Olympic trip to East ‘encouraging’

Press, 14 May 1982, Page 28

Olympic trip to East ‘encouraging’

NZPA-Reuter East Berlin The Los Angeles organising committee for the 1984 Olympic Games has arrived in East Germany on a tour which it hopes will transform its difficult relations with Eastern Europe’s top Olympic countries. The president of the committee, Mr Peter Ueberroth, told a press conference yesterday that the trip meant a breakthrough in understanding in spite of recent Soviet criticism of Los Angeles as an Olympic venue. The committee arrived on Wednesday on an unannounced six-day visit to East Germany at the invitation of the president of the East German Olympic Committee, Mr Manfred Ewald. Mr Ueberroth said that the tour had been extended at short notice to include Warsaw and Moscow, which he saw as an encouraging sign of a desire for co-operation. Referring to criticism in the Soviet press that Los Angeles had too much smog and was making inadequate preparations for the 1984 games, Mr Ueberroth said that he had read the articles and noted that they also contained much personal criticism of him. “But the Soviet Union’s National Olympic Committee is made up of good sportsmen, and I will see them on this trip and look them in the eye,” he said. “East Germany is one of

the top three Olympic countries in the world and we regard this trip itself as a breakthrough in our relations with countries in this part of the world,” Mr Ueberroth said.

The Los Angeles delegation will return home via Yugoslavia and Rome, where it will attend a meeting of the International Olympic Committee.

Replying to questions from East German journalists about "commercialisation” of the Olympics, Mr Ueberroth, said that the 1984 Games would be the least commercialised in recent years with 30 sponsors, compared with 100 al Moscow and 164 at Montreal.

However, he said companies would sponsor the building of stadiums, a new idea which could allow poorer countries interested in staging the games, such as Hungary or the Ivory Coast, to do so.