OLYMPICS: The Games: Up in the Air

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Before accepting her bronze in the all-around, she bestowed a queenly kiss on the two youngsters who had upstaged but not outclassed her, Comaneci and a bright new Russian face, Nelli Kim, 18. Daughter of a Korean, Kim won two 10s herself from the judges, one in her specialty, the vault, and one in the floor exercise. She took two individual gold medals and one silver, and firmly established herself as the personable, expressive new star of Russian gymnastics.

While Russians and Rumanians were whirling their way into the hearts of the packed houses at the Forum (a total of 86,000 watched the gymnastics), a much less diminutive set of women turned the Olympic swimming pool into their own private splash party. The East German women's team, which had never won an Olympic gold medal, took nearly all of them last week—and a lioness's share of the silvers and bronzes too. In fact, for a time the simplest way to keep tab on the women's medal count was to tally the ones the East Germans did not get. It was not until the fourth day that their domination was broken, and then not by the U.S. but by the Russians, who swept the 200-meter breaststroke. Through the first five days, Shirley Babashoff, who was the United States' one gold-medal hopeful, was kept to a respectable but disappointing harvest of two silvers—in the 200-and 400-meter freestyle. Canadians, Soviets, Dutch and Americans took eight other medals. That left the East Germans with the remaining seven golds, four silvers and two bronzes.

Four of the golds were won by East Germany's imposing (5 ft. 10 in., 155 Ibs.) Kornelia Ender, who came into the Olympics holding four world records and by Saturday had set three new ones. When the East Germans suddenly emerged as a swimming superpower three years ago, disgruntled rivals speculated that gold-crazed East bloc coaches were giving their women swimmers male hormones and then subjecting them to a training so regimented that it turned them into aquatic automatons.

But at a warmup session last week, the East Germans laughed, smiled and swam their laps to the sounds of pop music that their coaches had insisted be piped into the pool. They looked for all the world like candidates for a California swim club—but their training is a lot tougher. With typical Marxist determination, East Germany has established a policy of scientific selection for finding swimmers; it is based partly on early assessment of a child's cardiovascular capacity and body type. Great emphasis is put on weight lifting to build strength. The average East German woman swimmer was 5 ft. 8 in. and 150 Ibs.; not that much larger than her U.S. counterparts but substantially more muscular. Their sexual identity, like that of all women competitors, had been officially confirmed by the Olympic "femininity control clinic" (a simple chromosome test that involves taking cells from the inside of the cheek is used, but many women athletes still find the idea of such examinations offensive).