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  Out of a runway at the east end of the oval came a Boy Scout with bare knees and a sign reading “Greece.” Being the original Olympic nation, Greece’s team led the march. The Greeks in the front ranks were all bald, obviously committeemen, caterers, and coaches. Their big silken flag, a white cross on a blue field, dipped as it passed the royal box. The King, standing, snapped to salute.

  Thereafter, he remained standing as the flags passed in alphabetical order, never once shifting to relieve the heat on his royal bunions, saluting even those flags which were not dipped. About a half-dozen standards were not lowered, either because of national rules, or because their bearers hadn’t been sufficiently rehearsed, or as a form of political criticism. Ireland’s flag was half-dipped; grudgingly might be an accurate adverb. Colombia’s didn’t go down, but its bearer snapped into a majestic goose-step as he passed. By and large, the teams marched better than baseball squads do at the flag-raising on opening day.

  The first wholehearted burst of applause came for Australia, first of the United Kingdom affiliates to show. However, the loudest enthusiasm manifested between A and E was inspired by the Danish team, whose claque set off a volley of yells and upped with a regular flurry of red Danish flags with their white crosses. Subsequently, this section boisterously hailed all Scandinavians—the Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, and even Iceland’s team. As each such group appeared, the rooters gave off a chant that sounded, from this seat, like “Yale, Yale, Yale.”

  There were big teams and little. Panama was represented by one guy in a Panama hat, not Lloyd LaBeach, the sprinter. India’s team wore baby-blue burnooses. New Zealand’s had what looked like smoking jackets. The Swiss wore caps like lady softball players. The United States got a restrained hand; the last man in our ranks halted to snap the King’s picture.

  Well, the King finally got to sit down. He looked on while trumpeters trumpeted, speakers spoke, and attendants released a great mess of caged pigeons, which zoomed and swooped over 82,000 unprotected skulls. The billing promised 7,000 pigeons, or one for every twelfth head, but it looked like maybe 2,000. Chances are the brass didn’t dare turn loose that many squab in this hungry nation. Almost immediately twenty-one guns boomed. Sounded like first day of the duck season off Little Tail Point in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  Now a tall young blond in his underwear burst through the entrance and circled the track, bearing aloft the Olympic torch, a blinding magnesium sparkler which hurt the eyes. Theoretically, the torch had been lighted on Mt. Olympus and delivered by Western Union boys running in relays across Europe, with a Ford truck following with a spare torch in case the real McCoy went out. Actually, the torch that appeared here was a ringer, a special oversize job carried on the last relay from a suburb like Bay Ridge.

  The torchbearer dashed up into the stands, brandished his torch on high and dropped it into a tall concrete bird bath—from which red flame arose. That flame will burn throughout these games.

  The crowd made with the tonsils. It was hokum. It was pure Hollywood. But it was good. You had to like it.

  VICTORY SPELLED BACKWARDS

  LONDON, 1948

  And now, the Royal Air Force band must return to the desolate, forsaken field of Wembley Stadium and unplay “God Save the King.” Blighty’s only track victory in the Olympics, which was presented to Britain last Saturday under the Marshall Plan, fell under the terms of reverse lend-lease today and was restored to the United States, the original copyright holders. It was the most sensational reversal since Serutan.

  At 4:00 P.M. on Saturday, the American team of Barney Ewell, Lorenzo Wright, Harrison Dillard and Mel Patton—identified locally as three cups of coffee with the cream on top—fled home first in the 400-meter relay by seven or eight yards.

  Five minutes later a vigilante committee of judges ruled that Ewell, after running the first hundred meters, had bootlegged the baton to Wright in a sinister black-market deal consummated outside the legal zone. The United States was disqualified; England was declared the winner; the Union Jack flapped from the victor’s flagpole; the British Lion looked up from his lunch of cold mutton and cheese and roared his triumph to the skies.

  But they had reckoned without J. Arthur Rank and his magic lantern. Today Mr. Rank brought out his stereopticon machine and pictures of the race were shown to the American, the Frenchman, the Finn, the Dutchman, the Czech, and the two Britons composing an International Jury of Appeal. The slides proved, beyond possible cavil, that the baton-snatch had been engineered in strict obedience to the laws of God and man.

  The jury thereupon declared the Americans undisqualified. The decision came shortly after 12:30 P.M. Thus the United States triumph was accomplished in 68 hours 37 minutes 40.6 seconds. This is not an Olympic record.

  Gold, silver, and bronze medals for first, second, and third place were, of course, awarded last Saturday to Great Britain, Italy, and Hungary, whose runners now are required to disgorge, yield up, surrender, and relinquish the hardware. Chances are that before these twelve gimcracks reach their rightful owners, Scotland Yard will have to comb every hock shop in London.

  Thus history was made today, both in international athletics and in the film industry. It was not only the first reversal of a decision involving victory in any Olympic competition; it was also one of the few times within living memory that the movies definitely settled a disputed point in any sport. In the past, it has almost invariably turned out that the cameraman was ogling a blond when the deed was done.

  Before these pictures were shown to the jury, they were viewed by Castleton Knight, producer of Mr. Rank’s sweaty epic. He gave it as his inexpert opinion that the camera had caught the Americans red-handed and the disqualification would stand. The London press quoted Mr. Knight to this effect, unaware that he didn’t happen to know what he was talking about.

  This was, nevertheless, a great day for the flicker industry. All through the games, there have been approximately as many cameramen as athletes on the field, creating the impression that this struggle for world supremacy was mere window-dressing for a J. Arthur Rank production. That impression has been gloriously confirmed. Eighty-two thousand cash customers saw a race last Saturday. Now they’ve got to go to a theater to see the official contest.

  Half an hour after the jury’s decision, the films were run off for the press. Agreement was unanimous that Ewell and Wright had swapped the stick well over on the alkaline side of the white stripe marking the limit of the legal zone. The only argument concerned their margin of safety.

  ‘Three feet,” said Mr. Knight.

  The assembled experts jeered.

  Twelve feet, they insisted. Ten, anyway. Two full strides, someone estimated. Another counted three. Somebody else guessed four.

  “Aw,” said somebody, “give em three steps.”

  “Coo,” said a small voice,” ‘aven’t we given ‘em enough already?”

  As if things weren’t tough enough for the bandsmen, having to learn the anthems of fifty-nine nations, including Liechtenstein, now they’ve got to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” backward.

  “O, Yas Nac Uoy Ees . . .?”

  GOOD, CLEAN FUN

  HELSINKI, 1952

  The Lady of the Bath glanced up without curiosity when four gents tottered out of the steam room of the sauna, all naked as jaybirds and broiled like proper sirloins, charred on the outside, medium rare in the middle. The Lady of the Bath, an old doll wearing spectacles and a long rubber apron, was busy soaping and scrubbing the tract of masculine meat on her pine-board table, and the newcomers represented more work on an already crowded day.

  The sauna (pronounced sowna) is a Finnish bath, and a great deal more. It is a sacred rite, a form of human sacrifice in which the victim is boiled like a missionary in the cannibal islands, then baked to a turn, then beaten with sticks until he flees into the icy sea, then lathered and honed and kneaded and pummeled by the high priestess of this purgatorial pit.

  Nothing relaxes a Finn like
this ritual of fire worship, water worship, and soap worship. It is an ancient folk custom dating from forgotten times, and it explains why Finland produces so many great marathon runners. Anybody who can survive a sauna can run twenty-six miles barefoot over broken beer bottles.

  The most gracious gesture of hospitality a Finn can make is to bathe with his guest. From an American host, a suggestion that everybody go get washed might imply that the guest was getting a trifle gamy, but Americans don’t know everything. Lots of them haven’t been bathed by a doll since they were six.

  “A foreigner,” says a pamphlet on the subject, “who leaves Finland without the intimate acquaintance of a sauna cannot boast of having got into the grips with the Finnish mentality. Through it the creature of civilization is enabled to get in touch with the primal forces of nature—earth, fire and water.”

  Curious about primal forces, three Americans and Kai Koskimies, their Finnish keeper, had taxied out to Waskiniemi, on the outskirts of Helsinki, where a birch forest meets the blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. There they stripped to the buff, bowed cordially to the Lady of the Bath, and entered the steam room.

  In a murky, low-ceilinged cubicle recognizable by anybody who ever read Dante, several other lost souls attired in sweat sat on benches with faces buried in their hands. The room was heated—an understatement, as ever was—by a sort of Dutch oven in which cobblestones are cooked over a fire of birch logs. A thermometer registered only 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and Kai, making a snoot of disapproval, scooped water onto the hot rocks to get up a head of steam.

  The visitors were destined to discover the differences between dry heat and the steamy coziness of this inferno. The steam room is the simple, ancient type of sauna, which is part of the humblest Finnish home. There are 400,000 of them in Finland, one for every ten people. “The air gives off a slight but exhilarating aroma of smoke,” says the pamphlet. “The effect of the open fireplace feels strong to sensitive people.”

  Four sensitive people stood it as long as any hickory-smoked ham could have done. Then they oozed out of the cell like melted tallow, and Kai led the way to another room, providing dry heat. There the thermometer outraged him. It registered only 176 degrees, not even warm enough to boil an egg. The sauna proprietor agreed that this was ridiculous.

  “This is no sauna,” he said, and did something with the fireplace. “In one, two, three minutes it will be warm.” In one, two, three minutes the thermometer raced up to 219 degrees. Missionaries are fricasseed at 212.

  Bundles of leafy birch branches were provided as knouts so the bathers could beat themselves. Kai splashed water around to cool the wooden floor and benches, but it evaporated instantly. Even with the insulation of a folded Turkish towel, the seats were like stove lids.

  Relaxing Finnish-style, everybody sat rocking from cheek to cheek to avoid being fried outright. At the same time, all laid about with the birch, flogging themselves like flagellants. After that came a refreshing dip in the sea.

  The Gulf of Finland is colder than an Eskimo spinster. All feeling, however, had been left behind in the stew pot. The instant a guy hit the water he turned numb; he suffered no more than a corpse.

  Cleanliness was next on the schedule, and the Lady of the Bath was the babe to provide it. She starts with a shampoo, then works on the subject in sections—just as one eats a lobster, cleaning up one claw, laying it aside, and picking up another. Her powerful fingers probe deep, finding muscles the doctors never have charted. She is skillful, efficient, and thorough. She scrapes the hull with a rough wet towel. The combination massage and scouring process is genuinely relaxing, easing muscles, untying knotted nerves.

  That’s all there is to a sauna, except for one technicality. The technicality is that as soon as you’re finished, you do it all over—the heat, the swim, and the shower. In the winter, when the sea drops two degrees in temperature and freezes over, you can’t swim. You go outdoors and roll in the snow instead. On the second time around, the temperature in the dry oven had got satisfactorily cozy. It was slightly over 269 degrees. This created some excitement around the sauna. They said it was a world record.

  When it’s all over, you get a diploma testifying that you are alive and clean. This is partly true.

  CZECH AND DOUBLE CZECH

  HELSINKI, 1952

  In the morning there was a headline in a paper from Paris reading: “La Finale du 5000 Metres? Ce Sera la Bombe Atomique des Jeuxf (This will be the atomic bomb of the games.)” In the afternoon there was thin sunshine, turned on specially for the occasion by the Finns, to whom nothing is impossible when it involves entertaining the thieves of time and destroyers of distance in congress here from all the nations of the world.

  The steep slopes of the stadium were peopled with the greatest crowd yet drawn for Olympic competition here. Thousands of athletes not engaged on the day’s card sat among the cash customers, taking time off from their rehearsals to see the bombe atomique go off.

  Even on the field there was uncommon congestion. Judges scurried in flight as whirling hammer throwers flung hardware about the huge playpen. Guy Butler, an old English Olympian now turned journalist-photographer, was stooping to dig into his equipment case when something hissed through the air and landed—kerchok!—just short of his unprotected flank. He whirled and saw, quivering in the real estate, the javelin of a Russian broad (the term is purely descriptive, not ungallant).

  On the fifth day of boisterous combat, this conclave of gristle had achieved a climax with the second bid for a gold medal by the comical contortionist Emil Zatopek. Four years ago, this gaunt and grimacing Czech with the running form of a zombie had made himself the pin-up boy of the London games. Witnesses who have long since forgotten the other events still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, gasping, groaning, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain. In the most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein, Zatopek set an Olympic record for 10,000 meters in London and barely failed to win the 5,000 from Belgium’s Gaston Reiff. This year he broke his own records for both speed and human suffering at 10,000, and two days ago he created a minor sensation in his 5,000-meter heat. Leading on the last lap, he made the only political gesture yet seen on this playground, slowing up and beckoning to his Communist cousin, Russia’s Aleksandr Anoufriev, to come on and win the heat.

  Now he was back in the 5,000 final, trying for a distance double that had defied every mortal save Finland’s Hannes Kolehmainen, who won these two tests in 1912. To the Finns, these are the races that count; anything shorter is for children.

  For example, an old gaffer around here overheard mention of Andy Stanfield, the Jersey City sprinter, and asked: “Stanfield? Who is he?”

  “The American champion,” he was told. He blinked.

  “How can he be champion to run two hundred meters?” the old guy said. “He should run anyway five kilometers.”

  That’s what Zatopek was doing, along with Reiff; Alain Mimoun, the French Algerian schoolmaster; Herbert Schade, the German favorite; and Chris Chataway, the Oxford blue. These five were the leaders from the start, and they made up a sort of gentlemen’s club on the front end, some distance removed from the ten other starters. Then Reiff quit the lodge, giving up on the eleventh turn around the track, with a lap and a half to go.

  All through the race, Zatopek had commanded the rapt attention of spectators, and with every agonized step he had rewarded them. Bobbing, weaving, staggering, gyrating, clutching his torso, flinging supplicating glances toward the heavens, he ran like a man with a noose about his neck. With half a mile to go, Schade and Chataway passed him. He seemed on the verge of strangulation; his hatchet face was crimson, his tongue lolled out. A quarter-mile left, and he went threshing to the front again, but as they turned into the back-stretch for the last time, he was passed by Schade, then Chataway, then Mimoun.

  Now he was surely finished, a tortured wreck three yards back of the three lea
ders who ran in a tight little cluster into the last turn.

  Suddenly, midway of the turn, there was a flash of red on the outside. Four times in front and four times overtaken, that madman was rushing into the lead with his fifth and final spurt. He went barreling past the rest in an unbelievable charge. There was a jam on the inside, and Chataway sprawled over the curb into the infield.

  Mimoun took out after Zatopek. The little Algerian made a fine run, as fruitless as it was game. He tailed Zatopek home as he had at 10,000 meters. Even Schade, in third place, broke Reiff’s Olympic record, and Chataway, who got to finish fifth alongside his countryman Gordon Pirie, was only four-tenths of a second off the London time.

  A little later in the day, Mrs. Zatopek won the javelin throw in the women’s department. Czech and double Czech.

  THE SIX O’CLOCK SWILL

  MELBOURNE, 1956

  This is written after a conscientious and coldly scientific survey of Melbourne’s most celebrated institution—the six o’clock swill. The Olympic Games will spawn bigger headlines in the world press, but the press of this troubled world is not noted for its sense of proportion. Take a bottle-scarred researcher’s word for it, the Olympic marathon will produce no gamer competitors or pluckier stayers than the legions who rush the growler six evenings a week in Melbourne’s pubs. The six o’clock swill is a charming folk custom sired by a law which requires saloons to stop serving at six P.M. This creates a challenge which no Aussie worth his malt will take lying down, or at least not as long as he can stand. Most offices close at five, most shops at five-thirty. It isn’t easy to make your load in one hour, much less thirty minutes, but these people come from pioneer stock.

  In a recent referendum a proposal to keep bars open until ten o’clock was defeated by an odd coalition, not to say an unholy one. Marshaled against the bill were the outright prohibitionists, the saloonkeepers, and the housewives. The first group wants the joints closed as early as possible, the proprietors are happy with the roaring business they do and don’t want working hours extended and labor costs increased. The wives just want their husbands.