Pass baton of restraint, relay team

SYDNEY, Australia ---They had too much fun.

That was the problem with the way Baltimore's Bernard Williams and his 400-meter relay teammates celebrated after winning a gold medal last night in Olympic Stadium.

A little bit of joyful preening and silliness is fine at such a moment for any athlete so inclined, but Williams and his teammates just kept going. And going.

Too far.

And for too long.

They were happy beyond words and celebrating the accomplishment of a lifetime, of course, and everyone recognized that. But a coach or friend or adviser or someone needed to get to them and tell them that enough was enough, that they needed to tone it down a little.

You know, the kind of thing a parent might have to tell a young child getting carried away.

OK. That's enough.

Unfortunately, no one did that for Williams, Jon Drummond, Brian Lewis and Maurice Greene after they rolled to an easy win before 105,448 fans at Olympic Stadium and a worldwide television audience.

No one told them that it was a bad idea to turn the American flag into a head-wrap, as Williams and Lewis did.

No one told Williams that raising a comic eyebrow, bugging out his eye and striking a famous World Wrestling Federation pose was amusing enough once or twice, but not a dozen times or more.

And no one told them to stop mugging for the crowd and making silly faces after they had their gold medals around their necks, as basic Olympic civility dictates.

It's just bad form to turn a medal ceremony into an over-the-top comedy jam.

Just... so... ungraceful.

You can get away with being arrogant, chest-beating winners back home, where we're used to (or just defeated by) such behavior.

But doing it at the Olympics looks bad.

Granted, the Sydney Games have hardly set the highest example of dignity, with drug rumors flying in all directions. The drug use so obviously prevalent here is a lot more unsporting and insidious than what Williams and his teammates did.

And let's not even talk about insulting the dignity of the International Olympic Committee, which has been rocked for two years by bribery allegations currently simmering in the U.S. judicial system.

What Williams and his teammates did was a mistake bound to offend many, as affronts to accepted symbolic rituals always do, and it will only harden the preconceived notions that exist in the rest of the world, fairly or not, about Ugly American Athletes.

But really, no one should make any more of this than, say, a youngster's indiscretion at an uncle's house. No one intended any harm. No one was out to make any grandiose statements about race or politics.

It was just some guys being a little too happy and acting kind of dumb.

When the IOC banned an American sprinter from further competition in 1972 after he twirled his gold medal on his finger, there were doubts about his respect for the medal.

The only doubt in this case was whether Drummond or Lewis came up with the idea of everyone ripping off their shirts and using American flags as capes as they walked around the stadium and celebrated. There's a serious issue for you.

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos dropped their heads and lifted their hands in a black power salute on the medal stand in 1968, they had a serious agenda.

This, uh, wasn't quite as high-minded. Williams just wanted to pay homage to his hero, WWF wrestler "The Rock."

That's the level we're operating on here. And we're operating with a group of extroverted athletes who are famous for putting on public displays.

"I didn't see the [400-meter relay] celebration, but I can only imagine," said U.S. star Michael Johnson, who anchored a 1,600-meter relay team that also won a gold medal an hour later.

That relay team behaved perfectly on the stand, as did every other U.S. relay team that won a medal last night.

"What they did is not the image we want up there," said Nanceen Perry, who won a bronze medal in the women's 400-meter relay. "How can we get others to respect our flag when we don't respect our flag?"

But Brazil's da Silva Claudinei, whose relay team won the silver in the men's 400, said, "If Brazil had won the gold, we probably would have partied even harder than that."

Williams, the baby of the U.S. group, raised in one of Baltimore's toughest neighborhoods, just shrugged and said he couldn't help himself. At a high-end meet in Oregon last year, he dressed in knee-high socks with horizontal stripes, outlandish attire for track.

"I like to give the crowd a show," he said.

He said he was concerned about not letting the flag touch the ground, and he sang every word of the national anthem at the top of his voice, with a mile-wide smile you couldn't wipe away with a scrub brush. This was a national disgrace?

"We're not trying to offend anyone," Drummond said. "We're just expressing ourselves the way we know how. And with all sincerity, if anyone was offended, I apologize."

They just had too much fun. And no one told them to cool it.

Too bad. But they sure ran beautifully. And the world will continue to turn.