Sport: Eve of a New Olympics

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"Conditions will be excellent," Austrian Heinz Jungwirth concurs, "but they do let us pay through our noses." Room and board in the Olympic Villages is priced at $35 a day (payable in advance), but organizational extras are expensive. One phone line for three weeks costs more than $600, and a parking sticker at the Coliseum goes for $350.

As uncomfortably as the International Olympic Committee reacts to any loss of control (in the I.O.C. offices, Ueberroth is known as "Peter Ueber Alles"), this must be nothing next to the embarrassment being felt around the national Olympic committees and international sports federations. The ones feeling the pinch are those very officious officials so plastered with pins and patches that they resemble their own steamer trunks. A certain amount of freeloading used to be traditional. French Committeeman Henri Courtine, an old Ueberroth acquaintance, says just a little ruefully, "He's the kind of man who succeeds in life. Sometimes, I must say, his way of doing things shocks people. We [Europeans] talk a little less about money, even if we manipulate it. His methods are based on efficiency. In Europe, we don't work that way."

Courtine's only specific lament, a reasonable and thoughtful one, pertains to the fragmented Olympic Villages. "The justification of the Olympic Games is to unite the youth of the world," he reminds. "With two Olympic Villages [three, in fact], some of the athletes will not be able to meet." The president of the original Southern California committee, John Argue, has a ready answer for that. It sounds somewhat brusque. "We invented the concept of the Olympic Village [in 1932]," he says. "We're disinventing it."

Alas, friendly neighbors are no certainty even in an Olympic Village. "They have to worry not only about separating Arabs and Israelis," says Committee President Isaac Ofek of Israel, "but what about all the other problematic teams—the Turks, Greeks, Chinese, Russians, Cubans? They'll do their best not to put the cats together with the mice." It would be a humorous image, if it were not so chilling.

"You can imagine," Ofek says, "that we spent our two weeks in Los Angeles going over every inch of ground. We sought out the person in charge of security [Ed Best, former FBI special agent] and had some in-depth discussions. We concluded that the arrangements could not be better. At Munich, the Germans were anxious not to give the impression that the athletes were living in a concentration camp. They went out of their way in that respect. Their security people did not even carry arms and the result was tragic—for the Olympics and for us. In L.A., it will be different, as far as we can see. I can't be too specific, but the communications equipment is first class. There will be fast, well-equipped vehicles always on alert, even helicopters, and most important of all, very good intelligence."