Sport: Schande! Schande! Schande!

(2 of 2)

The incident led the boxing association to take a harder look at the Munich decisions. Two days later, one boxing judge was dismissed and 16 were warned. By week's end six boxing officials had been dropped. That, of course, did little to console the bewildered Jones, who swore he would never fight again.

It is no coincidence that the worst of the decisions against U.S. athletes were made by European judges, especially those from Communist-bloc countries, which attach great political significance to Olympic performance and seem to regard their athletes as instruments of foreign policy. U.S. Wrestler Wayne Wells, a gold-medal winner, has his own notion: "It's the way they've been brought up. What's cheating to us is not cheating to them." The pivotal problem is that the judges are originally picked by member nations, leaving the Olympic Committee little choice but to rubber-stamp the nominations. One sure way to avoid a recrudescence of suspect decisions at the XXI Olympiad would be to change the system and let one of the international Olympic bodies choose the judges.