"This is just how I've always dreamed it would be" Amid traffic so tolerable that it actually seems lighter than usual, in air so passable that smog is on sale by the bottle, under security so congenial that immediate fears have eased, with tickets so plentiful that face value has made a comeback, the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles have at least begun brilliantly.
The secret lamplighter of Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee President Peter Ueberroth turned out to be two: Gina Hemphill, granddaughter of Jesse Owens, and Rafer Johnson, 1960 decathlon champion. But then all of this summer's 4,200 torchbearers turned out to be remarkable. Winding around and about Southern California these past ten days of the 15,000-km relay, the path traced the same thread that has been tugging at the country since May, a trail of glad tears. George Allen, 62, a football coach of meager perspective who used to say, "Losing is like dying," progressed in one short kilometer to a point where he could admit, "This is more fun than beating Dallas." The great O.J. Simpson, 37, handed off to the great Michael Baily, 7, who has cerebral palsy. Lenore Nicholson-Woodward, 69, a bona fide "little old lady from Pasadena," almost overran the escort vehicles with her impatient heel-and-toe style. Back down the road in Louisville, Muhammad Ali had carried his torch too. In his book The Greatest,
Ali claimed to have tossed his Olympic gold boxing medal off an Ohio River bridge in 1960. But it's a funny thing. Nobody has ever believed him. He is at the Games now.
The final count of attending countries is 140, a record, with the Soviet Union and 16 sympathizers declining for reasons of either security or insecurity and two others demurring independently. Libya withdrew on the eve of the Games after two of its journalists, alleged to be terrorists, were refused U.S. entry. About 8,000 athletes are off on a farflung, 16-day spree splashed with hot pastel colors that might have been selected for their political insignificance or because this Olympiad is privately financed and they happened to be the shades on sale.
Calling to mind Jackson Pollock canvases, speckled draperies decorating the high fences at 23 venues actually look more like painters' dropcloths. But they do relieve the mood of the barbed wire (see DESIGN), and even the main villages at U.S.C. and UCLA are unforbidding. Strangely, no rifles and very few sidearms are in view. The only visible security forces, Ueberroth's Royal Blue Berets, are khaki-clad women and men as affable as park rangers. (Rest assured, there are hidden police gunmen.) Less than the customary Olympic access is being accorded the media. Once processed into the U.S.C. village, reporters have been quarantined just past the gate, a consideration probably involving privacy as much as security.
Some university employees still going about their campus business have been insulted by a shrill L.A.O.O.C. command not to speak to any athlete "even if he or she initiates the conversation."