COMMENTARY : ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : USOC Wins Gold in Backing Down

That sound you heard Saturday afternoon, a big whoosh like the noise of a giant balloon deflating, was the sound of the U.S. Olympic Committee caving in. An extensive search of USOC officials in Lillehammer found no evidence of existing spines.

Tonya Harding will skate in the Olympics. That’s a fact.

The USOC had the power, the right and sufficient cause to stop her from skating in the Olympics. For a week or so now, it has talked bravely about upholding Olympic codes of sportsmanship and questioned the propriety of having somebody on a U.S. Olympic team who had admitted to lying to the FBI about knowledge of an assault on one of her main competitors for a medal. But the minute some guy in a three-piece suit waved a legal pad at them, the USOC went whoosh . That’s also a fact.

Many people who felt Harding should not skate will blame our legal system for all this, for the stalling and the stonewalling and the non-decision decisions and the posturing and postponements and the ever-present lawsuits. But that’s what our legal system does best. Tonya Harding might be the greatest bonanza of billable hours in the history of the state of Oregon.

No, the Tonya Harding case does not give our legal system a bad name, because that’s no longer possible these days.

It does however, give the USOC a bad name, which is still possible. It had a chance to take a stance on an issue upon which common sense pretty well dictated a course of action, and it went whimpering off into a corner and hid.

And the most distasteful part wasn’t even that it copped out, but the reason it used for the cop-out: The Harding case was becoming a distraction to the other athletes at the Olympics, it said.

Golly, what a swell group of people these USOC officials are, sweeping away the mess so that athletes of all countries may compete in harmony and joyful celebration, arms locked in international kinship and minds focused on performing well and getting their own Nike commercial.

That left a couple of things unsaid, however.

Left unsaid was that the U.S. Figure Skating Assn., a federation within the USOC, was given the ammunition by its own panel a week ago to drop Harding from the Olympics and passed the buck. Action last week pretty well would have gotten rid of the distractions.

Left unsaid was that, in eliminating the distraction, it created an even bigger distraction. Does the USOC really believe that, now that Harding will compete, the story is over and all the cameras and reporters will flood the biathlon?

Left unsaid, in this scramble to do everything imaginable to protect Harding’s rights, was the question of Nancy Kerrigan’s rights. Did anybody ask her how she felt, what she thought? Did the USOC ponder whether their cop-out would place so much additional pressure on Kerrigan that she would end up competing in a nightmare. Clearly, the women’s figure skating at Lillehammer will not be an event, it will be a circus.

Left unsaid was the distraction in the life of 13-year-old Michelle Kwan, the alternate who, until Saturday’s USOC cave-in, could have skated in the Olympics. She was told to keep practicing, keep thinking Olympics. She was told to make travel plans. Now she is told to set her sights on 1998.

And left unsaid was the windfall that landed in the lap of the CBS television network, which will have, on the telecasts of women’s figure skating the nights of Feb. 23 and 25, ratings that might make the Super Bowl look like an afternoon cooking show. There is no evidence that anybody from CBS exerted any influence on the USOC’s decision. But you can be certain that there are some giddy CBS executives walking around Lillehammer today. Nor does it hurt the USOC to have huge TV ratings of an Olympics.

The USOC back-down would have been somewhat more palatable if it had simply stood up and told it like it was--that it gets nervous every time a lawsuit is waved in its face and it didn’t quite have the stomach for a hard-line stance on this.

So, Tonya Harding’s rights have been protected, the USOC has taken the course of least resistance, and the Lillehammer Olympics will be a TV show like never before.

The USOC let the lawyers win again. It is the American way.