What’s an Olympics With No Tourists?

The International Olympic Committee will impose strict qualifying standards to weed out “tourists” for the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway.

Marc Holder, an IOC executive-board member and president of the international ski federation, said the Winter Games at Albertville, France, earlier this year had their share of inept competitors.

“We had tourists,” Holder said. “There were tourists who fell six, or seven times in giant slalom. One (cross-country skier) complained because he was overtaken by a competitor who started one minute after him in a race lasting 1 hour and 30 minutes.”

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Add tourists: Holder also cited a Latin American country that entered a competitor who had never skied.

“They told us he would spend one week at ski school in Val d’Isere before entering the race,” Holder said.

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Trivia time: Washington has won 22 consecutive football games, second-longest winning streak in Pacific 10 history. Who holds the conference record?

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Tub training: Question to the Good Doctor of Inside Sports: “Rollie Massimino is the new basketball coach at Nevada Las Vegas. What’s his first task?”

Answer: “To make sure all the hot tubs have been drained.”

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Nice life anyway: Jerry Tarkanian, the former UNLV coach, is a rookie NBA coach with the San Antonio Spurs.

Said Tarkanian of the NBA: “You get to charter (flights) to games, and those per-diem checks are nice, and you stay in nice hotels, and don’t have to carry your luggage. But, as far as the games go, I have a lot to learn.”

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Heartless: The NCAA reported in a recent edition of the NCAA News that any college athlete remembering a fallen teammate by wearing that teammate’s numeral on a small section of his uniform, or helmet, is violating an NCAA playing rule that prohibits a player from wearing numbers that do not correspond to his own jersey number.

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Makes sense: Sportsletter reported that Birdie Tebbetts, a former major league baseball manager, once had this to say about his approach with the players:

“They said I had to get to know my players. That arithmetic was bad. Doesn’t it seem more simple to have had 25 of them get to know me?”

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Looking ahead: ESPN’s Lee Corso, on Brigham Young’s upset of Penn State last Saturday: “It looks like Penn State already thinks it is in the Big Ten.”

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Matter of time: Charlotte Hornet Coach Allan Bristow on Shaquille O’Neal, the 7-foot-1, 310-pound rookie center of the Orlando Magic:

“Two of the four moves he makes now are unstoppable. Pretty soon, he’s going to get three out of four. Then, he’ll get four out of four. Once he does that, he’ll be an elite player in our league.”

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Trivia answer: USC, with 25 in a row from 1931-33.

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Quotebook: Bill Lyon of the Philadelphia Inquirer on Deion Sanders: “Perhaps Deion should be reminded that neon is nothing but gas.”