OLYMPICS WATCH : Reason to Cheer

Kristi Yamaguchi will be remembered for her figure skating. She will also be remembered for winning one of five gold medals that the United States took home from the 1992 Winter Olympics. And this year’s Olympics will be remembered because all the U.S. gold medals were won by women.

But the picture of Yamaguchi, a Californian of Japanese ancestry, and Japan’s Midori Ito standing side by side as they received their Olympic medals for figure skating should be remembered for its contrast with images in the United States and the world exactly 50 years before.

On Feb. 21, 1942, few in the United States could have imagined cheering for a Japanese-American, especially one standing alongside a Japanese national.

The United States was at war with Japan, and just two days earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed the infamous executive order authorizing the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans.

On Feb. 21, 1992, the cheering for Yamaguchi had nothing to do with ancestry. She was being cheered for her athletic ability; so was Ito. And that was as it should be.

Albertville, France, was a long way from the internment camps where Yamaguchi’s mother was born and her father spent part of his early childhood.

It was a painful chapter of U.S. and world history. But the painful memories subsided a bit as millions of television viewers across the United States cheered for the American champion, one who just happened to be a Japanese-American.