BOTH for the athletes involved and the armchair sportsmen cheering them on, this month's Olympics promise to be a spectacle of truly Olympian proportions. With a field of over 10,000 competitors vying for 364 gold medals, the task of the spectator will be almost as demanding as that of participant, and to help the former, a special Olympics supplement accompanies TIME this week. The product of weeks of reporting and research, the supplement is a preview of whom to watch and what to expect when the Games get under way in Munich. It was assembled under the direction of Senior Editor John T. Elson. The introduction and analysis of the Games were written by Associate Editor Edwin Bolwell. Bolwell, who will be in Munich later this month covering the Games firsthand, was first introduced to the Olympics spectacle 16 years ago. The Games were then in Melbourne, Australia, and Bolwell was a reporter for his home-town Melbourne Herald.

As a newspaperman in Australia, and later in Canada, Bolwell has covered every kind of athletic event from tandem cycling to surfboat racing, and has himself been an active amateur athlete most of his life. A former cricketer, track star and Australian football player, he now concentrates on his aggressive tennis game and on encouraging his ten-year-old son Farley--a prospect, says Bolwell, for the 1980 Olympic swimming team.

"While predictions are a risky business in any sports event," he says, "some Olympic athletes are especially worthy of being watched, win or lose." To find out who, Bolwell called on TIME'S correspondents round the world for a critique of the principal international stars.

The job of evaluating the U.S. stars fell to Reporter-Researcher Paul Witteman, who spent long days and late nights tracking down U.S. Olympic team officials for their views. It was an assignment that demanded its own brand of agility.

Not even some Olympic officials knew the name of the coach of the U.S. water-polo team, and it was days before Witteman tracked down Art Lambert at DeAnza College in Cupertino, Calif. The rowing coach, Harry Parker of Harvard, was reached on a phone in the Dartmouth College boathouse. "I have learned more about the Olympics in the past month," says Witteman, "than I ever dreamed I would know."

To capture the atmosphere of the Games' setting, European Correspondent Jesse Birnbaum spent more than two weeks in Munich last month. Birnbaum, whose first trip to the city was under far less pleasurable circumstances--as a member of an Eighth Air Force B-17 bomber crew during World War II--returned now as a tourist and talked at length to businessmen, artists, actresses, politicians and students. His impressions provide ambience and a vicarious sensation of a city that for 16 days will be the sports capital of the world.

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