The Olympic flame, kindled at the ruins of Olympia in Greece, arrived in New York City twelve hours later aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. It was a dispiriting day for pageantry: raw, windy, drizzly. But as runners started the torch on its zigzag, 15,000-kilometer journey across 33 of the 50 American states, the dark skies seemed only to intensify the symbolic glow. The second runner, 91-year-old Abel Kiviat, silver medalist in the 1,500-meter race in the 1912 Olympics, had no inkling that anything was amiss as he ended his appointed kilometer; he lit the torch of twelve-year-old Timothy Towers, who had won the honor in a raffle, and urged, "Carry on." But as the 22nd runner, Nicole Zell, age 13, started her kilometer outside city hall in Manhattan shortly after noon, word crackled over radios in the sparse crowd that the Olympics were once more being seared by political animosity. Moscow had just announced that when the last torchbearer carries the flame into the Los Angeles Coliseum on July 28 and President Reagan officially declares the XXIII Olympic Games in the modern series to be open, no athletes from the U.S.S.R. will be there to compete.
Nor will the superb runners and swimmers from East Germany, one of the world's top three athletic powers, judged by medals won in past Olympics. Nor any athletes from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Laos, Mongolia or Viet Nam. Almost certainly, the Poles and Hungarians will stay home, though nothing is official yet; the Cubans are probable no-shows too. The Soviets obviously have carefully orchestrated the boycott, with one satellite after another falling into line, often a day apart. "We are going to be receiving a one-a-day bitter pill for some time," predicts Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (L.A.O.O.C.). He also fears that the Kremlin leaders will try to extend the boycott "far beyond the normal Soviet bloc countries."
Why? One reason undoubtedly is simple revenge, tit for tat. The U.S. led 36 nations in boycotting the 1980 Olympics, held in Moscow, as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Though that pullout was widely dismissed in the West as a futile gesture, it hurt the Soviets' pride more than many Americans ever realized. It also dashed their hopes of putting on a spectacular show that would advertise Soviet athletic and organizational achievements to a television audience around the world. The Kremlin's leaders are widely believed to have been itching to pay Washington back in the same coin.