Is This Something to Feel Festive About?

They have finally settled on a name, the United States Olympic Festival, but don’t let that fool you. This is really America’s Summer Camp, 10 days of fun and frolic for children of all ages, and this year, they picked the right spot for it.

Lots of lakes here. A big tent, too--that fabulous fiberglass fixture known as Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, famed for Hefty bag home runs, collapsing roofs, collapsing Rams and now, the world’s largest indoor Bunsen burner.

No festival is really Olympic without a flame, so they erected a 30-foot high caldron inside the Metrodome and had Jackie Joyner-Kersee light it. That was the highlight of Friday night’s opening ceremony, although a lower roof would have added a needed edge to the proceedings.

So what’s an Olympic Festival?

It’s best to start with what it’s not.

It isn’t the Sports Festival--and, as the event’s organizers will rush to remind, hasn’t been since 1986. It isn’t the Special Olympics or the Olympic trials or the pre-Olympics.

And it isn’t the Mini-Olympics, which is what ABC’s Wide World of Sports labeled it while covering the inaugural competition in 1978, which was more than a mini-mistake in the eyes of many chagrined festival organizers.

This year, it isn’t even the Mini-Goodwill Games, which has been a considerable problem no one in the Twin Cities is eager to address. Ted Turner’s athletic extravaganza, scheduled two weeks hence in Seattle, has siphoned off most of the world-class competitors, leaving the Olympic Festival with Joyner-Kersee, 1988 Seoul divers Wendy Lucero and Wendy Williams and a handful of others recognizable outside their hometowns.

Joyner-Kersee, twice a gold medalist at Seoul, will run two relays here and brush up on her high-jumping and javelin-throwing. So thankful were the festival planners that they immediately named her official torch lighter. A favor for a favor.

This Olympic Festival, as with most others, is a sprawling intramural meet, attended by 3,000-plus participants, from 50 states and 37 sports. Since sides are required, there is the North, the South, the East and the West. Or, the Yellow, the Green, the Blue and the Red. Or George, Paul, John and Ringo.

The affiliations are only for affiliation’s sake. The South ice hockey team, for instance, features six players from Minnesota. Joyner-Kersee attended UCLA and lives in Southern California but will run for the North’s 400-meter team. And the West hockey team is basically a device for tuning up young prospects for this year’s world juniors championships.

The experience is what matters. Most of the field here won’t get anywhere near Barcelona in 1992. But maybe a few will be ready by 1996. That’s the hope, the supposed premise of the Olympic Festival. The long-range future is now.

But the festival also attempts to go where the real Olympics can’t, or won’t. An 11-year-old gymnast, Lily Chang of Walnut Creek, is here. So is a 60-year old shooter, Don Hamilton of Kingston, Mass. So, too, is 29-year old judoist Eddie Liddie, participating in his 10th festival and looking for his 10th medal.

Even some of the sports are on the fringe. A gold medal in bowling? Someone will win one here. Racquetball is scheduled. Badminton shuttlecocks are cocked. Roller skaters are ready.

That’s one more reason why Minneapolis is right for the Olympic Festival. Quaintness plays well in this corner of the country, where every barely published author from Minnetonka and folk singer from Winona is toasted with chest-puffing civic pride. This is the place, remember, where an entire state fell into depression when Garrison Keilor left for Denmark.

Schmaltz and feel-good go down smoothly here, which is why tens of thousands waved their souvenir flashlights in the dark Friday night, cheering Joyner-Kersee on during her last leg to the semi-Olympic flame. Or why others danced in the aisles while The Fabulous Thunderbirds--the rock band, not the roller derby team--played their clean-cut boogie and Sarah (100-Meter) Dash belted out the festival’s theme song, “The Road to ’92.” Or why hundreds of festival athletes rushed the stage when Otis Day and the Knights launched into the song that made them famous in “Animal House,” “Shout.”

They even applauded the official festival mascot, Willie Win One, which is supposed to be a cute and cuddly abominable snowman--of course--but looked more like someone’s runaway pet shaggy dog after ear-removal surgery. Bigfoot under fiberglass.

There were also fireworks inside the Metrodome, a blimp inside the Metrodome, drill teams, marching bands, audience-participation card tricks and a choir. Much ado about nothing that really matters? To Friday night’s revelers, this was the Super Bowl. The big time, even if it’s just the kind-of-big-time, had come to the Twin Cities.

The Minny Olympics were under way.