Sport: Big Brother Sees All

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No Russian athletes competed in the winter Olympic games, but Russian "observers" were all over the place. At first they were content to pop off about the superiority of their home-grown athletes. Toward the end of the games, perhaps warming up for the summer Olympics, they began to growl about a "behind-the-scenes deal, so evident that even the bourgeois Norwegian press was forced openly to take notice of it."

The "deal," first trumpeted in Moscow's Trud and later echoed by Tass, was the 3-3 ice-hockey tie between the U.S. and Canada. The result, as it happened, assured Canada the Olympic title, moved the U.S. to second place (up from fourth) and forced Czechoslovakia into a third-place play-off—which it lost to Sweden. The Russians, looking after Little Brother Czechoslovakia, figured the tie was no mere accident. In effect, they were crying that ugly three-letter word all too familiar to Western sport fans: "Fix."