A Soviet Nyet To the Games

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The Soviet leaders, of course, have sent their athletes to compete at Olympiads in Munich, Montreal and other Western cities where no such police-state controls were in effect. Still, most experts agree that in the U.S. they feared being humiliated by demonstrations and defections. F. Don Miller, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, speculates: "What they really want is a promise to hand over defectors." That concern might seem paranoiac: Olympic athletes are young, intensely patriotic and highly privileged members of Soviet society—and they know that a defecting swimmer, say, could hardly earn as much cash in the West as a ballet dancer. No Soviet athlete has defected yet at an Olympiad. But Western experts note that if there were any defections, the KGB would take the rap. It would not be in a position to control the situation. Thus the KGB had a strong motive to argue against participation in the Los Angeles Olympics.

REVENGE. To many in the U.S., the boycott of the 1980 Olympics seemed a flat failure. The Soviets stayed in Afghanistan and the Games went on. Though such major nations as Canada, Japan and West Germany stayed away at Washington's urging, athletes from allied countries like Britain, France and Italy competed. The U.S. Olympic Committee's list of sympathizers that joined the boycott is studded with names like Bermuda and Fiji, scarcely powers in international sports.

Moscow, by common consent of diplomats and journalists who were there—and Soviet officials speaking frankly—saw it very differently. The Olympiad was by far the biggest and most prestigious worldwide gathering to which the Soviet regime had ever played host. It was to symbolize the U.S.S.R.'s emergence as a full-fledged, legitimate member of the world community of nations and to show off the glories of the new Soviet society. But the luster of the competition was dimmed, global TV audiences and headlines in the world press disappointingly small, visitors to Moscow fewer than expected.

The urge to give the Americans a black eye in return, Western experts agree, might not have prevailed had dealings with the U.S. generally improved. But with superpower relations as frosty as, they are now, why not? Ueberroth notes that the Soviets seemed cooperative in discussing plans for the Los Angeles Games until the death of President Yuri Andropov in February, but after Konstantin Chernenko's accession to power, they started raising one complaint after another. Chernenko was a longtime crony of Leonid Brezhnev's, the Kremlin boss from 1964 until his death in 1982. And Brezhnev is widely believed to have felt personally affronted by the 1980 Olympic boycott.