Sport: Eve of a New Olympics

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The S.C.C.O.G. is not a whimsical organization. It was formed in 1939, seven years after the original Los Angeles Olympics, by a group of local businessmen. Merely securing the U.S. bidding rights constituted an epic campaign: four times they lost out to Detroit. When the U.S. Olympic Committee finally endorsed the Los Angeles bid for 1976, Moscow at the last minute decided to make it a contest of superpowers, and Montreal was selected in a spirit of compromise. Though New York City in the early going made a lavish presentation for '84, by the late-1977 deadline Los Angeles was the sole applicant for the honor. Not just in the U.S.—throughout the world. The only other city thinking of bidding was Tehran. This was the state of the Olympic dream, a pipedream.

But then, hardly anyone for some time has regarded international athletic competition as a refuge from the troubles afflicting mankind. Probably since 776 B.C., but certainly since 1936, the summer of Adolf Hitler's Nazi festival, the games have been irresistible forums for social, racial and political causes (as well as a handy time for athletes from totalitarian states to defect). There was pause on the part of some countries as to whether they wished to party with the Third Reich. But the I.O.C. assured everyone that it had met with Hitler and "no one since the Greeks had captured the Olympic spirit so well."

Every four years since then, the world has come together to be pulled further apart in the only event that seems to matter: the international tug o' war. Munich in 1972 was a reprise of the Holocaust. Two dozen African nations, one full ring off the Olympic charm bracelet of continents, disengaged from Montreal in 1976 rather than associate with New Zealand, whose rugby team had scrummed in apartheid-infested South Africa. The U.S. and 35 sympathizers boycotted the 1980 Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With Americans currently enraged at the U.S.S.R. for shooting down a Korean airliner last month, and many U.S. arenas slamming their doors to traveling troupes of Soviet athletes, Moscow is being coy about its participation in Los Angeles. "Perverting the Olympic ideals," the triweekly newspaper Soviet Culture reports, "American Big Business has seized control of the preparations of the Games." The Soviets do not have to commit themselves until June 2.

Like the intrusion of politics, the hypocrisy of amateurism once was high in the criticisms of the Olympics. But the Americans have recently taken care of that by validating the bribes that U.S. athletes used to take from promoters and shoe manufacturers, and by instituting above-the-table "trust funds" that have turned the state-supported professionals of other countries into the poor relatives. The Olympics has many unseemly sides: jingoism, less than perfectly impartial officiating, drugs. But if there was a single scandal that narrowed the 1984 field to one, it was the cost.