LILLEHAMMER / ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS : This Was a Gold Mine for the Ratings Game

So Tonya Harding has competed in the Olympics.

You were surprised?

Come on! There was no way she wouldn’t.

Look! CBS has paid $295 million to televise those Winter Olympics. You think they’re not interested in ratings?

The International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee are, too. They need those ratings because they’ll want to sell the rights again four years from now--and you think it won’t be advantageous to say, “Hey! Four years ago we had ratings through the roof! This’ll cost you double 1994!”

Then, of course, you had Nike shoes chipping in $25,000 for Tonya’s “defense fund,” whatever that was. And that’s only what they shelled out on the record. Of course, lawyers were flocking to take the case on the come. Because it was a publicity bonanza for any barrister anyway.

If anybody was stupid enough to keep Tonya Harding out of those Olympics, he should be prosecuted.

It’s Dempsey-Tunney. Snow White vs. the Wicked Witch of the West. Grand opera. Soap opera. Sure-fire box office. Great theater.

You think they’re going to let any picayune ethical considerations trifle with that? Gimme a break!

You see, it was only a few weeks ago that CBS was the laughingstock of show business. They had lost out on NFL football, to which they had the rights historically--and they had replaced it, so to speak, with this funny little sports event that was to take place somewhere up around the Arctic Circle. Guys sliding up and down hills on sticks, doing Swan Lake on skates, a whole bunch of guys named Stein and Sven and Bjorn with icicles on their beards--Peer Gynt with time clocks.

Madison Avenue like to have died laughing. It figured to sell just better than test patterns--or at least a Chevy Chase talk show rerun. Nobody this side of a ski lodge proprietor had ever heard of Nancy Kerrigan or Tonya Harding--with the possible exception of a couple of Arizona hit-men, and even they needed a picture of Kerrigan and a few phone calls to see where she hung out.

They couldn’t know they were about to make the Winter Olympics the hottest ticket on television, that they would get Connie Chung and Dan Rather and everybody else with a microphone out of Bosnia or the earthquake zone and position themselves in this frostbitten little hamlet in Norway that nobody ever heard of.

No Hollywood press agent could dream up a stunt like this to promote a flop flick.

It had everything. It was a morality play, a melodrama, a sob story, you name it. Made “Dynasty” look like a documentary.

All of a sudden, everyone knew the Winter Olympics were on. They were on the 11 o’clock news, prime time and everybody’s conversation. The world took sides. All the losers related to Harding. She was right out of trailer-court America, gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, with a vocabulary just this side of a truck driver, a tough little cookie whose mother was working on her seventh marriage, whose father was long gone. Married at 20, divorced at 20, she once fired a gun outside her apartment and settled a traffic argument with a baseball bat. If she were a fighter, she’d be Jake LaMotta. Hardly a character out of Louisa May Alcott.

She’s a better athlete than Nancy Kerrigan. She may be a better athlete than Troy Aikman. If you locked both her and Kerrigan in a room with a blackjack, Tonya would be the one to come walking out. Kerrigan would be in a coma.

But figure skating is not the Golden Gloves. It’s kind of ballet, and chances are Tchaikovsky wasn’t on the stereo a whole lot in the trailer when Tonya was growing up.

Kerrigan gets cast in a poor light, too. She starts to come off as Miss Goody Two Shoes. You get the feeling she went to bed with teddy bears and said her prayers when she was a kid. She’s probably lucky she’s able to walk, never mind skate, after the goon got through with her. She’s in the Games on a pass, too. She never made the final trials. But she didn’t need any lawyers threatening $25-million suits, either.

I mean, you think the USOC is going to leave Kerrigan off? She’s Gene Tunney, remember. The IOC needs her to make this plot thicken. Nobody’s going to turn on Channel 2 to see how Harding does against Oksana Baiul. Whoever she is.

Kerrigan is America’s Sweetheart. Right out of “Little Women,” so New England you’re surprised her name isn’t Abigail. She skates for that part of the population that still clings to the old verities. Which doesn’t think that winning justifies everything.

Kerrigan can still turn this into a Disney movie. A happy ending. If Harding wins, it becomes an adult western. X-rated. Kerrigan is Grace Kelly, Tonya is Clyde’s Bonnie.

But you see what they’ve done to the Olympics? The ratings are up astronomically over the last Winter Games at Albertville in ’92. Why? The rest of the cast of characters is relatively the same, sometimes identical. The events are the same.

No, what is different is the Nancy-Tonya Show. All by itself, it has elevated the Winter Olympics into the big time. The Bum vs. the Lady is a scenario that has blockbuster written all over it. The tabloids love it, the 11 o’clock news loves it, Norway loves it, CBS loves it, Nike loves it, Reebok loves it, Chrysler loves it.

And believe me, the IOC loves it. Ban Tonya?! You gotta be kidding?! Shoot Santa Claus?! Gidouddahere!