"Which would you rather be," the Athenian statesman Themistocles asked 2,400 years ago, "a victor in the Olympic Games or the announcer of the victor?"
TIME'S correspondents, writers and researchers covering the 1976 Summer Olympics are obviously on the announcer's side, but some of them once had more strenuous thoughts. Staff Writer Le Anne Schreiber, who wrote the cover story, recalls the time when as a ten-year-old she hid her hair under a stocking cap and tried out for halfback on the football team of her Evanston, Ill., Catholic grammar school. "I was beating this guy out for the position," Schreiber says,...