When competing in the Olympics, winning gold is nice. But to judge by the recent Olympic coverage, winning cardboard is even better — particularly that small rectangular patch of the stuff that appears on the front of Wheaties boxes.
To wit: throughout the 2006 Olympics, countless American journalists have made it clear that the ultimate prize of Olympic competition isn’t taking home a medal or breaking a world record. Rather, the world’s highest athletic achievement involves getting your picture plastered on a box of cereal.
“It’s all about the medal count with U.S. athletes,” Newsday reported recently. “That’s sort of the unwritten agreement we have with them. They win, we give them their own Wheaties box. They lose, we forget they even existed.”
“Think about it,” wrote the San Diego Union-Tribune. “When was the last time you saw someone who came in last on the cover of a Wheaties box?”
Ah yes, the thrill of the Wheaties box, the agony of defeat.
On Thursday, the cereal chatter reached a peak as American figure skater Sasha Cohen spun and twisted and twirled the Olympic press corps into a frenzy of Wheaties-box speculation.
“When Sasha Cohen of the United States glides onto the Palavela ice Thursday for her Olympic long program,” reported the New York Times, “she will be competing against the Russian skater Irina Slutskaya for the gold medal — and presumably against the speedskater Joey Cheek and the snowboarder Shaun White for the front of the Wheaties box.”
Alas, shortly thereafter, Cohen’s cereal-worthy status took a serious tumble.
“Sasha Cohen was poised to be the enduring icon of these sluggish Winter Olympics,” reported the Chicago Sun-Times, “the Wheaties box image, the one wonderful memory her nation has struggled to locate the last two weeks.”
“Sasha Cohen was asked to save the United States from itself, to finally give Wheaties a face for its box, to restore pride in the beleaguered United States team,” added the New York Times.
And then she fell.
“With Sasha Cohen’s failure to capture a gold medal Thursday, it seems likely that the next stop for Olympians Shaun White or Joey Cheek after Turin will be the cereal aisle of U.S. grocery stores,” the Chicago Tribune reported today. “General Mills doesn’t announce who will grace its Wheaties box until after the Winter Games are over, but all bets are on White, the snowboarder known as the Flying Tomato, or Cheek, the speedskater who donated thousands to children’s charity.”
Of course, Cohen wasn’t the first person at the 2006 Games to fall out of the Wheaties competition.
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune on U.S. curling team member Pete Fenson: “And, when the Games are over, there likely will be no Wheaties box in Fenson’s future.”
• Newsday on Ted Ligety and Toby Dawson: “Twenty-one-year-old Ted Ligety surprised the field in the Alpine combined, and Toby Dawson, a South Korean orphan who was adopted by a Vail, Colo., couple, won the freestyle moguls silver medal. But neither of those feats is going to get you on a Wheaties box …”
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Bode Miller: “He isn’t headed for the Wheaties box. He is headed for the cover of National Lampoon.”
But not every U.S. athlete at this year’s Olympics was longing to sit on breakfast tables all over the country.
“In 2010, Weir could get himself a gold in Vancouver,” reported the Boston Globe. “That might get him on a Wheaties box, but Weir’s not interested.”
“Being on a cereal box is being on a cereal box for however long, a week?” said Weir. “I want to write a tell-all book when I’m done skating. That’s what I’m really excited for. So I’ll be on the front of my book.”
Weir then suggested that, as cereals go, Wheaties are — hold on to your seats — boring.
“Oftentimes, figure skating isn’t taken seriously,” Weir was quoted in Newsday. “Judging scandals, little girls in rhinestones, little boys in rhinestones; it’s not this gridiron sport. … But if figure skating was more mainstream, it’d be a whole lot more boring. It would be more ‘Wheaties box.'”
In other words, annoyingly overexposed.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.