Rogues' Gallery

From Pinsk to Prague, it was open season last week on errant Iron Curtain athletes. Cops and customs guards were putting the arm on muscular heroes for all the little illegal adventures that were once a proletarian winner's prerogatives.

Time was when Russia's light-fingered lady discus thrower, Nina Ponomaryeva, could lift a couple of hats from a London department store (TIME, Sept. 10, 1956) and rate hardly a slap on the wrist from her commissar chaperons. Nina was needed for the Olympics. But the party line has changed. Last week Czechoslovakia's table-tennis champion, Ivan Andreadis, was "temporarily disqualified" from the national team for "unsporting behavior." His bourgeois crime: Ivan "forgot" to report a large hunk of his earnings.

Teams that once returned from abroad as wholesalers of smuggled watches, ballpoint pens and nylons are groaning to see their luggage picked over. Police no longer look the other way when athletes hit the bottle too hard. The roll of Communist sportsmen is fast becoming a rogues' gallery. Among those who have made the squad: P:Edik Streltsov, crack center forward on the Moscow Torpedo soccer team, ignored repeated warnings and became a drunk. "When Streltsov was in the hospital," reported East Berlin's Junge Welt, "his mother brought him not fruit or books, but vodka. The doctors objected, naturally, but the mother advised her son to secrete the bottle by suspending it from the window by a string. Neither did she make do with one bottle. She brought two." Streltsov was finally picked up by the police. His comrades voted to drop him from the national team and petitioned the Union Committee to revoke his title of "Deserving Master." P:Hungary's women's national basketball team produced a pair of culprits. Coach Janos Szabo was slapped with a lifetime expulsion from coaching and a one-year suspended jail sentence for smuggling 13 watches from Rio de Janeiro. Player Agnes Szabo was bounced from the team for life for smuggling 150 pairs of nylons. P:Poland's all-star soccer forward, Kazimierz Trampisz, is getting flayed by both Radio Warsaw and Warsaw's newspaper, Sztandar Mlodych. His shocking behavior, say Trampisz' critics, rates him a three-year suspension. In a game at Cracow, his temper stoked with vodka, Trampisz dropped his shores, and gesticulated at the crowd. Once before, reported the paper, ''he dropped his shorts and stuck out toward the public that part of his body below the back." To make matters worse, Trampisz ''is one of very few major-league soccer players with a university education."

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