In the year since the Olympic flame was lit in Atlanta, Strug has gone about the classic American enterprise of transforming herself from athlete to celebrity. She headlined two touring shows; visited the White House; showed up on ““Beverly Hills 90210,’’ ““Saturday Night Live’’ and ““Touched by an Angel’’; wrote two books; was featured in ads for HBO and ESPN; signed endorsement deals with Ace Bandage and Danskin, and, by posing aloft in the arms of countless strangers, gave new meaning to the cash-and-carry business. And even though Kerri’s gymnastics tour flopped, it was a million-dollar year for the 19-year-old. ““Our goal was not to oversaturate, not for her to be a star who flamed out,’’ says agent Leigh Steinberg, with whom Strug signed right out of Atlanta. ““We could have booked her every hour of every single day.''
First there is the Olympic gold - and then, sometimes, there is the real gold. ““You dream about doing it like Bruce Jenner - you come out of the Olympics, sign on the dotted lines for $10 million and never have to run on the track again,’’ says Dan O’Brien, who, like Jenner, won the Olympic decathlon and, with it, the unofficial title of ““world’s greatest athlete.’’ But the modern Olympics are so vast and overhyped that inevitably there is never enough money to go around. ““Nobody’s all over the place like Jenner was except Tiger Woods - and he wasn’t even in Atlanta,’’ says O’Brien.
O’Brien is frankly disappointed. The Olympics gave him only a ““bump up’’ to the high six figures without producing any lucrative new deals. But it’s hard to promote the stars of sports that are virtually invisible in America between Games. There is subsistence support to be had, but wrestlers, for the most part, go back to coaching, kayakers to Wall Street and archers to their day jobs. Track stars, at least, can retreat to Europe, where their talents are appreciated. Even Michael Johnson, with his brilliant three-gold-medal Olympics, didn’t quite rate the full Jenner treatment. While he bumped up from $1 million a year to about $4 million after Atlanta, he says, ““it’s not so it changed my life.''
In fact, Brad Hunt, the agent for Johnson, O’Brien and other Olympic stars, says the year before the Games can be far more important commercially than the year after; there is far more excitement anticipating the Olympics, he says, than recalling them. Virtually all of Johnson’s current corporate ties were established during the 12 months before Atlanta, after he became the first man ever to win the 200 and 400 meters at the 1995 world championships in Sweden. Nike, for example, signed Johnson in 1990, but only in the past year has it featured him prominently in TV ads in the United States. Still, company spokesman Keith Peters says Nike ““doesn’t just wait to see who’s on the gold-medal stand before opening up the checkbooks. We have a longer-term view of the Olympic cycle.''
Nike recognized that women’s sports were finally coming of age. It signed up stars like basketball’s Sheryl Swoopes and soccer’s Mia Hamm early and, thanks to their Olympic prominence, now promotes them more aggressively. Indeed, America’s women stole the show in Atlanta and are finally reaping benefits that for so long eluded them. Amy Van Dyken, the upbeat, asthmatic swimmer from Colorado, arrived in Atlanta with one corporate backer, Speedo; she left with four gold medals and corporate America clamoring for her endorsements. ““Who could believe me with my very own milk mustache?’’ she says.
No group of athletes fared better than the women basketball players, who upstaged Dream Team II in Atlanta. Their reward was two new American pro leagues. For Ruthie Bolton-Holifield, that meant the blessed end to a peripatetic life that saw her play in Sweden, Italy, Hungary and Turkey. ““Words cannot describe how good it feels to be able to stay here and play,’’ says the WNBA star. Even without a homegrown league to showcase her talents, Hamm scored ads for Pert Plus, Power Bar, Pepsi and Earth Grains cereal. And Nike featured her in a commercial touting ““the greatest soccer player in America - you’ll never see her play; the networks don’t think it’s good for ratings.’’ In Atlanta NBC offered only highlights of her team.
NBC clearly has make-or-break power for budding stars. The network decided to keep Olympic boxing out of prime time, even before the U.S. team’s uninspired Atlanta showing. As a result, the boxers who turned pro had little economic clout. The lone exception: David Reid, who won America’s sole boxing gold with a fluke one-punch knockout of a superior Cuban fighter. He got a seven-figure bonus to turn pro and made his debut on HBO. Antonio Tarver, regarded as the team’s best boxer, only won a bronze; he wound up managing himself and debuted at the Blue Horizon boxing club in Philadelphia.
Even seemingly easy money can be perilous. Michael Johnson’s match race against Canada’s Donovan Bailey last month may have been an honest effort to stir up excitement, but it proved embarrassing when Johnson came up lame and Bailey came up loud. Strug made loads of money but spent more time signing autographs than performing. And she took flak for breaking up Atlanta’s ““Magnificent 7’’ by choosing her own show over a team tour. Kerri, who was noted for changing coaches, has now changed her management team. ““The one thing you don’t want to do out of an Olympics is put the athlete in the public eye as opportunistic,’’ says Hunt. ““With the Olympics you got to be in for the long haul.''
The long haul may be the only haul. In an era of overkill, there are Olympic stars, but not Olympic immortals. New ones come along every two years. Before Atlanta, there was Dan Jansen, and in just eight months, there will be Michelle Kwan or Tara Lipinski. Many of Atlanta’s luminaries are already pointing toward Sydney 2000. ““I’m certainly not set for life,’’ says decathlete O’Brien. ““But I’m on the way, if I do things correctly, where I could be set for life.’’ The gold medals go to the swift; slow but steady may win the race for gold.^
