Olympics meant to the oarsmen competing became a great deal more understandable. Almost eight years of largely solitary effort was being summed up this weekend in a 7-minute race. For in a nation where sports was big business, crew was apart. It had in no way benefited from the extraordinary growth of sports, both amateur and professional, which had been caused by the coming of television. By the 1980s, the marriage between sports and television (and merchandising) was virtually complete. Sports that the electronic eye favored underwent booms of astonishing dimension and became opportunities for celebrity and affluence. Sports that the camera did not favor atrophied by comparison. Many of the other great athletes who went to Los Angeles in 1984, the basketball players or the track and field stars, would have other chances to gain their moment of national recognition on the electronic eye during long and successful careers. Jimmy Carter would go on television again and again in his career. But the rowers would not. Physically, rowing was remarkably resistant to the camera: Even if the television producers managed to rig a dolly on which the cameras could follow alongside the race, the angle of the camera might distort the finish, making a boat that was behind appear to be winning. Helicopters had been used with only marginal success. Worse, rowing at its best— the symmetry of powerful athletes pulling on their oars at precisely the right moment, in the grace of execution— seemed mechanical to the camera. When ABC covered rowing as part of an Olympiad, the network's haste to get away from this sport and on to something more telegenic was almost embarrassing. The camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen was exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was a sport without faces. That allowed it to remain an anomaly, an encapsulated nineteenth-century world in the hyped-up twentieth-century world of commercialized sports. Until television, sports had been largely divided between the worlds of the amateur and the professional. Even at the collegiate level, certain sports such as football and basketball became tinged with professionalism. But bastions of amateurism such as track and field were now beginning to fall. A top amateur track star named Carl Lewis, an immensely talented young man who might possibly win four gold medals in the summer Olympics, reportedly made $1 million a year in appearance fees and endorsements and was already a serious collector of antiques and crystal. When the Dallas Cowboys football team drafted Lewis as a possible wide receiver, Lewis's coach pointed out that they would have trouble signing him, not because Lewis did not want to play football but because their salary was likely to represent a considerable decline in income for Lewis. Some of the new affluence in track and field was a reflection of television's interest in it, although the networks put track on only when there was a vacuum in schedules or when, during Olympic years, there might be Soviets for these young (black) athletes to beat. Part of it as well was a reflection of a changing society: As America went from a blue-collar to a white-collar society and feared becoming sedentary, more people than ever before had taken up running and jogging, greatly increasing the possibility for endorsements and triggering the interest of Madison Avenue. That interest was great in ordinary years; in Olympic years, it was pervasive. The turning point of Madison Avenue's heightened interest in the Olympics was the surprise victory in the 1980 winter Olympics of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviet Union. College hockey had never before fascinated the viewing public, but a victory over the Russians was another matter. Many of the commercials aired during the 1984 winter games reflected that triumph and Madison Avenue's expectations