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Why not auto racing in next Olympics?

 
Published July 30, 1996|Updated Sept. 16, 2005

Imagine a Dream Team of Dale Earnhardt and Al Unser Jr. going for gold against Canada's Jacques Villenueve and Scott Goodyear. Germany could enter Michael Schumacher, while Damon Hill would drive for England.

Good ol' boys and gaudy cars in the Olympics?

It might sound crazy. But what could be more Olympic than the world's best competing while covered head to toe with ads?

Of course, the odds of it happening are slim. The Games are supposed to be a test of physical exploits _ of strength, speed, endurance. Funny thing about race car drivers: They're not very fast without their race cars.

But how can you explain the litany of non-traditional sports in the Games? There's ballroom dancing, badminton, even beach volleyball. What's next?

"There should only be, like running, wrasslin', and track and field events in the Olympics," said Kyle Petty, the son of stock car king Richard Petty. "Beach volleyball's a joke. You gotta have dove hunting if you're going to have beach volleyball."

The point is, there are less traditional sports than car racing already in the Games.

If there was ever a weekend to try this pipe dream of an experiment, it was this one. The Summer Games are going on in Atlanta. About 100 miles west in Talladega, Ala., the DieHard 500 Winston Cup was raced. Fifty miles west of Talladega, they're playing Olympic soccer at Legion Field in Birmingham.

But how would you pull it off? Drivers from different classes of racing perform in different cars, making it difficult to pick the best driver.

One solution would be an overall championship in which the racers would drive equal cars _ sort of like the Internationl Race of Champions. Earnhardt the stock car driver, Emerson Fittipaldi the Indy-car driver and Steve Kinser, the dirt track king, would compete in the same cars, thus eliminating the mechanical advantage.

Andretti, who has driven everything from go-karts to midgets to Indy cars in his career, said it wouldn't work that way. You would have to do it like gymnastics, he said, with an overall champion and then individual event medals.

If it's not clear how it would work, there's no doubt what the cars would look like. The paddock at any Winston Cup track looks like a shrine to the Olympic Games and American commercialism.

Ken Schrader's Chevrolet Monte Carlo could be the official car of Olympic auto racing. The Chevy (an Olympic sponsor) shines with the red and white colors of Budweiser (another Olympic sponsor). The body is trimmed with a star-spangled blue strip, complete with Olympic rings on the hood and a decal for every medal the United States wins in the games.

Schrader, Earnhardt's fellow Chevy driver, wouldn't mind trying it.

"Those gold medals are a big deal," Schrader said.