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For all the clouds on the horizon, the Seoul Olympics still promise to be perhaps the best-organized and best-equipped event ever. Over the past decade, South Korea has spent some $3 billion on preparations for the Games. Moreover, it finished the work well ahead of schedule, whereas at Montreal in 1976 the readiness of the facilities was in doubt right down to the wire. The graceful, 100,000-seat Olympic Stadium on the bank of the Han River, site of opening and closing ceremonies as well as track-and-field events, was finished in 1984. Eight miles south of the city center, the 135-acre Seoul Sports Complex (completed in 1986) includes a boxing arena, swimming hall and 50,000-seat baseball stadium. Some two miles away to the east, the 750-acre Olympic Park will be the site for gymnastics, fencing and cycling. Many of the facilities have already received a shakedown, having been used for last September's tenth Asian Games. Participants in that extravaganza were lavish in their praise.
Where urban infrastructure is concerned, the government has taken great pains to make attending the Olympics a pleasant experience. Seoul's subway system was revamped in anticipation of some 340,000 foreign spectators; it will whisk visitors comfortably from their downtown hotels to event sites. Restaurants and hotels around the capital have been refurbished. About 100,000 Korean volunteers have signed up to serve as guides, translators and stadium workers. As this week's disturbances have painfully illustrated, the government is anxious about security. That concern will be heavily on display at the Games. Uniformed policemen and military counterterrorist squads will be deployed at Olympic sites.
Such worries are justified, and not merely because of the scale of the ongoing South Korean civil disturbances. In the past two decades, unexpected violence and the fear of it have become an ugly Olympic specter. In 1968 more than 400 protesters were killed in rioting just days before the Mexico City Games. And in 1972 Palestinian terrorists forever ended complacence when they abducted and murdered eleven members of the Israeli team in Munich. The U.S. and some 60 other nations boycotted the 1980 Games in Moscow, and four years later the Soviet Union and 16 other Communist countries retaliated by staying away from Los Angeles because, they claimed, security was lax.
At Seoul there will be another thorny consideration: North Korea. The $ Communist government in Pyongyang has insisted that it should be host to fully half the 1988 Olympic events on its soil -- and keep 50% of any profits from the Games. Its failure to get anywhere with such demands has caused Pyongyang to hint frequently that it will boycott the Games, perhaps pulling the Soviet Union and other East bloc countries along in sympathy. The I.O.C. position is that the Olympics are awarded to a city, not a nation, and that the athletic events cannot therefore be shared. When Munich was host to the 1972 Games, the I.O.C. points out, it did not share events with East Germany.