Games too dear—Soviets

Press, 23 April 1984, Page 26

Games too dear —Soviets

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Soviet Union, maintaining a constant barrage of complaints about preparations for the Los Angeles summer Olympic Games, said yesterday they were too expensive. The official news agency, Tass, said that the cost of participation would be twice as high per athlete as that of the Moscow Games in 1980 and that the extra money was all going into the pockets of the “American propertied classes.” Earlier yesterday, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia issued fresh official press attacks on the American

organisation of the games, but the Bulgarian media dismissed the notion that the Soviet bloc might boycott the event. Tass said that the high costs were not even justified by the facilities offered, as participants would be staying in university dormitories so far away from sports centres that they would be exhausted when they arrived to compete. “Irrespective of the results the athletes will be able to show in these conditions, the spectators will have to pay record money to watch tired sportsmen compete in the suffocating

smog of Los Angeles,” Tass added. The Soviet media began a fierce campaign against the Los Angeles Games last month and daily commentaries have complained about everything from the city’s brothels to the cost of hire cars.

Soviet sports chiefs have also alleged that East European athletes would be in personal danger in Los Angeles and have threatened to stay away from the Games altogether. A separate Tass commentary yesterday chided the West for assuming Moscow’s attitude was motivated by a vindictive

desire to avenge the Western boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. “Nothing could be further from the truth than this slander pushed by all manner of Right-wing organisations and the U.S. bourgeois press,” Tass said. It added that such allegations were “a vain attempt to blame others rather than the hosts for the tensions that have flared up around the 1984 Olympics.”

The Czechoslovak Communist Party daily, “Rude Pravo,” said yesterday that a meeting tomorrow between the Los Angeles Games president, Peter Ue-

berroth, Olympic officials and Soviet sports officials, should not be limited to mere formalities.

“It should call on the U.S. organisers to consistently implement the Olympic charter and adopt measures which would guarantee security to the games participants and equal conditions for all athletes and delegations.” Bulgaria, however, in an article in the official sport newspaper, “Naroden,” said yesterday: “Boycott cannot be our appeal. Not for a single instant have Bulgarian athletes upset their training for the twenty-third Olympics.”