Free board at Olympic village

Press, 28 July 1976, Page 11

Free board at Olympic village

PA corres Montreal Embarrassed Canadian security officials are trying to tighten checks at the Olympic Village after the discovery that a young American has been living there undetected for nearly two weeks. The American, Paul Wilkinson, even marched as a member of the Canadian team in the opening ceremony a week ago. Games officials tried to hush up the incident after a Toronto newspaper exposed the deception, A Canadian sprinter. Bob Martin, a friend of Wilkinson, has taken the blame and has been expelled from the Canadian athletics team. The pair are old university friends and Martin invited ■ the American to share a spare I bed in the Canadian team’s :apartment at the Games village as a joke. They used another Canadian athlete’s identity card;

[ to bluff the security system. Now, according to village offi- . ciais, the security checks i have been made even tighter. In another incident, a ■ bomb-disposal unit removed . an alarm clock and wires . from a public lavatory be- , neath the Olympic sports stadium soon after a telephone . message that a bomb had [ been left there. i The police said that the t clock, wrapped in a shoe box and placed on a lavatory seat, i was wired to the pay-lavatory • coin mechanism. The box I contained no explosives. The telephone call came > minutes before the end of an . Olympic handball match beI tween Japan and Yugoslavia. . However, the police allowed • the match to end before , clearing out the teams and I >the 2242 spectators. . 1 The caller said that a bomb . had been planted in the lava-; tory, then muttered a French; slogan coined by the separ-' atist Quebec Liberation; ■ Front, “Nous Vaincrons,” —. [ “We shall overcome.”