"The Olympic movement tends to bring together in a radiant union all the qualities which guide mankind to perfection."

Thus gushed the creator of the modern Olympic Games, a short, pedantic French baron named Pierre de Coubertin. His idealistic musing was particularly ironic, since Baron de Coubertin was originally inspired to reinvent the Games chiefly as a means of spurring the French into greater physical fitness than their bellicose German neighbors. Stung by Bismarck's defeat of Louis Napoleon in 1871, Coubertin wanted France to win the next European war. Nonetheless, the baron gradually came to believe his own words; ever since, the aristocrats of the Olympic movement have felt obliged to play similar windy tunes when searching for ways to define the true significance of the Games.

In short, there has always been a tug-of-war between Olympic rhetoric and Olympic reality.

Looking back over the 100-year history of the modern Games, one finds that they have never come close to meeting the lofty claims laid on them by Olympic grandees for so many decades. Instead the Games have always been an infinitely earthy human enterprise, awash in sweat, blood, tears and--in recent times--urine samples. They have been lifted by the exalted moments of athletic achievement most fervent supporters choose to remember. But they have also been flawed by bad judgment and bad temper, infected with brazen lies and howling hypocrisies. They have only slowly and reluctantly come to respond to some of the great social changes that were occurring outside the Olympic stadiums: the demise of aristocratic amateurism; the rise of totalitarian regimes that recognized no rules of sportsmanship or fair play; the ongoing emancipation of women; the ever growing global power of commercialism. Like the British monarchy, the Olympics ultimately changed and adapted themselves to these realities--but often just barely. Nonetheless, as the Games enter their second century, they have attained a dazzling level of athletic accomplishment and planetary popularity.

Over the years the single longest-running myth upheld by Olympic leaders--and still believed by some--is that the Games operate in a pristine zone of space and time where there are no politics, no animus, no rivalries beyond the purity of individual competition. Avery Brundage, the millionaire Chicago curmudgeon who ruled the International Olympic Committee for two decades, said at his I.O.C. presidential inaugural in 1952, "If the Games become contests between the hired gladiators of various nations with the idea of building national prestige or proving that one system of government or another is better than another, they will lose all purpose." By then, of course, the adoption of Olympic athletes as national gladiators had already been the rule for years, not the exception. Next the branded hiring may be by companies. Mark McCormack, the U.S. agent-promoter who is widely regarded as the most powerful entrepreneur in international sport, coolly predicts, "An Olympic athlete running in a Hertz uniform is a generation away."

Perhaps the most blatant of Olympic hypocrisies upheld over the past 100 years was the nonnegotiable rule that each athlete had to swear that he was an amateur before he could compete. Athletes could not even be paid for time taken off from their other work. The cult of amateurism was from the beginning an assertion of social-class values, and it led to heated disputes, athletic boycotts and breakaways. From the 1950s on, most of the really good athletes received sub-rosa government pay (in socialist countries) or at least athletic scholarships (in the U.S.). "Shamateurism" became so rampant that Jack Kelly, the great Olympic sculler and president of the Amateur Athletic Union (1970 to 1971), said, "As many as two-thirds of the athletes signing the Olympic oath are committing perjury. Instead of teaching the great lessons of our sport--honesty, integrity and fair play--our code sanctions the worst."

Life's forces, not eternal verities, have shaped the modern Olympic Games. They have been quite madly chameleonic--utterly unpredictable and totally dissimilar from one quadrennial spectacle to the next. Every one of the 22 Summer Olympics in this Olympic century (war excised 1916, 1940 and 1944) has had a radically different character--each dependent entirely on the politics, the economics, the mores, the fads and the spirit of the times.

Among other things, the modern Olympics have served as a showcase for Nazi efficiency, a launching pad for the careers of Hollywood Tarzans, a surrogate battlefield in the cold war, a floodlighted stage in the world theater of protest, a slaughterhouse for terrorists, a passion play where innocent amateurs pit themselves against hard-boiled professionals, a sizzling TV sitcom that holds in thrall 3.5 billion viewers, and a megamachine for merchandising and product packaging that is second to none on earth. They have also brought onstage the modern woman and the black athlete and have served to announce the arrival of dozens of nations once considered subordinate or inferior--at best, pat-on-the-head colonies.

But in the beginning, for the first and almost only time, the resurrected Olympics were a sweet, apolitical, amateurish sporting carnival held in Athens during 10 unseasonably cold days in April 1896. No world records were broken by any of the 311 contestants (all male) from 13 countries. The non-Greek competitors were mainly college boys on a rollicking holiday. Ellery H. Clark, a Harvard man who won golds in both the long jump and the high jump, wrote of the jolly reception Athens gave the American team: "There was a brass band of many pieces. There was champagne--much of it--and until we were able to explain the reason for our abstinence, international complications threatened. Training? A strange word. Come, a glass of wine to pledge friendship. No? Strange people, these Americans."

Another college man, George Stuart Robertson of Oxford, became an Olympian after seeing an ad for the Games in a London travel agent's window. "The Greek classics were my proper academic field, so I could hardly resist a go at the Olympics, could I?" he said. He was a hammer thrower at Oxford, but there was no such event in Athens, so he entered the shot put and the discus, finishing, by his own account, fourth and sixth respectively. He spent $11 for his trip to Athens, met King George of Greece ("Nice chap, sense of humor") as well as Baron de Coubertin ("funny little man the baron") and found the Olympic experience most amusing. "There wasn't any prancing about with banners and nonsense like that; I suppose we had some kind of Olympic fire, but I don't remember it if we did. It was all a splendid lark."

From Athens the games went to Paris in 1900, and the contrasts between the two events could not have been uglier. The Games of the Second Olympiad were shoehorned in as an almost invisible appendage to the five-month-long International Exposition. Coubertin had been effectively ostracized from his own creation by exposition officials who derided his ideas as "shabby and undignified." The word Olympic appeared nowhere in official programs, and many athletes had no idea they were competing for Olympic medals.

There were fierce squabbles between the French and Americans over scheduling events on the Sabbath and between the French and everyone else over the abominable competitive conditions. Swimmers raced in the dirty waters of the Seine aided by a current so fast that the gold medalist in the 220-yd. freestyle beat the world record by 13 sec. Track events were held on a 500-m undulating grass oval instead of a proper cinder track, and the marathon was run over a labyrinthine route through the back streets of Paris. The winner just happened to be a local baker's delivery boy who knew the course and all its shortcuts like the soles of his feet.

After Paris the Olympics moved in August '04 to oven-hot St. Louis, Missouri, where their international character suffered along with the athletes. Because of the daunting distance from Europe and press reports that the sole fare in St. Louis restaurants was buffalo meat, only a sergeant's guard of non-Americans turned up. The U.S. won 244 medals (78 gold), while the entire remainder of the 12-nation field had 37 (18 gold), with Germany placing second with 12, and Canada third with six. The Games were again overshadowed by a World's Fair, this one marking the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Many Olympic events were interspersed with races for Young Men's Christian Association members and novices. The marathon was a farce in which the initial first-place finisher was disqualified for riding in a car, and the ultimate winner confessed that he had loaded up on strychnine and brandy to gain the stamina to finish.

At this point, with two fiascoes in a row, the fledgling Olympic movement was in danger of going under. Luckily, the Greeks stepped in once again. In the spring of 1906 they celebrated the 10th anniversary of the I Olympiad by acting as host of a clean, efficient festival in Athens called the Intercalated Games. Coubertin opposed the affair and didn't attend, and none of the athletic events were counted in official Olympic records. But in retrospect, its success probably saved the Games for the rest of the 20th century, because--incredibly--the 1908 Olympics were more fraught with ill will and bad vibes than any previous.

Originally, Coubertin had chosen Rome for the Games of the Fourth Olympiad. As he explained in his usual hyperinflated manner, "I wanted Olympism, after its return from the excursion to utilitarian America, to don once again the sumptuous toga, woven of art and philosophy, in which I had always wanted to clothe her." But Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1906, obliterating several towns and straining Italian government finances too heavily to underwrite an Olympics.

The Games were moved to London, where there were other eruptions. Initially, they had to do with the fact that the U.S. flag was inexplicably missing from the array of banners displayed at the Olympic stadium. The Brits claimed they hadn't been able to find a proper-size U.S. flag. The angry Americans didn't believe that for a moment. From then on the Games deteriorated into one of the uglier spite fights in sports history.

At the opening ceremonies, the American flag bearer issued a stunning insult by refusing to follow formal protocol of the day and dip the flag as he passed King Edward VII. (This remains the U.S. practice today.) The King, in turn, protested "the barbarous cries" of American spectators. The feud spilled onto the track. In the 400-m final, with a field of one Brit and three Americans, British observers caught--and disqualified--one American for obstructing their man. But when the race was reset with the Brit against two Yanks, both Americans refused to run, and Lieut. Wyndham Halswelle covered the 400 m alone to win gold for his King.

More skulduggery occurred in the marathon when British officials bodily carried a stricken Italian, Dorando Pietri, across the finish line so he could beat an onrushing American, Johnny Hayes. Cooler heads prevailed later, and Pietri was disqualified, while Hayes got the gold. A result of the British-American squabbling was to put the London Olympics on front pages around the world--the first taste of the press coverage that would engulf them through the rest of the century.

The Games of 1912 in Stockholm were a model of clean, calm, up-to-date Scandinavian efficiency. There was a minimum of political upheaval, though bad blood simmered between Finland and Russia. Under Russian domination since 1809, the Finns demanded to compete under their own flag. The I.O.C. acceded, much to the Russians' irritation. The hostility climaxed in a fierce Greco-Roman semifinal wrestling match between a Finn named Alfred Askiainen and a Russian named Martin Klein. The two grappled for 11 hours until finally the Russian managed to pin the Finn. But Klein was so exhausted that he was unable to wrestle for the gold the next day, and a Swede got it by default.

After Stockholm's polished spectacle, there was at last an abiding sense of optimism about the Olympic movement. Everyone was eagerly anticipating another splendid affair in 1916--in Berlin. But Kaiser Wilhelm I declared war in 1914, the Games were canceled, and Baron de Coubertin made a painful decision that the Olympics would be better preserved through the war in the peaceful environs of neutral Switzerland. Early in 1915 he moved the entire Olympic bureaucracy--meaning mainly his family and household staff--from Paris to Lausanne, where it remains today.

The 1920 Games in Antwerp were a gloomy affair. No one felt like celebrating at a sports extravaganza after the slaughter of the flower of Europe's youth. The teams of the defeated nations--Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey--were not invited. Russia did not compete either: after the revolutionary triumph of 1917, the Bolsheviks withdrew from such bourgeois pursuits as the Olympics and boycotted until 1952. Antwerp had only a year to prepare, and the stadium was unfinished. The swimming and diving competitions took place in an old moat. Spectators were so sparse that Belgium's King Albert remarked during the opening ceremonies, "All this is quite nice, but it certainly lacks people."

The people most notably lacking were women. Coubertin had personally opposed the inclusion of females in the Olympics as "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect." An early I.O.C. statement on the proper place of the sexes declared, "We feel that the Olympic Games must be reserved for the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, arts for its setting, and female applause as its reward."

Women were limited to applause at the first modern Games, but in Paris in 1900, 11 of them (compared with 1,319 men) competed in two suitably sedate games: lawn tennis and golf. In St. Louis in '04, eight lonely women competed at archery. In London in '08 no fewer than 36 women (compared with 1,999 men) competed in tennis, archery and, oddly enough, figure skating.

Even among the male chauvinists, the all-male American Olympic Committee stood out. It had a rule that barred women from entering any events where long skirts weren't required. Naturally, no U.S. contestants were allowed into the women's swimming and diving events, introduced to the Olympics for the first time at the Stockholm Games of '12. Women from Australia, Great Britain, Germany and Sweden won medals. Ironically, their participation was opposed by some ardent feminists who feared that curvaceous young women in swimsuits might attract more lip-smacking voyeurs than legitimate sports fans. Only 64 women appeared in '20 at Antwerp (compared with 2,543 men), among them the U.S.'s first official female team--mostly swimmers and divers.

The 1924 Games were scheduled for Amsterdam, but Coubertin requested a move to Paris because he planned to resign as I.O.C. president and wanted his final Games to be on his home turf. It was a triumphant valedictory. At the opening ceremonies Coubertin, then 61, surrounded himself with royalty--including the Prince of Wales, the Crown Prince of Romania and the regent of Abyssinia. Crowds of up to 60,000 attended events, and a record 3,092 athletes from 44 countries competed. It was easily the best Olympics to date, and the baron exited gracefully, saying, "My work is done." He never attended another Olympics, although six more, Winter and Summer, occurred before he died of a stroke in 1937.

With his departure, the antifeminist dam broke--sort of--in 1928. More than twice as many women entered the Amsterdam Olympics as ever before--still only 290, compared with 2,724 men. The better news was that women were allowed for the first time to compete in track and field, the centerpiece events in any Olympics. Only five female competitions were allowed (compared with 22 for men), but they featured some unforgettable performances. The first women's athletics event in Olympic history, the discus throw, was won by the brawny Pole Halina Konopacka, who shattered her own world record by 45 cm and beat the runner-up by 2.53 m.

The women's 800-m run was the most controversial event at Amsterdam. Antifeminists claimed it was dangerous for women to run so far, "a feat of endurance," ranted the London Daily Mail, "that makes women become old too soon." The race was won by Germany's Lina Radke, who set a world record that lasted 16 years. Alas, several women collapsed after the race, and Radke was swooning with exhaustion. This gave ammunition to the too-old-too-soon critics, and authorities outlawed the 800-m event from the Olympics for the next 32 years, leaving the 200-m sprint as the longest female race until 1960.

Even as the issue of women in the Games was slowly being resolved, the endlessly debated question of amateurism remained a point of bitter dispute in the 1920s. "Broken time" payments (compensation for time taken away from work in order to compete) were forbidden by the I.O.C. But powerful international sports groups such as the soccer federation disagreed and ultimately broke away to create the monumentally popular World Cup tournament, which began in 1930 in Montevideo. At its congress in 1925, the I.O.C. wrote a new rule defining amateurism: "An amateur is one who devotes himself to sport for sport's sake without deriving from it, directly or indirectly, the means of existence. A professional is one who derives the means of existence entirely or partly from sport." This was clearer than previous formulations, but no one could miss the class bias toward the rich and aristocratic. The I.O.C. also explicitly outlawed all forms of government training that might have made the definition of amateur a little more democratic.

All of this would turn into transparent hypocrisy in the cold war era of the Olympic century, but in these early years the bite of the amateur rule was quite real--and, at times, deadly. Just before the '32 Games were to begin in Los Angeles, the International Amateur Athletic Federation and the I.O.C. accused the greatest distance runner of all time, Finland's Paavo Nurmi, of taking money to run. Already the winner of nine gold medals in the three previous Olympics, Nurmi was about to crown a superhuman career by running his first Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. Track fans were furious, and Nurmi vehemently denied he had been paid. Unfortunately, the charge was probably true; he had long been known for having "the lowest heartbeat and the highest asking price" of any athlete on earth. Nurmi spent the Games in the stands with the likes of Joe E. Brown, Bing Crosby and the Marx Brothers.

The '32 games in Los Angeles drew the smallest field of competitors--1,281 men, 127 women--since 1904, because of the Depression and the cost of traveling to the U.S. West Coast. Six months before the Games were to begin, not one foreign country had agreed to attend; interest at home was nil too. Even President Herbert Hoover rejected an invitation to the Games, saying, "It's a crazy thing, and it takes some gall to expect me to be a part of it." Eventually, 37 countries took part.

By contrast, ideology was the potential stumbling block at the 1936 Olympics. Millions of Americans didn't even want to send a U.S. team to Berlin because of Hitler's rabid anti-Semitic policies. Campaigns to boycott Berlin also took root in France, Great Britain and Canada. I.O.C. loyalists insisted the anti-Nazi movement was the product solely of communist and Jewish agitation. Avery Brundage, then president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, warned both to "keep your hands off American sport" and proclaimed, "No nation since ancient Greece has displayed a more truly national public interest in the Olympic spirit than you find in Germany. We can learn much from Germany."

A Gallup poll in 1935 on a boycott indicated 43% of the U.S. populace favored it. At an Amateur Athletic Union congress the same year, the vote on whether to support sending a team to Berlin ended with a sliver-thin majority--58 1/4 votes to 55 3/4 votes--in favor of going. Ultimately, a U.S. team of 384 competed in Berlin, and the other would-be boycotters sent teams too.

Hitler's government profited greatly from the Games. With an unprecedented $30 million invested, the Nazis proved their technological superiority with new electronic photo-finish equipment, closed-circuit TV and state-of-the-art press facilities, including a 41-nation radio network, the first telex transmissions of copy and a Zeppelin to fly newsreel film to other European capitals. The Nazi Olympic Village was secretly designed for fast post-Olympic conversion to military use. The Third Reich, with its carefully selected and illegally subsidized army of Aryan Olympic athletes, gave a proud Hitler his desired sense of racial superiority, winning 89 medals, 33 gold, while the runner-up U.S. got 56, with 24 gold.

To widespread Aryan chagrin, four of the U.S. golds were won by the heroic African American Jesse Owens, and three other "black auxiliaries," as the Nazis called them, also won medals. Although Germany's virulent racism put Owens & Co. in a spotlight, black athletes had competed for decades in the Olympics without great hullabaloo or hostility. The Olympic charter had long made color and creed irrelevant among competitors, saying, "The goal of the Olympic movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind."

Hitler's grimmer ambitions prevented the '40 and '44 Olympics from happening at all. In 1948, still war-torn London was filled with rubble left by German bombs; food rationing remained in place; and money was so short that the Olympic Village was a wartime R.A.F. barracks. The time seemed too hard to be paying for something so frivolous as a sports festival, and some newspapers editorialized bitterly against it. Nonetheless, crowds were huge and exuberant, and it seemed that fabled Czech runner Emil Zatopek spoke for much of the world when he said, "The revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out. I went into the Olympic Village in 1948, and suddenly there were no more frontiers, no more barriers. Just the peoples meeting together. It was wonderfully warm."

But not for long. The cold war brought its first eyeball-to-eyeball Olympic confrontation in 1952 in Helsinki, and for almost all of the next 40 years, the Games were held hostage to U.S.-U.S.S.R. ideological rivalry. The Russians hadn't competed in an Olympics since 1912, so no one knew what to expect when they came to Helsinki. A month before the Games, Avery Brundage organized a 14 1/2-hr. Olympic Fund Telethon to raise $500,000 to finance the U.S. team. Bob Hope was the emcee, and he set the tone: "I guess old Joe Stalin thinks he's going to show up our soft, capitalistic Americans. We've got to cut him down to size." U.S. athletes responded nicely in Helsinki, winning 14 gold medals in men's track and field while the Soviets got none, and edging them 76-71 in the overall medal count.

At Melbourne in 1956, the Soviets turned the medal tables and trounced the Americans, 98 medals to 74. After the Games, the U.S.S.R. reported that its athletes had pulled off this victory despite heavy-handed efforts by U.S. agents to sabotage them. "The American intelligence service did its utmost to force upon Soviet athletes an acquaintance with young women," reported the Literary Gazette, an official Communist Party paper. "Its agents more than insistently importuned them to 'have a good time.'"

The big rivalry in Melbourne, however, was a fierce and bloody match between the water-polo teams of Hungary and the Soviet Union. Earlier in the fall of '56, Hungarian freedom fighters had rebelled against the Soviet regime in Budapest and taken over the city for a time. Then Soviet tanks rolled over the ragged rebels, crushing the brief revolution. The water-polo game in far-off Melbourne became an extension of the battle in Budapest, and in a match filled with fists and fouls and the threat of riots from an emotional anti-Soviet crowd, the Hungarians avenged their countrymen, crushing the Soviets 4-0. Then, to the delight of the free world, they won the gold medal.

During the fiercest decades of the cold war, Olympic amateurism was almost as volatile an issue in the East-West conflict as political ideology. The governments of the U.S.S.R. and all its Iron Curtain satellites brazenly subsidized their athletes by paying them for jobs they never performed--border guard, customs agent, policeman, military officer, etc. It was cynical to a scandalous degree, yet throughout the '50s, '60s and '70s, the I.O.C. and the international sports federations turned a blind eye to the violations. I.O.C. president Brundage insisted in the late '60s, "I have been offered no proof, no documentation, that would require action against Iron Curtain athletes. You must have proof, you know, and that is hard to come by."

The other side of the illegal coin was the athletic scholarship, a form of subsidy given to thousands of American college athletes. This was ordinarily a pittance compared with the full-time support given to Iron Curtain Olympians, yet it also mocked the I.O.C.'s code. Third World countries too would routinely subsidize their best athletes in hopes of gaining worldwide recognition by winning a medal or two. Parry O'Brien, a gold-medal U.S. shot putter who competed in four Games from '52 to '64, once declared levelly, "I have never known a name Olympic athlete who was an amateur."

1964.

But if the I.O.C. was unwilling to face the ugly truth about its code of amateurism in those years, it didn't turn away from another explosive issue--the blatant racism of South Africa. Apartheid had been the country's declared policy since 1948; by 1959 the white-only South African teams finally offended I.O.C. executive-board members enough that they accused South African leaders of violating Olympic principles. The South Africans declared that their black athletes simply weren't of Olympic caliber. Flimsy though the alibi was, the I.O.C. dithered for five more years before ruling, at last, that South Africa could no longer compete in the Olympic Games, beginning with Tokyo in

Meanwhile, a new force was brewing that would ultimately transform the Olympic movement more than any battle involving racism, amateurism or ideology. The force was television--specifically U.S. network television--and it made its first mark on the Olympic landscape during the magnificent Rome Games of 1960. Played out before the ancient cityscape, with part of the marathon course run on the stones of the Appian Way, these were among the most beautiful Olympics. And thanks to TV, they were seen by more people than ever before. In the U.S. the CBS network aired night after night of filmed footage in prime time. Eurovision was also showing parts of the Games live in Western Europe. This was the beginning of the revolution that would soon transform the Olympics from a relatively esoteric spectator entertainment into a worldwide extravaganza eagerly viewed with unblinking attention by more than 2 billion people from opening to closing ceremony.

There was no doubt about the importance of the Olympics in sports-crazy Japan. The Japanese spent almost $3 billion on the Tokyo Games in 1964, far more than any other host country had. In return, they got one of the best Olympics ever, plus a stupendous urban-renewal face-lift in a city that had been for decades a shambles from earthquakes and World War II bombing raids. Beyond that, the Olympics did much to erase Japan's dark image as a defeated enemy nation and spotlight its huge economic potential. "Without the magic of the Olympic name," said Tokyo Mayor Ryotaro Azuma, "we might not have got the investment we needed to rise as a world trade power." The theme of the Olympic extravaganza as a wise civic investment was growing more embedded.

Starker issues were at the fore in Mexico City in 1968. Rioting students, protesting against the diversion of money from poverty programs to sports circuses, were slaughtered by government troops in the Plaza of Three Cultures 10 days before the Games began. An air of fear and distrust hung over events from then on. The famous black gloves raised by sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos on the victory stand to protest U.S. racial policies caused fistfights among Americans in the stadium. Both athletes were expelled from the Olympic Village; their visas were revoked, and they were deported like criminals. Later Carlos said, "Ours was not a political act; it was a moral act--and that is all right." U.S. heavyweight boxer George Foreman protested the Smith-Carlos protest by stalking around the ring waving a small American flag after he kayoed a Soviet. Foreman was not reprimanded for his political gesture.

In Munich four years later, aging I.O.C. president Brundage faced a far worse crisis--plainly the worst in Olympic history--and he had to make the most controversial decision of his controversial career. Before dawn on the 11th day of the Games, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September movement kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes, held them hostage all day in the Olympic Village and murdered two of them. That night the terrorists took the nine remaining Israelis to a helicopter at the Munich airport. In the course of a police attack on the craft, all nine hostages died, along with three terrorists.

Brundage faced the question of whether to halt the Games. He didn't have any doubts. He muscled the I.O.C. into passing a resolution that the Games would continue after a day of mourning. As he explained in a speech that day, "I am sure that the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on."

A fierce storm of dissent arose, particularly among journalists. The New York Times's Red Smith scalded Brundage and his peers: "Walled off in their dream world, appallingly unaware of the realities of life and death, the aging playground directors who conduct this quadrennial muscle dance ruled that a little bloodshed must not be permitted to interrupt play." But the government of Israel agreed with Brundage because, as Prime Minister Golda Meir put it, "the Israeli government does not negotiate with terrorists."

Though the Olympics had for years been a toy, a tool, a theater for politics, they had not previously served as a killing ground. The Munich monstrosity provoked a deeper round of soul searching about the meaning of Olympic rhetoric in a hyperpoliticized age. The editors of Sports Illustrated in the U.S., for example, were appalled and called for a drastic response: "The murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich is a disaster of a kind that must not be repeated, and one way to ensure that is to abolish the Olympic Games. If the organizers of the Games cannot prevent them from becoming a political arena, there is no sporting sense in holding them. Recent evidence is that the organizers are unable to do just that." Olympic organizers paid no heed, and neither did most Olympic fans.

When the 1976 Games got under way in Montreal, however, security was an obsession. Tension crackled in the air, and the city was an armed fortress. Sixteen thousand police and soldiers were on duty with a budget of $100 million for security alone. Just before the Games began, an Argentine official pulled his car into a no parking spot near the equestrian venue. A Montreal cop ordered him out, but the Argentine couldn't understand French, and he was beaten up. Instead of apologizing, a police spokesman said the man was lucky the Games hadn't started, because "he could have been shot." As it happened, there was no shooting in Montreal, though the Games were not without political upheaval: 24 African nations angrily stalked out because the I.O.C. refused to ban New Zealand after its rugby team began a three-month tour of South Africa.

Montreal might have done better with fewer police and more accountants. Canadian dollars were pouring down the drain in volumes never seen before on sacred Olympian territory. The original estimated price tag when Montreal successfully bid for the Games in 1971 had been less than $310 million. By the time officials added up all the unplanned expenses for security, labor strife, mammoth budget overruns and a grandiose stadium, the tab was more than $1.5 billion--a debt still not paid off. Charles Lynch, then a columnist for the Southam newspaper chain, wrote, "My longtime support for the Montreal Olympics has been based in part on the feeling that the Games are a war substitute. It begins to look as though we would have done better to settle for World War III."

After Montreal, the Games seemed to stagger from bad to worse. In 1980, following the U.S.S.R.'s invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. President Jimmy Carter ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow in retaliation. It proved a feckless tactic, as the Soviets stayed in Afghanistan, hemorrhaging, for eight pointless years. Nevertheless, 61 countries joined Carter in the boycott (among the most important exceptions: Great Britain and France). They didn't miss much. Day after day, Soviet fans indulged in rampant hooliganism, booing and whistling insultingly at almost any winning athlete who was not Soviet. Worse, there were charges of flagrant cheating by Soviet judges in the javelin and discus throws and in the triple jump, which resulted in gold medals for Soviet athletes. By hook or by crook, the U.S.S.R. won more medals in the Moscow Games--195--than any country had since the American fiasco in St. Louis in '04.

Los Angeles was the next host city, and pessimists had long predicted that a second Olympics in La-La Land was doomed from the start. Venues were spread over 11,600 sq km, and the city government had refused to underwrite the Games financially. When the Soviets announced their own retaliatory boycott with 16 allied countries, the end seemed at hand--not least, said the skeptics, because spectators and TV viewers alike would be turned off by an Olympics that didn't feature the white hat-black hat melodrama of cold war competitions. As it turned out, there was a substitute: commerce. After decades of ranting against the incursion of business into the holy Olympic citadel, the lords of the I.O.C., under new president Juan Antonio Samaranch, stood aside and let the salesmen in.

Peter Ueberroth, a southern California travel agent, took over as president of the L.A. organizing committee and reinvented the modern Olympics. He made his most revolutionary departure when he enlisted a phalanx of large corporate sponsors to help pay for the Games. Ueberroth boldly sold companies the right to put the sacred Olympic rings on everything from soda cans to whitewall tires and magazine covers. He produced a $225 million overall profit (the first in any Olympics, except for Los Angeles in 1932) and walked into the Olympic sunset a hero, carrying a $475,000 bonus from a grateful organizing committee. His bonus equaled almost exactly the amount of money it cost to put on the entire Olympics in 1896.

The L.A. Games were also a defining moment of triumph for commercial television. Roone Arledge, president of ABC-TV Sports, led his network to a profit of about $435 million on the Olympics. A tradition of multibillion-dollar bidding for Olympic rights and a new round of global hucksterism had begun. Nonetheless, Los Angeles had breathed life into an expiring body, and the Olympics rose to became more robust with each passing Olympiad, no matter what other tensions surrounded it.

The fear of violence intensified again in Seoul in 1988, since South Korea was technically still at war with North Korea, and the country had been racked with bloody student riots. But nothing went wrong, and the opening show was as stunning as any in Olympic history. Even more significant was the fact that these Games were the first in which professional athletes, boldly identified as such, were welcomed. Thanks to some pragmatic pressure from Samaranch, the I.O.C. had finally dropped its long-discredited requirement that all competitors be "amateur," and had accepted the rules of each international sports federation as the basis for allowing in pros. In Seoul the way was open for world-class tennis stars to perform, including Steffi Graf, who beat Gabriela Sabatini during the first gold-medal competition in tennis since 1924, when a dispute over the amateur-status clause had led to tennis' departure from competition.

Successful though they were, the Seoul Games still produced controversy. Ideology was not the only force that had perverted competition. Biochemistry was at work too. Ben Johnson, a brilliant Canadian sprinter, won the 100-m dash on the track by a sizable margin, then lost it in the drug-testing laboratory when his sample showed evidence of heavy steroid use. His gold medal was lifted, and he went home in disgrace. Nine other athletes (mostly weight lifters) were also caught for using banned substances, but knowing insiders estimated that as many as 50% of all world-class athletes routinely used some kind of performance-enhancing drugs.

Though drug tests had been part of the Olympics for 16 years, actually catching guilty athletes was extremely difficult because of masking agents, natural hormones that didn't show up in tests and careful timing of illicit dosages so no traces were left when urine samples were taken. Iron Curtain teams were widely assumed to operate on sophisticated soups of steroids or hormones, with East German female swimmers and Bulgarian weight lifters considered the most flagrant abusers over the years. Johnson's stunningly stupid use of steroids was a rare exception among world-class competitors, yet Mary Slaney, the American runner, said, "I think it's wonderful. Not because of Ben, but because I want a clean sport. The fact that a thing this big can't be swept under the rug is a sign of hope."

By the time the Games opened four years later in Barcelona--another beautiful setting--a revolution in world politics had transformed the Olympic stage, putting the issue of drug use back in the shadows. Peace had finally burst upon the Games. The Soviet Union was gone--fractured into 15 separate independent countries, all claiming to be democracies. The Russian republics agreed to compete together in Barcelona as "the Unified Team," but a member of the Russian Olympic Committee said, "Each republic has been pulling the blanket over to its side of the bed. We are a unified team for the last time." The Berlin Wall had fallen, and East and West Germany were one. There were no boycotts, no hired gladiators, no good guys, no bad guys.

Even South Africa, Olympic pariah nation for 32 years because of its apartheid policies, was welcomed back after changing its ways, and its multiracial team listened raptly to a pre-Games pep talk in the Olympic Village by Nelson Mandela. Full of passion, Mandela cried, "We are saying now, 'Let's forget the past. Let bygones be bygones!'" He singled out two white team members--Elana Meyer, a 10,000-m star, and Wayne Ferreira, a world-ranked tennis player. "We are counting on you," said Mandela.

The Olympics had finally reached an apotheosis of sorts, very different than its founders envisaged. Never the cult of purity that they extolled, the Games had become the focus of a new kind of cult that worships the ultimate in unlimited sporting achievement. Professional athletes were not only welcomed in Barcelona, they were canonized. The American basketball Dream Team was swarmed over for autographs by Olympians during the opening ceremonies.

Those quaint words of Coubertin now have a different resonance: "The Olympic movement tends to bring together in a radiant union all the qualities which guide mankind to perfection." The radiance had become that of professional superstardom. Olympic heroes have multimillion-dollar contracts and cast electronic shadows around the globe.

Pure competition, as the Games' crusty founders envisaged it, does not yet exist and isn't likely to. Training methods and chemical abuse still cause quarrels and suspicion. The tom-toms of nationalism are throbbing as loudly as ever. But the sheer artistry of Olympic attainment, however amplified by hucksterism, has survived war, ideological struggle, racism, revolution and a host of other human ills. Imperfect as it is, the enduring Olympics may prove Coubertin right. They are here, perhaps, because they can still give humanity a glimpse of evolving perfection.