They Have Their Own Version of the Closing Ceremony for Olympics

The professionalism of sport has reached its logical conclusion in the 1992 Olympic Games, and the scene is ugly.

Charles Barkley elbows an Angolan in the opening Dream Team game and later states that the Olympics are not about making friends but about making money, marketing himself and the NBA. All three medalists in the shotput have just graduated from bans resulting from recent steroid use. And many are competing not for an olive wreath but for a lucrative corporate sponsorship.

When I made my first Olympic team (1976), Avery Brundage ran the Games, and the excesses were very different. An athlete who coached a high school team for a few hundred dollars would be banished forever from amateur sports. Old Avery was a fanatic, but sports were much cleaner and somehow more noble.

Materialism wins the gold now, and the million-dollar contract rules supreme.

It is still true that most athletes do honor to their nations and to the talents they have been given, and they do so with an attitude of humility and a little awe. The Olympic Games still possess a greatness that sets them apart.

But how many of us sometimes stop and wonder what has been lost?

LARRY WALKER, U.S. Olympic Teams, 1976 and 1980, 20-kilometer walk