Sport: Eve of a New Olympics

Capitalism has never been thought of as an Olympic sport before, so it is a little startling to look up and find that the flag under which the Games will be conducted all over Southern California next summer is the vest from a three-piece suit. In the most remarkable private business deal in the history of free enterprise, patriotism is seeing nationalism, and raising the bet outrageously. "It is akin to patriotism," says Dan Greenwood, a committeeman in the Olympic company, "but a patriotism of businessmen." Commercialism is not a bad word either, though some may disagree.

Growing so hugely expensive that they have been threatening to collapse under their own deficits, the Games have not been at such risk since A.D. 394, when the athletes' grumbling displeasure with olive-wreath prizes caused Roman Emperor Theodosius I to halt the competition in dismay for 1,502 years. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French idealist whose practical side was underrated, revived the Olympics in 1896 in the name of international amity but with a plea for fiscal sanity that is near to the heart of Peter Ueberroth, 46, the Olympian Cash McCall. For, in a way, this San Fernando Valley businessman-sportsman is starting the Games all over again too. "They must be kept more purely athletic," as the baron said, "more dignified, more discreet and more in accordance with the classic artistic requirements. The Games must be more intimate and, above all, the Games must be less expensive."

From nothing but "a cardboard box with $300,000 in debts, no employees, no phones, no plan"—actually locked out of its first office after a credit check—the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee has burgeoned in four years to something greater than phenomenal. The L.A.O.O.C. plan: Don't build any sports palaces, refurbish the Memorial Coliseum. Spread the Olympic Village lightly over U.S.C., U.C.L.A. and U.C., Santa Barbara. Dot the megalopolis with stirring events. "We didn't have the three top sources of income available to all prior Olympic Games," Ueberroth (pronounced you-ber-roth) says. "The No. 1 income source has been government. We are putting on a private Olympics without government subsidies. The second source in Canada or the Soviet Union or Mexico City or Tokyo was Olympic lotteries. That's gone to us because it's against the law in California to have lotteries. The third is donations." Declining to cut into the take of every nonprofit organization in California, wanting to avoid local enmity by all means, the L.A.O.O.C. decided to refuse charity from anyone.