Everybody seemed to be catching Olympic fever last week, participants and spectators alike. Veteran journalists, including TIME'S expanded team of 38 correspondents, writers and photographers in Los Angeles, were no exception.

Correspondent Steven Holmes has been reporting on the preparations for the Games for more than a year, including our October 1983 cover story on how the Olympics were being financed. "I confess," says Holmes, "I am a certified Olympic nut. I knew it when I walked into the Coliseum for the opening ceremonies. I was with Hurdler Edwin Moses, whose journey was interrupted every few steps by people wanting to take his picture--not only spectators but other athletes, all wanting to preserve the special moment."

Los Angeles Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate caught his touch of Olympic fever at a TIME reception in Beverly Hills for the opening of the Games. There he was privileged to perform an unusual introduction: "We had invited Bill and Evelyn Lewis, Carl's parents, and Mrs. Ruth Owens, widow of Jesse Owens," Cate recalls. "They had never met, but they greeted one another like long-lost friends and chatted together for the better part of an hour."

For Contributor John Skow, who had covered the tragic 1972 Olympics in Munich, comparisons were inescapable: "Before the massacre of the Israeli athletes, journalists freely roamed the athletes' quarters. No such freedom prevailed in Los Angeles. But despite the restrictions, security officials were unfailingly courteous."

Atlanta-based Correspondent B.J. Phillips, a member of the TIME contingent that covered the Winter Games in Sarajevo as well as the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid, marveled at the resilience of the American athletes, particularly the gymnasts. "It was old home week for me in Pauley Pavilion," says Phillips, who has been following U.S. gymnastic progress since the 1979 World Championships in Fort Worth. "It was all the more bittersweet because I had gone to Moscow to cover the 1980 Games they could not attend. After the men's team victory, I talked to Bart Conner. There is no hug as bone-crushing as that of a gymnast capable of hanging motionless in an iron cross. 'It wasn't easy to wait so long,' I said to him. 'Yes,' he replied, 'but aren't you glad we stayed to see this day?' "