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The village landscape is not harmed by giant balloon-like umbilical cords streaming in the treetops and kept buoyant by ulterior fans. They are fascinating. The dormitories and other buildings given over to a "main street" of shops, a moviehouse, a beauty parlor and a disco have been redone in a profusion of violet squares, vermilion triangles and aqua stars piled chockablock on orange scaffolds beside pink-and-black-striped cardboard columns. Professor Stanley Weingart of the U.S.C. business school says, "I keep waiting for Dumbo the elephant to fly out." It does put one in mind of an amusement park. Although not Disneyland so much as Coney Island.
To Mary T. Meagher, a U.S. swimmer, the atmosphere is, simply, beautiful. For track stars, the Olympics may be a means, but for swimmers it is everything. They come to the Games prepared to laugh. "Let this, go out nationwide," proclaims Steve Lundquist. "I need a job. I'm keeping my ears open, and they certainly are big enough." Lundquist, 23, and Meagher, 19, are two of the sport's grizzled journeymen. She was a record holder at age five, a world champion by 14. Then, in 1980, what should have been Meagher's Olympics went on without her when the U.S. boycotted Moscow.
After an understandable slump—common among U.S. swimmers and something of a national malaise, as Jimmy Carter might say—Meagher rallied grandly. Now she can contemplate three golds. "The Pan-Am Games are great, the Worlds are wonderful," she says. "But the Olympics are the Olympics. Everyone walking around the village smiling, speaking their own language but understanding all the same. This is just how I've always dreamed it would be, maybe even more cheerful."
A crowd of laughing Rumanians, evidently not the soccer team, is kicking a spotted ball around a park bench. Nadia Comaneci, a guest of the L.A.O.O.C., is staying with her old team. "It is very bright and cheerful. I like everything very much," says the darling gymnast of Montreal. A Lebanese long jumper, Gabi Issa El Khouri, who could shave clear up to his eyes, is rolling them at the second most wonderful question put to him so far: Are Los Angeles and Beirut much different?
"Woooooo," he says, "we can say that!"
The first: Can he outjump Carl Lewis?
While Lewis may try to exceed 29 ft., El Khouri hopes to reach 25 ft. "Lewis will be too tough in the 100 meters and the long jump," says Gus Young, a Jamaican who lives in The Bronx and runs for North Carolina State, "and he'll have to be kept jumping a while to lose the 200. But we can beat him and the U.S. in the relay." Gus sounds absolutely convinced of it.
The Olympic spirit does not prevent rival boxers from occasionally saluting each other, just in passing, with a universal smile and an expressive forefinger dragged meaningfully across the throat.
Paul Gonzales laughs at first, then stares off in the direction of his toughest fight.
"They take a lot of punches, boy, Koreans," he says absently. Not a 10-min.