When the Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles 52 years ago, TIME'S pre-Games coverage amounted to one column of miscellaneous notes and statistics. (Sample: the 69-member Brazilian team was so strapped for funds it had to sell bags of coffee to finance its stay.) We have come a long way since 1932. This week TIME marks the return of the Summer Games to the U.S. with one of the biggest editorial issues in its history. In addition to 15 pages of convention coverage, the magazine contains a 38-page Special Section, by far TIME'S largest Olympic undertaking. Under the direction of Assistant Managing Editor Walter Bingham and Senior Editor Jose M. Ferrer III, Special Projects Art Director Tom Bentkowski, along with dozens of writers, photographers, correspondents and reporter-researchers, put together a preview of the quadrennial event that offers not only a sense of its vastness but, in Ferrer's words, "creates a sense of focus. Our stories introduce a relatively small number of U.S. and foreign participants and work, we hope, as a selective guide to the myriad individuals and statistics involved in the Games."

Among those individuals are 18 athletes from nine countries (Britain, China, Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya and the U.S.) whom TIME has photographed against one of their homeland's famous symbols or landmarks. This 14-page photo essay, with captions by Senior Writer Paul Gray, provides dazzling evidence of the artful eye of Photographer Neil Leifer, who also took the cover picture of U.S. Track and Field Star Carl Lewis at the Statue of Liberty. "Not only was this the best assignment I've ever had," says Leifer, "it was the best I've ever heard about." It was certainly one of the longest: 18 months from first proposal to final prints, involving substantial amounts of planning, travel and especially diplomacy. "Persuading star athletes to interrupt their training schedules and sometimes go hundreds of miles to pose for pictures took a lot of cajolery," recalls Leifer. "So did getting officials at the Parthenon to close the temple early so we could shoot in late-afternoon light and convincing the Chinese that I indeed wanted to shoot at the Great Wall and not at the Temple of Heaven, even though the temple was in Peking and the Wall a 2 1/2-hour drive away." Leifer was aided in his planning by Deputy Picture Editor Michele Stephenson and Staff Assistant Antonio Suarez, who helped with the entire assignment.

No one, however, was able to foresee some of the difficulties Leifer was to encounter. In England he found his first choice for a backdrop, Big Ben, sheathed in scaffolding. Result: the shoot underwent a fast change of locale to Windsor Castle. Scaffolding also loomed as a potential problem at the Statue of Liberty, which was scheduled to be shut down late last year for repair and refurbishing. Leifer quickly corralled the busy Carl Lewis and got him to pose last October in what was then the only prototype of the U.S. Olympic uniform. "The real difficulty," says Leifer, "was getting him up at 5:30 a.m. to be at the statue when the light is best. Carl hates to get up early."

Included in the original assignment were three Communist countries, the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba, which have decided since May to sit out the Games. Leifer had the notion that Cuba's "landmark" was President Fidel Castro, who obligingly posed with the island's superheavyweight boxer, Teofilo Stevenson. Afterward, when Leifer asked Castro to autograph a picture from an earlier session, the President's arm was so sore from holding Stevenson's hand aloft in a victory salute that he could barely write. The arm was not too sore, however, to offer Leifer a light for his Cohiba Cuban cigar in the souvenir photo above.