At Spartakiad, one can see the future, and it works—mostly
Exactly 363 days before the 1980 Moscow Olympics were due to begin, an Olympic dress rehearsal opened with a mighty spectacle. The event is Spartakiad,the quadrennial two-week games of the U.S.S.R., and its opening ceremony was the kind of show that the Soviet Union does so well, choreographed to a split second bursting with color and life. Before 103,000 people in Lenin Stadium, folk dancers, marching teams, gymnasts and 6,000 card flashers performed with astonishing precision. Ritual welcomes were delivered, the Olympic torch was lighted, and 3,000 doves soared skyward. All in precisely two hours.
When the competition began later that afternoon, another typically Soviet spectacle took place. In a heat of the 400-meter hurdles, the giant electronic scoreboard in Lenin Stadium flashed word that Edwin Moses of the U.S., the world's best in the event, would be wearing No. 825 and running in Lane 2. Trouble was Moses was at a track meet in Italy. The real No. 825, who belly-flopped at the last hurdle ,was Stan Vinson, an American middle-distance runner competing in the hurdles for the first time.
The pageant and the ensuing mix-up seemed a fitting preview of the 22nd Olympiad, displaying, as one visiting U S sportswnter unkindly put it, "the Russian proclivity for excelling at pomp and fouling up circumstance." Spartakiad's first week did produce scores of minor organizational glitches that need to be ironed before next year. But to their credit the Soviets seemed obsessively determined to correct their mistakes and make the most impressive Olympiad yet. Spartakiad features 10,000 Soviet athletes, sifted from nearly 100 million entrants over two years of eliminations and—for the first time—2,500 foreign competitors. The games were organized so that the Soviets have a better chance of gaming the finals, and of the 87 other nations, not all entered their top competitors. The U.S., for instance, sent only 109 athletes, of whom only eight are top-ranked in their event. Still, the U.S. broke into the winner's circle when Karen Hawkins, 22, of St. Louis took a silver in the 200-meter dash. Then the U.S. collected four gold medals in Spartakiad's first five days: Wardell Gilbreath, 25, of Amarillo, Texas, in the 200-meter dash; John Powell, 32, of Cupertino, Calif., in the discus; Henry Marsh, 25, of Eugene, Ore., in the 3,000-meter steeplechase; and Vinson, 27, of Chicago, in the 400 meter.
Otherwise, Spartakiad was Olympiad without the crowds. The scale of the competition equals that of the Olympics, though several important 1980 facilities are not yet in operation. The official Olympic symbol, a cute bear cub named Misha, made its debut. With only a handful of Western tourists in Moscow last week, the city's life-support systems were not severely tested. But Soviet patience was, largely by Western journalists complaining about stalled visas, confusing event schedules and scoreboards that used the Cyrillic alphabet. Fed up, a Soviet official denied that Spartakiad was a "dress rehearsal" for the Olympics, just as another official was proclaiming it such.