WORLD SPORTS SCENE : USA Track & Field Drops This Meet’s Baton

The annual indoor track and field meet at the Sports Arena might live to see its 37th year after all.

Promoter Al Franken has been unable to find a title sponsor to replace Sunkist, which pulled out last winter after 26 years, but he said last week that he believes he has enough secondary sponsors to stage the meet on a reduced scale.

He already has the Feb. 24 date at the Sports Arena and a television contract with ESPN. All he needs now are athletes.

He figures on support from area high schools, although they might be asked for the first time to pay entry fees, and colleges. His concern is whether he can attract world-class athletes with diminished dollars.

Franken should be applauded for attempting to keep the sport alive in Los Angeles at least through an Olympic year.

But where has USA Track & Field been during this crisis? Officials from the national governing body neither tried to help Franken nor replaced his meet with one of their own, seemingly willing to forfeit the nation’s second-largest market. Southern California has already lost three major meets--two indoor and one outdoor--since the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Is it any wonder that the sport is vanishing? *

The 14th and final test event of the year for the 1996 Summer Games last week, the IBM Atlanta Gymnastics Invitational, not only was a challenge for Olympic organizers but also for the city.

Gridlock was feared as crowds of 14,982 for the gymnastics on one side of the Georgia Dome and 12,755 for a Georgia Tech-Oklahoma basketball game on the other side and 11,217 for an Atlanta-Miami NBA game in the Omni gathered within a block of each other Friday night. But no extraordinary traffic snarls were reported.

As soon as one cause for indigestion passes, however, another arises.

An accountant for a civic oversight committee warned Olympic organizers that they are perilously close to losing money on their $1.6 billion budget. Although they are comforted by a contingency fund of $30 million, IOC vice-president Richard Pound of Canada said, “Everyone there is going to have a lot of Rolaids between now and [the closing ceremony].”

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Add acid indigestion: Atlanta organizers want to honor Jim Thorpe by sending the torch relay through his birthplace. The problem is that they chose Yale, Okla., where he did not live until he was in his 30s. His birthplace is 50 miles away in Prague, Okla.

Are the people of Prague steamed? You bet.

“Atlanta’s not wanting this to be the ‘Bubba Olympics,’ but they can’t even get Jim Thorpe’s birthplace right,” Sam Muzny of the Prague Historical Society told The Sporting News. “The only place Jim Thorpe isn’t big is . . . in Georgia. So it is the ‘Bubba Olympics.’ ”

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Fallout was immediate from reports that Bill Hybl of Colorado Springs, Colo., among the front-runners to become U.S. Olympic Committee president next year, might be the target of an investigation by an internal ethics committee into whether grants the foundation he chairs gave to Olympic sports governing bodies represent a conflict of interest.

Hybl, who said the foundation stopped making grants to those organizations when he decided last March to seek the presidency, has withdrawn an offer of five years of free office space to the International Softball Federation if it moves its headquarters from Oklahoma City to Colorado Springs.

Ironically, Hybl formed the USOC’s ethics committee when he took over as interim president in 1991 after Robert Helmick resigned in a conflict-of-interest scandal.

World Scene Notes

Olympic 100-meter champion Linford Christie of Great Britain appears serious about retirement and is coaching Jamaican sprinter Juliet Cuthbert. “He’s killing me,” she says. “I’ve never lifted so many weights in my life.” . . . Joan Benoit Samuelson, winner of the first Olympic women’s marathon in 1984, announced she will try to make the 1996 team, but three-time New York marathon champion Alberto Salazar looks doubtful after recent surgery on his right foot. . . . Organizers of the 1998 Winter Olympics at Nagano, Japan have voted to add snowboarding to the program. It must be approved by the International Olympic Committee.

Roger Clemens says he would like to play four more years, then retire after pitching for the United States in the 2000 Summer Olympics at Sydney, Australia if international baseball officials vote eligibility for professionals. . . . The U.S. women’s basketball team continues to roll over highly-ranked college teams, winning all seven games so far by an average of more than 40 points. On a leave of absence from Stanford, Coach Tara VanDerveer took the team to the Cardinal gym and won, 100-63. . . . Bob Ctvrtlik was the only U.S. player selected to volleyball’s World Centennial Gala All-Star team. The U.S. men started play last weekend in the World Cup in Japan with a loss to Brazil. After an 0-4 start, the U.S. women finished their World Cup in Japan on Friday with a 6-5 record.

Figure skater Michelle Kwan of Torrance, who won the first two Grand Prix women’s titles this year, will attempt to add the Nations Cup on Ice to the list this week at Gelsenkirchen, Germany. National champion Nicole Bobek, off to a slow start, also will compete there. . . . Planning ahead: Malaysia has expressed interest in bidding for the 2020 Summer Olympics. . . . Scott Davis of Cerritos, who has served as the public address announcer at the Mt. SAC Relays for several years, has been named assistant meet director. . . . In rating this year’s Grand Prix meets, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, which governs track and field, again listed Zurich, Switzerland first. New York and San Jose were 19th and 27th, respectively.