneged on it.”

Southern Californians may well remember the “official sponsor” designations that were so much a part of the 1984 Summer Olympics.

They are all over the place here, too.

One little business, however, has taken another tack. An antique store near the Saddledome proudly proclaims on a sign in its front window: “Sponsor of Nothing.”

Coach Dave Peterson of the U.S. hockey team made quite an impression on the Canadians with his testiness here.

One Calgary paper referred to him Friday morning as “the Ugly American,” and “paranoid Peterson.”

The other took his team--which reflects the coaching--to task for “a lackluster performance” in playing “just hard enough to win,” in Thursday’s seventh-place game against Switzerland.

Times Assistant Sports Editor Mike Kupper and Times staff writer Randy Harvey contributed to this story.