It is already the middle of August and in a couple of months I will have to start doing a pushup or two every day to get back in shape for winter. In my case it will be another winter of living in our house on the side of a fantastic ski hill with a chairlift gliding by about 200 feet away. Since 1937 I have either been skiing, teaching skiing or filming skiing.
While I have been waiting for the exercise season to begin, I have been watching the summer Olympics. It is no surprise to anyone that after Michael Phelps won his first 16 medals the next four years those medals were worth millions of dollars a year in endorsements. I wonder how much money the next four years will be worth now that he has 22 medals.
Way back when I was going to become a ski racer in 1948, I was faced with a dilemma. I was told by Charlie Proctor, who used to coach the Dartmouth ski team and was on the Olympic team himself in the early 1930s, “If you want to continue to shovel snow here at Yosemite on the ski patrol I can pay you 25 cents an hour. However, if you accept that money you will become a professional skier and thus ineligible to be an amateur ski racer.”
Ward Baker and I put down our shovels and began to train as amateur racers and had a lot of fun doing it. Along the way we both managed to win a little hardware and collect a lot of laughs. We reached Bogus Basin, near Boise, Snow Basin near Ogden, Utah, the Sugar Bowl, on Donner Summit, California, Mount Rose near Reno, Nevada, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Sun Valley, Idaho, and parked in all of their parking lots with our trailer. No money was ever involved but the memories we gathered are priceless.
In the early days when the Olympics were being revived in the 20th century, Jim Thorpe was forced to give up a gold medal because he once was paid $25 for competing in an athletic event.
The Olympics on TV are a great entertainment item every two years because there is the winter games as well as the one that just wrapped up.
With a one-minute TV spot selling for $300,0000 during the opening ceremony, the Olympics are a real money-making machine. During these times of 8.3 percent unemployment in America, I am all for anything that provides additional jobs. The men and women who come home with Olympic gold will spawn many different jobs to take care of the endorsements and personal appearances that all of the winners and runner-ups will be expected to do.
The only bad thing about the summer Olympics is that they only occur once every four years and what if you are an athlete and you reach your prime right in the middle of that four-year period?
I hope there is a graduate student somewhere who will add up the dollars that all of these athletes earn in the next calendar year.
Finally I wonder how two male volleyball players from Latvia, a country of 2.5 million people, were able to beat two Americans from Southern California, where they probably grew up playing volleyball and a region of almost 15 million people, and the area where beach volleyball was invented? Food for thought.