Olympic Farewells

Rulon Gardner left Olympic wrestling with a classy bronze-medal farewell. The big five stars of the U.S. women's soccer team have played their last game. These Games will be the last we see of track star Gail Devers and swimmer Jenny Thompson, and it's likely Gary Hall, Jr. won't be back next time either. I wouldn't rule out Marion Jones announcing her retirement, either. Some Olympic fans, no doubt, believe that the next Olympics will be less exciting with some of America's brightest stars leaving the scene. This sentiment, of course, is ridiculous. The great thing about the Olympics is their resilience - not just the Olympic movement itself, but its ability to generate new athletes of greatness even as the old ones pass into history. When Mark Spitz retired from competitive swimming, for example, many swimming fans couldn't imagine American aquatic sports without him. Then along came Matt Biondi, Gary Hall, Jr., Tom Dolan, and the ultimate successor to Spitz, Michael Phelps.

To be honest, I thought a golden age of the American Olympic movement was over in 1996, when so many U.S. athletes were competing for the last time. The list included Carl Lewis, Janet Evans, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Shannon Miller, and Mary Decker Slaney, among others. Not to mention the U.S. men's field hockey team, the likes of which we'll never see again (I hope). But the Olympic movement survived, and the U.S. fielded another fine team in Sydney in 2000. Sport has an incredible ability to renew itself - unlike, say rock and roll, which never quite recovered from the Beatles's breakup and has pretty much become irrelevant . . . but that's another post.