Word: olympiade
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...learned the biggest lesson of my life in Munich," declared Australian Swimmer Shane Gould earnestly. "I learned how to lose." Could this be the same 15-year-old girl who won three gold medals, one silver and one bronze at the XX Olympiad-more than anyone else except U.S. Swimmer Mark Spitz? The very same, but last July Shane had carefully predicted her times for all five events, written "Here's hoping" underneath and sealed the estimates in an envelope. Back home in Sydney she opened it, found that she had bettered only one of her predictions, failed...
...annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund that convenes in Washington this week will be a kind of money Olympiad. Among the central bankers, finance ministers and star economists who attend such gatherings, there will be competition for national victories, much talk of gold and loud complaints about the rules of the game. The very purpose of the meeting is to start changing the rules in hopes of alleviating the world's serious and endlessly debated money problems. But too many powerful IMF members-including the U.S., West Germany, France and Canada-face imminent national elections to risk committing...
Against this backdrop of political chicanery and racial animosity, in an atmosphere of intrigue and incompetence, the Arab terrorists committed their murderous assault on the Israeli athletes. Yet even apart from the horrifying massacre, the XX Olympiad has to rank as one of the sorriest athletic spectacles in history. True, hundreds of athletes did their human best, breaking dozens of world and Olympic records. Nonetheless, the impact of these extraordinary feats of strength, endurance and grace was marred by the chauvinistic stockpiling of team points, power politics, inept and prejudiced officiating, flagrant commercialism and oleaginous doses of carnival ballyhoo...
These ills did not originate with the XX Olympiad. Since the Games were revived in 1896, they have too often been used for purposes that stray far from their professed ideal. Adolf Hitler made the 1936 Berlin Games a platform for virulent Nazi propaganda; in 1952 the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. began turning the Olympics into a cold war theater. Since then even the referees, who can do a lot of subjective mischief in judgment events like boxing, have often been chosen more for their ideological loyalty than for their skill. As proved by Munich 1972, the Games have become...
...more radical notion, endorsed in principle by Lord Killanin of Ireland, Brundage's successor as head of the I.O.C., is to continue the Olympic movement without a quadrennial Olympiad. As Lord Killanin points out: "There is too much concentration on the fortnight of the Games rather than on the Olympic movement, which goes on all the time." This is probably the soundest proposal of all. The Games could be spread over a longer period as well as geographically across a nation or even a group of nations. This would lessen the present emphasis on a single spectacle, thus diluting...