Covering the Olympic Games can be almost as strenuous as competing in them, a test of bodily endurance and mental agility. For TIME's 20 correspondents, photographers and assistants responsible for this week's eleven pages of stories from Sarajevo, the qualifying tests meant constantly racing against the clock, as do many athletes: but theirs was the deadline clock.
Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers and Reporter Gertraud Lessing mushed after the Alpine skiers, while Eastern Europe Bureau Chief John Moody found himself learning all he could about the new Soviet bobsled. Atlanta Correspondent B.J. Phillips is an expert on figure skating, but last week she drew on her experience in writing about politics. "I've seen as much rough-and-tumble in Yugoslavia over the judging of events as I would have in covering the Georgia primary," she says. Associate Editor Tom Callahan is a veteran of two previous Olympics, but this is the first in which he played a physical role. While interviewing Puerto Rican Luger George Tucker before a practice run, Callahan was asked by the athlete to help him get started. In view of his performance, Callahan felt like an accomplice to a crime. (Tucker wound up 30th of 30 finishers.)
Picture coverage was coordinated by Photo Researchers Jerry Astor and Paula Hornak, who supervised Photographers Rudi Frey, Neil Leifer, Jim Drake and John lacono. Says Astor: "Fog, heavy snow and bad light made it a photographer's nightmare."
There was the additional problem of getting the film to New York City. A French-made Gazelle helicopter and two Yugoslav pilots sped the film from the slopes where the skiing events were held to the Sarajevo airport, 20 miles away. There a courier took the film on a chartered Learjet to London and by Concorde to New York City. One day the airport was closed, so Frey and TIME's Yugoslav driver, Jovan Vučkoviċ, set off on a hair-raising ride over winding, snow-covered mountain roads to Mostar, 84 miles away, where the Learjet waited. Says Frey: "The drive, in good weather, takes two hours. We made it in an hour and 55 minutes." So fell another Olympic record.