Word: boycotts
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Elsewhere the Soviets have been subtler. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited France this spring in the midst of the boycott debate there; he pointedly told journalists that important trade-contract discussions were under way that could prove extremely profitable to the French. Although the Philippines had already been promised Moscow's free Olympic travel package if it decided to attend, the Soviets sent word later that large-scale purchases of Philippine coconut products were under consideration. No link was made to Olympic politics, but then none was needed. The message arrived only a few days before a meeting...
...Dublin last week a defiant Lord Killanin, president of the I.O.C., played two new cards that further confused the boycott picture. Killanin unveiled a $1 million "Olympic solidarity" fund created to assist national committees that are short of their usual government grants. (Killanin said the fund was originally for needy Third World nations but will now accommodate others.) He also indicated for the first time that the I.O.C. may per mit athletes from boycotting countries to compete as individuals...
Even if these moves provoke wholesale defections among the boycotters, certain events in the Summer Games will surely suffer. The absence of Japan, West Germany and the U.S. will undermine the value of medals in men's gymnastics, men's track and field, basketball, swimming, judo, boxing, freestyle wrestling and women's volleyball. Boycotts by individual sports federations-yachtsmen from Great Britain and Australia, equestrians from France, Switzerland and Australia -will deprive those events of much of their competitive stature. There will probably be additional dropouts from the Olympics by individual athletes whose countries have decided...
...Italian government cut its Olympic squad by nearly half after the nation's Olympic committee ignored the government's boycott recommendation and voted to go. The mechanism: it banned police and soldiers from Moscow competition and refused to alter exam schedules for student-athletes, who must now decide whether a trip to Moscow is worth losing a year's credit at their universities...
...athletes and Olympic committees pondered their options, the White House was making slippery use of statistics to prove that the boycott's effect was more than psychological. Countries on the U.S. no-show list accounted for 73% of the gold medals and 71% of all medals won by non-Soviet bloc nations at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the Administration noted. Perhaps, but the fact is that nations the U.S. says are not boycotting Moscow accounted for 72% of the gold medals and 70% of the total medals...