The Boycott That Might Rescue the Games

By LANCE MORROW

Every athlete feels the exact instant of no return: the body is then irrevocably committed; it moves with a concentration so fierce as to be almost abstract. Governments rarely achieve such purity of action. Nonetheless, by last week the U.S. had lumberingly launched the great weight of its foreign policy well past the point of second thoughts, on a course aimed at a boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics. It is a difficult maneuver; it could end by destroying the modern Olympic Games.

Even while Lake Placid proceeded, the American trajectory away from Moscow seemed unalterable. U.S. participation in the Summer Games has become more or less unthinkable, unless the Soviets withdraw their forces from Afghanistan in the next few months. That is improbable. So is the possibility, now being discussed, of moving the Games from Moscow to some other city, or postponing them. Jimmy Carter has committed the prestige of his presidency to the boycott. Having ineffectually lectured the Soviets last fall about their troops in Cuba, he cannot now fail to make an Olympic boycott stick, especially in a presidential election year. Nor does Carter stand exactly in embattled isolation on the issue. A chorus of polls and editorial writers has proclaimed a strong national disposition to stay home. Last week the Senate followed the House's example and voted, 88 to 4, to urge an American boycott.

A number of nations have drifted toward the U.S. position. To date, the State Department says, 36 countries have pledged, publicly or privately, to join the U.S.* Polls in West Germany show 71% of the public in favor

of a boycott or some other kind of protest. The Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad, Pakistan, asked 41 member nations to "envisage nonparticipation" in the Games.

But countries like France and Italy remained cool to the boycott proposal. Many of them legalistically pointed out that only national Olympic committees, not national governments, can make such decisions.

The U.S. boycott gives those committees around the world all kinds of apocalyptic visions: the sacred grove in ruins, the Games destroyed as surely as they were in A.D. 393, when the Emperor Theodosius proscribed them. If the Americans and others boycott Moscow, they say, then the Soviets might withdraw from the Olympic movement, denouncing it as a "tool of the imperialists." The 1984 Games in Los Angeles will be a forlornly restricted drama without the Soviets and their friends. The Olympics will cease to be a world movement. The Olympic torch will go out.

Did the U.S. make the right decision in pressing the boycott on the U.S. Olympic Committee and the nation's athletes?

Many of them are bitterly reluctant to stay home from the event they have trained for so single-mindedly for years.

Purists of the Olympics argue a bit romantically that the Games must be above politics, that regimes and secular squabbles come and go, that political issues are always transient, that the Olympic spirit is transcendent. That is what Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Panglossian founder of the modern Olympics intended. During the twelve centuries of the ancient Games, warring states and tribes suspended their homicidal business every four years and flocked to the sweet valley beyond Mount Kromion to compete for crowns of wild olive. Now, some athletes complain, a reverse logic applies; the Games get suspended at the first intimation of war.

That charge is disingenuous. To say that the Olympic Games have nothing to do with politics is the equivalent of saying that disco dancing has nothing to do with sex. Politics has always been a glowing, insistent presence in the Games, and in some ways their reason for being. Nations continue to compete hungrily for the right to host the Games even though they know that the host always loses millions of dollars in the process. Montreal was nearly bankrupted by the $1.27 billion cost of the 1976 Olympics. The political gains--prestige, legitimacy, image--are frequently judged to be worth the monetary loss. In 1968, Mexico City had the distinction of being the first Third World country to stage the Olympics. Tokyo's 1964 Games were Japan's first great celebration in the family of nations since World War II.

Each Olympics is an immense and garish parade of nationalism.

Over the years, political arguments have erupted repeatedly in the Games. At the London Olympics of 1948, the new state of Israel was excluded to forestall an Arab boycott. The 1956 Olympics in Melbourne occurred just after Soviet tanks had rolled into Hungary to crush the uprising there;

the Hungarians stayed in the Games, and beat the Soviets in a water polo championship that left the pool streaked with the players' blood. In 1976, 28 African nations stayed away from the Montreal Games to protest New Zealand's rugby tour of South Africa. American Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in black power salutes at the 1968 Games.

Far from being a pure and timeless island whereon youth can meet untrammeled to test body and spirit in the full glory of individual competition, the Olympics have become one ol the most dramatic and powerful political arenas of the century Palestinian terrorists understood that when in 1972 they crashed into Munich and left eleven Israelis dead. The Olympics so dramatically catch the attention of the world that hey have become an irresistible repository for all kinds of political hopes, benign and malevolent.

No one understood the political and public relations possibilities of the Olympics better than Adolf Hitler. The show he staged in Berlin in 1936 was, in its grandiose effects, designed to be rhapsodized by Leni Riefenstahl, the epic cinematic poet of Nazism. An array of swastikas lined the Reichs-sportfeld in the vast, mystic excess of the genre; Hitler jugend glowed in the golden well-being of their Aryamsm. At the nighttime finale, reported The New Yorkers Janet Planner "a giant chorus sang Schiller's words to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; overhead, 17 searchlights from far outside the arena made a lofty birdcage of streaming light beams. Imagine if television had been there to catch the spectacle in color and beam it by satellite to a world of viewers.

TV would have cut both ways, of course. It would have shown Jesse Owens, the black American, taking three gold medals from the Master Race. TV might have had some earnest little between-meets features discussing Hitler's anti-Semitic programs (the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, for example, which denied citizenship and livelihood to Germany's Jews). Might have; but sports television's mentality runs to the upbeat, the visually appealing and, obviously, the accessible.

An American movement arose in 1935 to persuade U.S. athletes to boycott the Berlin Olympics. It lost. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said at the time, it would be unfortunate if the Olympics were "dragged into the arena of political, racial or religious policy." That line is repeated almost exactly in 1980; it is no more valid now than it was in 1935.

The Soviets have long understood the political possibilities of sports, and especially the Olympics; they have counted heavily upon playing host to the 1980 Games. Some ill-informed Americans argue that the U.S. will only hurt itself with a boycott. They have ridiculed the idea that a boycott of the Olympics is anything more than an ideological spitball. In fact, both the Soviet government and the Soviet people have relied upon the Moscow Games to secure commodities they have never quite been able to purchase in the market of world opinion: prestige and respectability. Intensely proud and patriotic, they have inherited a centuries-old inferiority complex. They have invested hundreds of millions in the 1980 Games and have gilded every onion dome in Moscow. The Olympics were to be the great Soviet coming-out party.

Even a limited boycott, by the U.S. and a few other nations, is a profoundly upsetting possibility to the Soviets. They tend to view the U.S. as their only important and worthy competition in the world, athletically

and otherwise. They have been angered and shocked by the American boycott. It has, in fact, already carried exactly the message that Washington intended to send and has delivered it to precisely the address where it can be most effective: the national pride of a very touchy people.

The effects of the boycott upon Soviet behavior are not easy to predict. "The Soviets are a people who have a great desire to be proud of their government," says Princeton University Political Scientist Robert C. Tucker. "If the government is seen to be in disgrace because of the barefaced invasion of a small neighboring country, then they will be in some serious way discomfited by it." Some effects may be undesirable. The boycott may help create even more of a cold war climate in the U.S.S.R.; Soviet leaders may exploit the atmosphere, as they have in the past, conjuring up socialist fervor to counter the threat from the West. It is also possible, predicts Dimitri Simes, an analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, that the Kremlin will use alienation from the West to justify greater repression and internal control.

There is a sensible rule in human affairs: Never make a paranoid feel like a pariah; it renders him more dangerous. The rule may apply to the Soviets. On the other hand, they have often in the past worked in a point and counterpoint: they followed their Czech invasion with the beginning of the detente process, for example, and the Cuban missile crisis with the test ban treaty.

However the Soviets react, the U.S. has no alternative but to boycott the Moscow Games, even if it does so in the company of only a few other countries. If the U.S. were to participate in the Games, the Kremlin would take it as an abject confession of American weakness, of an absence of will. The Soviets would read it as supine acquiescence. American responses to Soviet military adventurism are now limited; to decline to exercise the powerful option of an Olympic boycott would be an act of diplomatic negligence.

This grinding of international wills, like the huge muscling of the earth's tectonic plates, threatens to crush the Olympics. Some people believe that might be just as well. The Olympics have become preposterously overcommercial and overbuilt, unwieldy and ruinously expensive. NBC paid the Soviets $87 million for television rights to the Moscow Games (and with laudable forbearance has stayed out of the argument over the boycott). For $50,000 to $300,000, a company can buy into the Games; Dannon paid up, for example, and so can advertise itself, with meaningless grandeur, as "The Official Yogurt of the 1980 Winter Olympics."

Television has invested the Olympics with worldwide reach; it is no wonder that both commerce in the West and ideology in the East get locked in struggle for control of its powerful images. NBC proposed to give 152 hours of programming to the Games, an unheard-of commitment in the history of television. Its minutes of commercials were almost sold out, at $190,000 a minute.

There remain in Olympic competition a tradition and splendor worth preserving. The Olympics allow the world to see its best athletes in a special way.

At their best, they are vivid with the drama of humanity in quest of pure excellence.

But the Games should be changed. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, a basketball gold medalist in the 1964 Olympics, predicted four years ago that politics would dismantle the 1980 Games. He believes, correctly, that the crisis of this XXII Olympiad may offer the opening to do so. The politics and commercialism of the spectacle should be radically reduced. Most athletes in competition neither want nor need the political extravaganzas and financial hype. To help rescue the Olympics from their present distress, in which this nation is unavoidably an accomplice, the U.S. might:

> Offer to give up Los Angeles as the site for the 1984 Summer Games. This would allow the U.S. to operate from a posture of moral detachment in the other steps.

> Help organize a worldwide consensus to move the Games, as Jimmy Carter and others have suggested, to a permanent home in Greece or some other country, possibly Switzerland or Sweden. Greece, the birthplace of the Olympics, would be the natural choice in most respects. But the Greek record of political stability is troubling. Moreover, Greece is a member of NATO, which might disturb countries from the Communist bloc or the Third World.

> Pledge several hundred million to help build first-class facilities at the permanent site. While the U.S. could pay a substantial part of the price, other countries could be apportioned shares of the expenses to get the permanent home of the Olympics established. Thereafter, the quadrennial profits and expenses could be negotiated between the permanent host and the participating nations.

A similar pattern would be possible for the Winter Games.

Some other changes to consider: the elimination of team sports, for example, which tend to exemplify a bellicose nationalism already too evident in the Games; the end of the hypocritical distinction between amateur and professional.

With a permanent home in a politically noncontroversial setting, the Olympics might escape at last from much of the politics and greed that now contaminate one of humanity's earliest and best ideas. -- Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.