Olympic boycott’s strange results

Press, 13 July 1984, Page 12

Olympic boycott’s strange results

From “The Economist,” London

The most astonishing resistance to political interference is developing among sports stars in eastern Europe. After Mr Chernenko’s Olympic boycott, some east European athletes have asked the Olympic authorities to allow them to compete in Los Angeles as individuals. Like the Americans who asked to compete as individuals in Moscow after Mr Carter’s ban in 1980, they will be refused. The Olympic authorities are still terrified of insulting Governments, but athletes now are not.

In 1980 the various plans for an alternative Olympics from Western Governments foundered be-

cause athletes scorned them. In 1984 Comecon’s proposed alternative Spartakiad is running into the same trouble (“I would have retired last year' if I had known, instead of training all winter.”) The Russians had supposed that a well-publicised Spartakiad would show the communists’ champions triumphantly bettering the times of more genuinely drug-tested Olympic winners in almost every event; today it might show how many eastern folk-heroes have abruptly stopped training, which is not surprising. On the capitalist tennis circuit Czechoslovakia’s clean Mr Ivan Lendl is allowed to become a

Florida millionaire; whereas world-beating East German Olympic champions have been painfully stuffed with drugs, and given nowhere to go. “It is curious,” says a sympathetic Briton, “that in N.A.T.O. in 1980 and the Warsaw Pact now only the Rumanian Government has supported the civil liberties of its athletes.”

The odd beneficiary of the Chernenko boycott will be South Africa. Black African Governments walked out of the 1976 Montreal Games at the deliberately inconvenient last moment to protest because New Zealand had recently played rugby against South Africa. As the English played rugby in South Africa this year, the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa wants the Africans

to walk out of Los Angeles unless, Britain is banned, but he has a small problem. The Kenyan Government boycotted the Olympics in 1976 and 1980; and Kenya’s great athletes, secure in public esteem, now refuse to take any notice of their authorities whatever. In Oslo last year Norwegian officials tried to tear the numbers off Nairobibanned Kenyan competitors, and were told by all athletes to buzz off.

As a compromise, many African countries are suggesting that they should stay Olympic this year, but that the meeting of the Commonwealth Games council — to be held in Los Angeles during the Olympics — should bar England from the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. Since a Commonwealth Games in Scotland without England would be commercially ludicrous, the Scots sports authorities may suggest a "friendly games” which anybody could attend if his Government ordered him not to. This would be the right pattern, but Edinburgh’s new Labour council would hate it.

After sourpusses had forecast that most British athletes would resent the quick naturalisation of Miss Zola Budd, she is instead blooming with full support from the International Athletes Club, which is Britain’s most successful multiracial organisation. Other newspapers are cross that one British newspaper is giving Miss Budd so much money, but athletes like this precedent. Locker-room lawyers say that Magna Carta grants “merchants” the right to ply their trade anywhere; assuming that athletes can be called merchants (after all, they earn enough), today’s young stars will not vote to be ruled by governing bodies which tell them what not to do and where not to earn money. In British track and field athletics, power is passing to the misnamed Amateur Athletics Association, which is likely eventually to allow British athletes and their agents to run their own shows and earn individually as

much money as possible anywhere. The two main sports now run in this way by the athletes themselves are golf and tennis, to the great advantage of communist countries’ sporting millionaires - (Mr Lendl, with properties in Florida and Connecticut, is back in Czechoslovakia’s Davis Cup team after remitting the negotiated equivalent of income tax to Prague) and white South Africans (23 of them were at Wimbledon, playing against representatives of all east European countries and a score of Third World ones). At Henley last month (because rowing is an Olympic sport, therefore one with a governing bureaucracy) South Africa’s national eight could win the Thames Cup only in the vests of an English club each had joined, although they wore Springbok socks. All television-attracting individualist sports will move during the next few years into grand-prix circuits like golf and tennis, and the Olympic fathers will have to decide at Los Angeles whether they will disband their bossy bureaucracies quickly enough to have any say in them. There will be problems. Top golf has passed into very decent hands since it became governed by the players, but poor countries don’t get coaching. Tennis’s revolt against authority briefly made eunuchs of those necessary authorities called umpires. But Olympic sports have the much greater scandal that they have become drug-ridden while subsidised bureaucracies (and therefore subsidising Governments) ruled them, because diplomats fear that stricter drug tests would insult drug-arranging Government officialdoms like East Germany’s. Presidents Carter and Chernenko have hastened the day when the golden youth of the world will no longer elect or obey sports officials who kowtow to Supreme Councils for Sport anywhere. This is one kind point for both their epitaphs. Copyright, “The Economist.”