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Immediately after the Soviet announcement, Greece renewed a suggestion first made in 1980 to be the host of the Games every four years, as it did for more than 1,000 years that ended in A.D. 393. But Samaranch and other international Olympic officials cling to the idea of rotating the Games around the world. In any case, Greece, as a member of NATO, might not be considered a totally neutral site. Some athletes speculate about breaking up future Games by holding, say, track-and-field events in one country and swimming races in another.
Such prospects depress the legions of ardent sports buffs in the Soviet bloc quite as much as fans in neutral and Western nations, as the Kremlin leaders well realize. It is a measure of the political importance they attach to the Games, and the depth of their anger with the U.S., that they knowingly took a step sure to stir deep unhappiness among their allies and their own people, as well as citizens of other countries who ordinarily pay little attention to international politics. In the Soviet Union, which has no professional sports as they are known in the West, the whole athletic system is geared to winning Olympic medals. In East Germany, which had been touted to win as many as eight golds in women's track-and-field events alone this summer, the production of world-class athletes by rigorous government-sponsored training programs is a source not just of pride but of something close to national identity.
The Soviet leaders did what they could do to cushion the blow. The controlled press in the U.S.S.R. for months has been running lurid depictions of Los Angeles as a sinkhole of smog, drugs and pornography, and has even been warning that Soviet Olympic athletes might be kidnaped there. The announcement of the actual pullout from the Games was carefully timed to coincide less with the arrival of the Olympic flame in New York than with the Soviet national holiday celebrating victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. And then it was heavily downplayed—a short story on the back page of Pravda, a brief mention close to the end of the main nightly newscast—in the apparent hope that it would be, at least momentarily, overlooked in a burst of patriotic fervor.
Nonetheless, Muscovites approached by Western journalists guardedly expressed regret and, at times, disbelief. "Come on, it's a capitalist joke," said one to a Western correspondent who phoned with the news.
Members of a Soviet gymnastics team touring Brazil spoke more candidly than their fellow athletes back home. Said Alexander Ditiatin, winner of a record eight medals at the 1980 Olympics: "I hope it's not true. After all, we have been preparing ourselves for such a long time, and all that work can't be thrown away."
Soviet allies appeared to be caught by surprise. Well ahead of the June 2 deadline, Hungary had already officially accepted an invitation to the Olympics and presumably will have to reverse itself. Polish newspapers were printing detailed analyses of the prospects of Polish athletes in Los Angeles that had to be hastily discarded. An East German official in Switzerland explained his country's participation in the boycott in the bluntest terms. Said he: "We are politically too dependent on the Soviet Union to envision any other decision."