The Olympics end: with glory, with anguish and reason for all to be proud
Could the celebration have been richer if the competition had been better? America's Olympics closed with the usual expressions of hope, as the five-ring flag was passed from Los Angeles to another neutral location, Seoul, Korea, where doom is expected again in four years, and the athletes will probably come through once more. The XXIII Olympiad was handsome and bright, not completely smog-free but, as British Runner Steve Cram said, "You should see it where I live," just outside Newcastle. Bringing a world of people to Los Angeles did seem a little like fetching coals to his neighborhood, but the capacities of the freeways were not overloaded. The capacities of the citizens were overlooked.
In off years the reasons for having Olympics tend to fade, but the proof of value is fresh now in the faces of the athletes. Certainly nowhere else in sports, and maybe nowhere else at all, do the emotions show through the contests so clearly or compellingly, to the point of dominating first the action and then the results, finally becoming a theme more powerful than any one anthem or all of them combined. There must be a lot of great Communist Greco-Roman wrestlers around the Soviet Union and East Germany, but no one spoke of hollow victories in boycotted company at the moment of burly Jeff Blatnick's memorable tears. It staggered him and everyone else. And the financial stripe of Mary Decker's shoes stopped being a topic of much interest once they became tangled in the loose limbs of a dramatic child, as Decker fell by the wayside of her lifelong race. Barefoot Zola Budd of South Africa and England padded onward in tears and boos, but her heart appeared to have dropped beside Decker. So that was the outcome of the Games' great confrontation: a double knockout.
How delicate they all really are, and how fragile their dream. For every flying Carl Lewis there is a fallen Mary Decker, and the fullest appreciation of sport requires both. Joan Benoit breezes in gracefully from her marathon, while Gabriela Andersen-Schiess lurches along grotesquely behind, and the picture-memory of the spectators develops into a composite of both images—the terrific and the terrible—much more touching as an entry than either could be individually. The happiest circumstance, of course, is when they take turns. First U.S. Gymnast Mary Lou Retton rejoiced as Rumania's Ecaterina Szabo sighed, then a couple of days later Ecaterina laughed and Mary Lou made a petulant face. The athletic world, like the real world, is seldom so equitable. Fairness is not really the essence of sport.