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  Ah, well. The conversation continued on less clinical grounds.

  Frau Nagele’s husband, Robert, is coach of the Swiss luge team, or rodelbund. Growing up in the village of Schiers, Elisabeth went belly-flopping on these devilish contraptions as all Alpine kids do, but she didn’t see competition until 1955 when she married and moved to the winter sports resort of Davos.

  She dug the racket, which proves there is no accounting for a lady’s tastes.

  The luge racer, new to the Olympics this year, stretches himself spine down and feet foremost on his tiny steel-shod sled. Zooming and clattering down the chute, he steers by dropping a shoulder to shift his weight.

  The sled leaps and bucks and plunges, bashing his crash helmet against the ice. He wears thickly padded gloves. If he should graze the wall without this protection it would be look, ma, no fingers.

  It was on one of these infernal things that a member of the British team was killed before the Games started.

  Still, little Mrs. Nagele loves it. Six years after her first ride down a racing course she was champion of the world. Her eldest daughter—there are three girls and two boys, aged two to eight—is already first-rate.

  Four times Frau Nagele went tearing through the hairpin turns on the lower slopes of Patscherkofel to finish twelfth in the first Olympic competition.

  “Nicht gut,” she said.

  She rolled up her right sleeve to show technicolor bruises along the inner side of the elbow. A few days ago, she said, the muscles were swollen clear out to here. She had mashed the arm on a practice run and the pain handicapped her. Made her, she was afraid, a mite too cautious in competition.

  “What did the coach say about your twelfth place?”

  “He is not satisfied,” Frau Nagele said. She made a wifely little snoot.

  SAYONARA

  TOKYO, 1964

  Now the sacred Olympic smudge smolders out, sending its last column of oily smoke into the drizzling smog, and it is Sayonara, Tokyo, farewell, land of peach blossom and raw fish with the eye left in, good-bye, O gracious, giggling hosts, and banzai to the kamikaze taxi jocks, so brave, so misdirected.

  The great global festival of sinew and sweat shuts down, and the departing guest can only hope that those who elevated the production to a level of magnificence never approached before may yet lay hands on that perfidious salesman of soda water and so avoid the alternative of falling on their swords.

  The sordid details of the Japanese Organizing Committee’s lone defeat in the games of this XVIII Olympiad have been suppressed, but this is the tale being told as the athletes in Orympic Virrage—to use the local pronunciation—pack their spiked shoes and barbells.

  It seems that in the bustle and confusion of the clambake’s opening, one imposter squirmed through security regulations and got himself accredited as a bona fide correspondent representing, he said, a newspaper called France West Subsequently it was discovered that he was a Gallic One-Eye Connolly whose real occupation was peddling Evian mineral water, that excellent French product which all experienced tourists mix with their Scotch in Paris.

  For the Organizing Committee it was an appalling loss of face. Ever since the foul deception was uncovered, agents have been tearing around town asking, “Would you happen to know where I can buy a shipload of Evian water?” in the hope of apprehending the miscreant. No success so far. Hara-kiri may be the only solution.

  Ah so, it was a busy time and a good one. Visitors who found leisure to investigate entertainment after dark report that the lid was on the Ginza and little was to be seen of the ladies whose profession is, in the enchanting Japanese expression, “selling springtime.”

  Still, there must have been some nocturnal attractions, for on the elevator one noon a man was heard to ask his American companion: “Where were you rast night, so rate?”

  And then there was the guy in charge of keeping newspaper stiffs off the press buses returning to town from the Toda rowing course after Philadelphia’s Vesper Club had brought off its smasher in the eight-oared race. He said he had “lesponsibilities” and seemed chagrined when it turned out that not all seats were taken.

  “I find,” he said reluctantly, “we have ress number. You may lide.”

  Finally, there was splendorous cocktail party tossed by the Seiko Watch people, who provided the timing instruments for all Olympic events.

  It was charming, with sushi as flavorful as raw fish can get, the tempura as delectable as deep-fried shrimp can be, and the premises festooned with small, exquisite creatures in gorgeous kimonos doing the hostess bit with incomparable grace.

  There was also a platoon of dolls playing the koto, an instrument that looks like a dugout canoe with strings on it. As favors, guests received a Japanese watercolor with this printed message over the signature of Tokii Akimoto, mama-san of the koto troupe:

  Well come to our performance today. Of course you may had many good times since visited japan, just we supposed.

  but Especially this time, we presented with “Harmony of KOTO-tone” for you. KOTO is representation of typical Japanese musical instrument, just like harp. How do you like it? Are you satisfied with this? We played the melody of SAKURA, ROKU-DAN, CHILDORI, and the other few concert, as well as we can. We hope to comfort your tiredness travel with our KOTO-performance.

  but We are very afraid what do you feel about it. Do you Vanish Out your discomfort travel? If we can be of any service to you, we shall be ver yglad. Please, remember what magnificent splendid meny japanese KIMONO ladys playing KOTO even after you’d return home. How’s your opinion and impression about it. Answer us Please, in after days, well wait it. Then Thank You for your appreciation and cooperation, today, finally, we’ll present with great pleasure a piece of “SHIKISHI-picture” in memory of this entertainment.

  Please Take it with one of your souvenirs from japan. The sign is mine, The Illustration is printed with KIYOKO TASTUKE (very famous artist of Nippon-GAFU in japan) by shes hand.

  T. akimoto.

  THE BLACK BERETS

  MEXICO CITY, 1968

  The 400-meter race was over and in the catacombs of Estadio Olimpico Doug Roby, president of the United States Olympic Committee, was telling newspapermen that he had warned America’s runners against making any demonstration if they should get to the victory stand. A fanfare of trumpets interrupted him.

  In stiff single file, the three black Americans marched across the track. All of them—Lee Evans, the winner; Larry James, second, and Ron Freeman, third—had broken the recognized world record. Rain had fallen after the finish and, although it was abating now, the runners wore the official sweatsuits of the United States team, plus unofficial black berets which may or may not have been symbolic.

  Each stopped to enable John J. Garland, an American member of the International Olympic Committee, to hang the medal about his neck. Then each straightened and waved a clenched fist aloft. It wasn’t quite the same gesture meaning, “We shall overcome,” which Tommie Smith and John Carlos had employed on the same stand after the 200-meter final.

  Lord David Burghley, the Marquis of Exeter who is president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, shook hands with each, and they removed the berets, standing at attention facing the flagpole as the colors ascended and the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Smith and Carlos had refused to look at the flag, standing with heads bowed and black-gloved fists upraised.

  Evans, James, and Freeman stepped down, and out from under every stuffed shirt in the Olympic organization whistled a mighty sigh of relief. The waxworks had been spared from compounding the boobery which had created the biggest, most avoidable flap in these quadrennial muscle dances since Eleanor Holm was flung off the 1936 swimming team for guzzling champagne aboard ship.

  The 400-meter race was run Friday, about 48 hours after Smith and Carlos put on their act and 12 hours after the United States officials lent significance to their performance by firing them from the team. The simple litt
le demonstration by Smith and Carlos had been a protest of the sort every black man in the United States had a right to make. It was intended to call attention to the inequities the Negro suffers, and without the aid of the Olympic brass might have done this in a small way.

  By throwing a fit over the incident, suspending the young men and ordering them out of Mexico, the badgers multiplied the impact of the protest a hundredfold. They added dignity to the protestants and made boobies of themselves.

  “One of the basic principles of the Olympic games,” read the first flatulent communique from on high, “is that politics play no part whatsoever in them. . . . Yesterday United States athletes in a victory ceremony deliberately violated this universally accepted principle by using the occasion to advertise their domestic political views.”

  Not content with this confession that they can’t distinguish between human rights and politics, the playground directors put their pointed heads together and came up with this gem:

  “The discourtesy displayed violated the standards of sportsmanship and good manners. . . . We feel it was an isolated incident, but any further repetition of such incidents would be a willful disregard of Olympic principles and would be met with severest penalties.”

  The action, Roby said, was demanded by the International Olympic Committee, including Avery Brundage, president, and by the Mexican Organizing Committee. They are, as Mark Anthony observed on another occasion, all honorable men who consider children’s games more sacred than human decency.

  Soon after the committee acted, a bedsheet was hung from a sixth-floor window of the apartment house in Olympic Village where Carlos has been living. On it were the letters: “Down with Brundage.”

  There were, of course, mixed feelings on the United States team. Lee Evans was especially upset, but when asked whether he intended to run as scheduled, he would only reply, “Wait and see.”

  “I had no intention of running this race,” he said over the air after taking the 400, “but this morning Carlos asked me to run and win.”

  Said Carlos: “The next man that puts a camera in my face, I’ll stomp him.”

  AMATEUR AMITY

  1968

  Baron Pierre de Coubertin was a little twerp standing 5-foot-3, a dropout from the French military academy of St. Cyr who specialized in political science and education. He cultivated a mustache that could shelter a covey of quail and a notion that international rivalry in sports would promote international amity in everything else. Toward this end he revived the Olympic Games, that sweaty love-in whose latest renewal has produced the following tidbits:

  1. Hans Gunnar Liljenvall, a member of Sweden’s modern pentathlon team, flunks his drunkometer test and the Swedes, who finished third, are ordered to return their bronze medals.

  2. S. Collard, masseur to Dutch cyclists, gets the bum’s rush for flipping vitamin pills to his bike riders.

  3. Tom Evans, coach of the United States free-style wrestlers, says rasslers for other countries dumped matches on orders from their coaches, who made deals to protect one another in different weight classes.

  “I don’t mind bad decisions or inferior refereeing,” says the broad-minded Evans, “but throwing matches is too much.”

  4. The United States Olympic Committee is investigating reports that some of our amateurs are on the payroll of sporting goods manufacturers, and Dan Ferris of the Amateur Athletic Union says athletes from virtually every country have been getting from $500 to $6,000 in payola.

  5. Two American foot racers demonstrate silently for human rights, and are blackguarded by the United States brass for “advertising their domestic political views,” and kicked out of Mexico.

  6. Harry Edwards, leader of the aborted Negro boycott of the games, scatters vague charges in Washington implying misuse of funds by American officials and says “payoffs to coaching staffs” should be investigated.

  It should not, however, be inferred that the hoedown south of the border has been totally devoid of the sweetness and light which the dear little Baron yearned for. In a gush of loving chauvinism, a manufacturer in Prague’s garment center promised a lace dress to every Czechoslovak cupcake who won a medal.

  The modern pentathlon is a military event combining riding, fencing, pistol shooting, swimming and cross-country running over five consecutive days. Theoretically, the contestant is a soldier who, finding himself in enemy territory, fights loose with sword and pistol and makes his way to freedom on horseback, afoot, and by swimming a river.

  You’d think a guy who’s going to be fighting and fleeing for five days would be entitled to a few belts of schnapps beforehand, especially if he’s a Swede. As the poet wrote about Minnesota:

  Across the plains where once there roamed

  The Indian and the Scout,

  The Swede with alcoholic breath

  Sets rows of cabbage out.

  Sweden’s Olympic delegates swore that none of their guys had more than a beer before the competition, but the medical committee hollered copper when its hydrometer showed Liljenvall’s radiator protected to 20 below zero. Out he went.

  As for payola, the Olympic gospel declares that “an amateur is one who participates solely for pleasure and for the physical, mental, and social benefits he derives therefrom, and to whom participation is nothing more than recreation without material gain of any kind, direct or indirect.”

  Nothing could be sweeter than that, or sillier in today’s economy. If the groundhogs who administer amateur athletics could face reality, they would discard such tumescent definitions for a simple yardstick: an athlete is a professional if he makes his living at the game; otherwise he is an amateur.

  Except in American colleges and a few countries like Russia, a man can’t make a living running 200 meters. If by padding expense accounts and endorsing spiked shoes he can raise the price of a few beers, he injures nobody. And anybody who thinks payola is something new should consult The Story of the Olympic Games, by John Kieran and Arthur Daley. He will read:

  They (the games) lost the spirit of the older days. . . . Winners were no longer contented with a simple olive wreath as a prize. They sought gifts and money. . . . The games were finally halted by decree of Emperor Theodosius I of Rome in 394 A.D.

  AVERY IN WONDERLAND

  1972

  “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

  “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

  Without a hearing, without a defense and without appeal, Karl Schranz of Austria has had his buttons cut off and been drummed off the ski slopes of Sapporo, Japan, by the self-appointed, self-perpetuating kangaroo court that calls itself the International Olympic Committee. Never has that clutch of overripe playground directors brought off a more transparent exercise in face-saving and never in all his years as Defender of the Faith has Avery Brundage, the noblest badger of them all, been in finer form.

  Schranz, at thirty-three the senior member of Austria’s alpine ski team, ranks third in the world this winter in the art of sliding downhill, which makes him a national hero. His crime was cashing in on his fame by endorsing ski equipment. This puts him in a class with ladies of the peerage who advertise that they wash their faces with a certain soap, movie stars who shill for deodorants on television, and practically every other schussboomer who ever cracked a fibula.

  Indeed, Brundage, doubling as chief justice and prosecutor, went into the star chamber with a list of about forty skiers whom he considered guilty of violating the amateur code. Had the I.O.C. cast them all into outer darkness, the millions Japan spent getting ready for the Winter Games would have gone down the drain and the slopes would have been stained by the blood of National Broadcasting Company vice presidents falling on their Scout knives.

  Quailing from such a responsibility, the vestals of the Olympic flame made an example of Schranz
and found all other defendants without sin. Brundage said the Austrian was singled out because he was “the most blatant and verbose,” which is pretty bad, and also “disrespectful of the Olympic movement,” which is unforgivable.

  Schranz, it seems, wasn’t content merely to sell his name and photograph to advertisers. He compounded his misbehavior by denouncing the Olympic fathers to the Associated Press for their “nineteenth-century attitudes” and charging that they favored “rich competitors over poor ones.”

  Brundage characterized these remarks as “very ill-advised,” and he was right. Schranz should have said eighteenth century.

  Avery Brundage is both the president and symbol of the I.O.C. He is a rich and righteous anachronism, at eighty-four a vestigial remnant of an economy that supported a leisure class that could compete in athletics for fun alone. His wrath is the more terrible because it is so sincere and unenlightened.

  It goes without saying that Karl Schranz is a professional. So are all the state-supported athletes of many countries; so are the American kids who are hired to play games for colleges; so are all those Olympic runners who took bribes from manufacturers of track shoes during the 1968 games in Mexico City.

  Several years ago the custodians of amateur morals in United States skiing circles decided that the way to keep athletes pure was to beat them to the loot. A firm of agents was employed to sell official endorsements for every item of winter sports equipment from thermal underwear to skis. Price lists were drawn up for manufacturers wishing to advertise that the United States ski team used their mittens or boots or goggles.

  An interesting rationale operates here. If a manufacturer pays an individual skier for using his product, it is dirty money. If the same manufacturer pays off the national association, the swag is as clean as new powder.

  The simple truth is that the whole concept of amateurism is archaic, as the dear old doyens of lawn tennis came reluctantly to admit at long last. Brundage is not the only hardshell who refuses to recognize this. He is just the godliest, the most intransigent and the loudest. He isn’t going to change, but perhaps one of these days younger and more flexible minds will reject the outmoded ideal of the gentleman sportsman and come around to the realization that open competition is the only kind that is practicable today in any sport.