Sensor! mexico City

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31803, 7 October 1968, Page 13 (Supplement)

Sensor! mexico City

SIESTA, manana and fiesta are perhaps the three Spanish words best known to the rest of the world. The first means sleep, the second infers procrastination and the last gaiety and festivity.

With almost these words alone the non-Spanish world blithely sums up and dismisses the Mexican and his Latin American brothers.

Success in the staging of these Olympic Games could mean that the Mexican could wipe away the all-too-common image of a hunched figure sleeping away the daylight hours until the night beckons him to his guitar and the serenade. Almost five years ago Mexico City was an extremely controversial choice as the site for the nineteenth Oympic Games of the modern era.

And few cities in recent times have known such frustrating and tensionridden times as Mexico City as it plunged into the great task of planning to act as host for more than 8000 competitors and providing venues for 19 sports. Firstly there was the altitude howl led by Christopher Brasher and many others, who claimed that the lives of competitors would be endangered in contesting certain endurance events 7000 feet above sea level. It only subsided when first South Africa was readmitted to the Games, and then barred following the threat of withdrawal by many Iron Curtain and African countries.

There were also fears that many projects such as the Xochimilco Canal for the rowing and canoeing would not be completed in time, while some frightening pictures were drawn of the visiting athlete and spectator racked in pain from "Montezuma’s Revenge.” But despite altitude, apartheid and gloomy forebodings by all the sporting sceptics, the Mexican has carried on his preparations for the “Greatest Sporting Show on Earth.” And now, even though the hammers are still pounding and paint brushes gliding across stadium walls, it seems that ■ Mexico City will be ready *

for the opening ceremony next Saturday. Mexico City did have some advantages on being awarded the Games. For instance, 75 per cent of the installations necessary for the festival were already on hand.

These included the Olympic Stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies and the track and field events, although the stadium situated in University City has been enlarged to accommodate 80,000 spectators. The magnificent Aztec Stadium has been the home of Soccer for more than two years.

A crowd of 100,000 can watch the games, and so well planned are the exits that the huge arena can be cleared of this number within 18 minutes. Among the biggest undertakings by the organising committee for the Olympics were the preparation of the rowing and canoeing sites at Xochimilco, and the construction of the spectacular Sports Palace for the basketball events.

The New Zealand oarsmen, as they glide their blades along the Xochimilco Canal, will probably not realise that this was once the home of floating gardens.

Long before Cortez led his conquistadors into Mexico the Xochimilcas, a peaceloving people, built their homes and cultivated their gardens on rafts on a lake so that they would be free from their less industrious but more warlike neighbours.

Later the rafts became anchored to the lake bottom, and by the time the Spaniards arrived, they had become small islands interlaced by canals.

These same canals were going tn be used for the Olympic rowing and canoeing. But there were problems, and finally a new canal was cut. The work was completed in only six months by entirely Mexican personnel. Perhaps there is some justification in calling it the “Miracle Canal.” The Sports Palace, it is said, will be the largest enclosed sports installation

in Olympic history. It is essentially a gigantic dome enclosed by 22 sweeping steel arches. The circular descending grandstands will seat 25,000 for the Olympic basketball.

The facilities should be all that the Games sportsman will desire. One who was in Mexico for the pre-Olympics last year, and was impressed by the preparations, was the noted Auckland centreboard yachtsman Ralph Roberts. „ So much for the sites: what about the competitors’ home during their stay in Mexico? The great majority will be housed in the Olympic Village at the southern end of the capital. Altogether there will be 29 buildings, 16 of them sixstoreyed and 13 of them 10-storeyed. Each floor will be divided into four threebedroom apartments with two baths, a hallway, a dining room, a kitchen and servants’ quarters. Gymnasiums, training fields, banks and post offices are all close to these quarters. But even exciting sport

and luxurious appointments are scarcely appreciated if the foreigner is stretched out on his bed with excruciating stomach pains. The Ministry of Health and Welfare has launched a dedicated programme to combat “Montezuma’s Revenge” by investigating sanitation, verifying water purity and endeavouring to rid all competition site installations of vermin, garbage and refuse. Only a few days remain now before the 8000 sportsmen will learn how well schedules have been planned m the long countdown period before they reach the launching pads of the

Olympic Stadium, Xochimilco and Acapulco.

And none will be more interested to know this than the Mexican competitors themselves. For the past few years more than 300 sportsmen of the host country have been prepared in the lavish Olympic Sports Centre to meet the invasion of sporting conquistadors of more than 100 countries.

All these preparations do not suggest Latin lethargy if one must use a dubious phrase.

They suggest a challenge to the pride—something no country can resist, especially one staging an Olympic Games.