VANCOUVER — This was a sight with which New York City had grown all too familiar by the winter of 1988: George Steinbrenner, standing behind a lectern, speaking defiantly and gesticulating wildly. Only this time his purview wasn’t merely the Yankees and his chief opposition, the American League East.
This time, he was talking about the U.S. Olympic team.
And he was putting the world on notice.
“Winning medals has always been the primary goal and will always be the bottom line,” Steinbrenner said one late February afternoon in 1988, seeming, as always, as if he were bursting into a room, looking for a fire, even if there wasn’t any visible.
“I don’t think the American people will ever think the socialist system is better, but we want to be sure that our athletes have the best opportunities. And I’m here to find out what’s right and what’s wrong.”
This was at the end of the most cataclysmic Olympics in American memory, which also happened to be the last time they were held in Canada. The U.S. would finish with a paltry six medals overall, all in either figure skating or speed skating. Bonnie Blair and Brian Boitano won the only U.S. golds. Dan Jansen had fallen, but the Americans couldn’t even fail with flair because that was the Olympics of Eddie the Eagle, the British ski jumper who leaped (sort of) into lasting infamy.
Steinbrenner, until then a quiet member of the USOC leadership, fumed as he watched the Americans bumble around Calgary, and one morning was approached by his friend, Al Neuharth, then the publisher of USA Today, and told the committee wanted him to take an active role. Steinbrenner, of course, knew how the media would react to that.
“No,” Neuharth said. “They’ll understand. We want a winner!”
So Steinbrenner went to a press conference, he pounded the podium, he talked about how he was “appalled” by the way U.S. athletes had to scrounge for training time, for gas money, for rent, saying, “I find the reports about that wonderful girl from Champaign rather disgusting” — a reference to Blair, who’d been forced to sneak into rinks in her hometown at 6 a.m. in order to train.
So what happened?
The next day, USA Today — his pal’s own paper — ran a headline that read this way: “Why Steinbrenner? Wrong Choice!”
Just George being George, the rest of the country figured.
Only a funny thing happened. Steinbrenner took the job seriously. His committee issued a 21-page report, and wound up raising the ante for Olympic athletes significantly, a good sum of the money coming out of Steinbrenner’s own checkbook. Other things helped: the splintering of the USSR, the reunification of Germany, the crash of the rest of the Iron Curtain, an influx of America-friendly events such as snowboarding and freestyle skiing. It was a perfect storm in many ways.
But it was Steinbrenner and his blustery vision that started it, who forced many Americans to believe that the Winter Games were just as essential to American athletic pride as the Summer Games. The strides were slow at first: 11 medals in 1992 at Albertville, France; 13 apiece in Lillehammer in ’94 and Nagano in ’98 to an all-time high of 34 in Salt Lake City in 2002.
But it might not have been until Wednesday — when the U.S. won six medals in one day, including golds by three athletes (Lindsey Vonn, Shaun White, Shani Davis) whose fame is worldwide — that Steinbrenner’s dusty dream from nearly 22 years ago finally bore its ultimate fruit.
“We can do better,” he’d blustered that day, sounding for all the world like he was howling at the moon. “We should do better. The American public deserves the very best we can give ’em. We want to make sure our athletes have everything they need to pursue the goal of gold.”
Twenty-two years later, 600 miles west of that podium in Calgary, American athletes are dominating their own podiums. They have their own ambitions to thank for that. And someone else’s, too.
How hot was it? So hot…
The Olympics are about color. They are about pageantry. And they are always about buses.
Buses get you where you need to be. Especially at the Winter Games, where the skiing events often take place on distant mountainsides. That’s OK. Our hosts are nothing if not affable, cheerful and helpful. Sometimes, in fact, they are a little too affable, cheerful, and helpful.
For instance, if your bus catches fire.
We were all half-asleep, heading back from Whistler Mountain on Wednesday. Amid the snoring Euros there was me. There was Costello from The Post. There was Buffalo Bucky Gleason. And there was Gannett’s Mike Lopresti, a veteran of 15 Olympics.
“SMOKE!” someone shouted. That’s odd, we thought. Then opened our eyes. And damned if it wasn’t smoke. Thick smoke. Oil-based smoke.
“OK!” the affable, cheerful bus driver replied. And kept driving. Affably. Meanwhile, the back of the bus looked like an outtake from “Backdraft.” “What would you like me to do?” the driver asked. Affably.
“STOP THE @#$#-ING BUS!” another, not-so-affable voice, sounding quite like my own, roared. Finally, we were stopped.
Lopresti juked like Adrian Peterson on his way out the bus, and we followed our lieutenant to a busy street and found a cab. The driver — AFFABLY! — insisted a replacement bus was imminent. We’d had our fill of affable.