Word: olympiade
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...Amid traffic so tolerable that it actually seems lighter than usual, in air so passable that smog is on sale by the bottle, under security so congenial that immediate fears have eased, with tickets so plentiful that face value has made a comeback, the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles have at least begun brilliantly...
...withdrew on the eve of the Games after two of its journalists, alleged to be terrorists, were refused U.S. entry. About 8,000 athletes are off on a farflung, 16-day spree splashed with hot pastel colors that might have been selected for their political insignificance or because this Olympiad is privately financed and they happened to be the shades on sale...
...marred by politics. The unhappy sequence began with riots outside and a black-power salute by U.S. athletes inside the 1968 Games in Mexico City and the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Games in Munich. It continued in 1976 with the boycott at the Olympiad in Montreal by black African nations that had unsuccessfully tried to get New Zealand expelled because one of its rugby teams had toured South Africa (which was barred from the Olympics after the 1960 Games because of its apartheid policies...
...wait a minute," interjects a still very angry man. "It's been years since we have achieved the political conciliation and unity of which you speak. Every Olympiad since 1976 has been marred by boycotts and international squabbles...
...stranger distances himself from the table and proclaims. "Gentlemen, think about an Olympics where the best compete against the best, but without associations with their countries. Yes, it would lack the sometimes burdensome political ramifications of the Games, but how empty such an Olympiad would seem, how pointless...