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> The Velodrome Krylatskoe, whose striking design was produced by a nationwide architectural competition, will station 6,000 spectators around its swooping, ranked cycling track.
> Druzhba (Friendship) Hall is an elegant gym set on diamond-shaped exterior struts that make it look like a crab. It will house the volleyball championships and seat 3,000.
Also nearing completion are two centers for the horde of sports journalists who will descend in 1980. Print reporters will have their headquarters at a spacious, up-to-date facility on Zubovsky Boulevard in central Moscow, which will be equipped to handle 3,000 writers at once. Some 3,800 foreign television and radio personnel will work out of a modern complex in north Moscow.
NBC, which paid $85 million for TV rights to the Olympics and will broadcast 150 hours' worth, flew in 45 production officials to scout Spartakiad. Next year the network will bring 660 staffers to supplement the pool coverage being provided by the host country.
Before returning to the U.S., NBC President Robert Mulholland raved about Soviet gains in television techniques: "We now see slow motion and instant replay—common for us but relatively new for them—used with regularity and with in credible skill." Will NBC'S coverage be censored in any way? Said Mulholland: "We've told them that we'll cover anything that happens, and they've understood that from Day One. But it's their house and they own the electricity." Meaning, apparently, that the Soviets can pull the plug if they dislike what they see.
Mindful that satisfied tourists are also potential propaganda bees, spreading the good word about the U.S.S.R. across the West, the Soviets are going to prodigious lengths to please those foreigners who simply come to watch the games. All told, 100,000 Soviets will work directly on the Olympics, and another 100,000 will serve foreign visitors. More than 10,000 are being trained as interpreters, and thousands of others, from cab drivers to tourist guides, are studying the rudiments of foreign languages. To ensure a positive first impression, the Soviets even hired a West German consortium to build a new terminal at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, which is now noisy, cramped and plagued by long customs waits.
It is on hotels and restaurants, where tourists will spend more time than in the bleachers, that Soviet planners seem wisely to be concentrating their attentions. By next summer, the capacity of first-class hotels in Moscow will have been increased from 50,000 to 75,000. The most important new facility will be the 10,000-bed Izmailovo Park complex, a cluster of five 28-story hotels, each with restaurants, underground parking and a movie theater. Only one new hotel has opened so far, the glittering, semicircular, 28-story Kosmos on Prospekt Mira. Built by a group of French companies who imported everything to make it but steel and cement, the Kosmos is the only luxury-class hotel in the capital. Comfort-minded tourists need not apply, however: its 3,000 beds will be filled during the Olympics by radio and television crews.