Moscow’s Olympic facilities now open to Soviet public

Press, 5 August 1981, Page 25

Moscow’s Olympic facilities now open to Soviet public

NZPA Moscow Muscovites have moved into the high-rise Olympic village, and sports facilities built for last year’s summer Games are being used by the public and for training athletes. The 40.000-seat covered stadium is a public skating rink this (northern) summer, and the new Olympic pool next door is open to the public. An 1.8. M. computer used at the Games now coordinates the city's ambulance service.

New gold leaf glimmering on the onion domes of the Kremlin churches in the hot summer sun of 1981 recalls the city-wide facelift which preceded the Games.

There are some leftovers. Olympic rings still decorate the outside of Lenin Stadium. Ceramic Misha bear mascots gather dust in souvenir shops, and there is still bitterness about the boycott which kept many nations away.

Just over a year ago, President Brezhnev welcomed Olympic athletes by calling the summer Games “a reflection of the striving of the peoples for peace, accord and beauty."

The greeting was not heard by athletes from 36 nations, including Canada. West Germany, Japan. Norway, and the United States.

They stayed away in protest at the December, 1979, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, depriving many events of top-rated competitors. The Games went on, but under a cloud, of political wrangling not seen since the 1936 Berlin summer Games of the Nazi era. The Moscow Olympics, the first staged by a socialist country, were to have been the biggest sports extravaganza in history and a showcase for Soviet society. With only 81 countries participating, however, the Games generated far less interest than the Soviets hoped.

The Moscow Games drew 5503 athletes, fewer than the three previous Olympics in Mexico City, Munich and Montreal. The record of 7147 athletes from 121 countries was set in Munich in 1972. The Soviet Union's Staterun press is still trying to dismiss the boycott, but its repetitive broadsides hint at the legacy of bitterness.

“There is no need to prove that the boycott of the Olympics imposed on some countries by the United States Administration ended in disgrace," the Soviet news agency Tass said'when commenting on the U.S.-Soviet track and field meet in Leningrad recently.

'The Moscow Olympics cannot be surpassed, they can only be repeated. And

then only it staged m Moscow," the mass circulation daily “Sovietski Sport” said late last year. The Soviet press is already sniping at alleged commercialism in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic plans, while criticising everything from athletic housing to the smog in southern California.

Western proposals to “denationalise" the Olympics by eliminating national flags and anthems have been repeatedly denounced this year by the Soviet press.

Though there was tremendous pageantry at the opening ceremony last .year, •several nations used the occasion to register disapproval of the Afghan situation. Some boycotted the opening ceremony — 16 countries marched behind the Olympic flag and 20 nations were represented by a flag carrier carrying only the country’s name.

The boycott opened the way for Soviet athletes to reap an unprecedented harvest of Olympic medals .— 196, nearly a third of the awards at stake.

Soviet officials proudly point out that in the two weeks of competitions. 36 world records and 74 Olympic records were set. surpassing the number of marks at the 1976 Montreal Games.

The Games gave Muscovites a whiff of Western culture unmatched since the

1957 World Festival of Youth, the first mass influx of Westerners and their ideas to Moscow in the postwar era. Moscow got a facelift. Nine highrise hotels and eight splendid sports centres were built, and virtually every building in central Moscow got a new coat of paint. The Russians made much of improving services in restaurants and hotels for the tourists, but there is no evidence that this filtered down to the average citizen. Slow service, food shortages and a lack of consumer goods are endemic to Soviet life. The Soviets said the cost of new facilities built for the Games was $4OO million but that figure is not thought to include the outlay for related capital investments or personnel costs.

The Soviets report that 211,000 tourists from abroad came to the Games. The number of Western tourists was well below expectations and, according to some estimates, cost the Russians as much as $2OO million in lost revenues.

Some 20,000 United States visitors had been expected, but only about 1000 came and business has not picked up since. About 80.000 American tourists visited the Soviet Union each year between 1976 and 1979 compared to 25.000 in 1980.