"Schande! Schande! Schande!"

OLYMPIC officials are a bit like American jurists: they are sometimes unqualified; they often get their jobs through political connections; and they usually hang on to them for a long, long time. Thus, as frequently happens in U.S. courtrooms, some distressingly poor judgments were rendered last week in Munich, leaving an indelible stain on the otherwise lustrous XX Olympiad.

In event after event, there were officiating blunders that demonstrated incompetence, and sometimes outright bias. The first involved Chris Taylor, the 434-lb. American heavyweight wrestler, in his opening bout with Russia's world champion, Alexander Medved. To most observers, Taylor waged a clean battle with his opponent and clearly should have won the match. Yet Referee Umit Demirag, a Turk, cautioned Taylor twice for fouling, without once reprimanding Medved; the penalty points incurred by Taylor provided Medved with his margin of victory. Demirag's calls were so conspicuously wrong that the Federation of International Boxing Associations afterward summarily dismissed him from all further judging assignments. But the decision stood.

There were other equally egregious judgments. In the women's 3-meter diving competition, the East German judge on a panel of seven generously gave the D.D.R. entrants the top three scores. Other judges saw matters differently, and the East German girls finished third, ninth and tenth in the finals. In the prone small-bore-rifle competition, Victor Auer of the U.S. appeared to have outpointed North Korea's Ho Jun Li, 598-595, despite raucous heckling by Li's countrymen, who steadfastly ignored the officials' reprimands. When the shooting stopped, the Koreans demanded an examination of the target. Two hours later the judges reversed the computer's decision, awarded Li four more points and proclaimed him the gold-medal winner.

None of these blatant exercises in bias remotely compared with the decision rendered against U.S. Light Middleweight Boxer Reginald Jones, 21, in favor of Valery Tregubov, 25, of the Soviet Union. The opening round could plausibly have been judged a standoff, with the more experienced Russian consistently dancing out of trouble. In the second round, Jones rocked Tregubov several times and opened a nasty cut over his right eye. In the third, Jones nearly sent Tregubov to the canvas three times; the Russian was unable to punch back and lasted until the final bell strictly on guts and savvy.

The boxers joined the referee in mid-ring, Jones dancing in the glow of apparent triumph, Tregubov glumly anticipating defeat. Suddenly the referee raised the Russian's right hand, signaling victory. The crowd sat stunned for a moment, then nearly blew the top off the arena, whistling (the European version of booing), firing debris into the ring and crying "Schande! Schande! Schande!" (Shame! Shame! Shame!)

That it was. Judges from Liberia and Malaysia had picked Jones as the victor while a Yugoslav had Tregubov winning. The Dutch and Nigerian officials scored the fight a draw; but preferences must be registered under Olympic rules, and both inexplicably preferred Tregubov, purportedly because of his "aggressiveness." -

The incident led the boxing association to take a harder look at the Munich decisions. Two days later, one boxing judge was dismissed and 16 were warned. By week's end six boxing officials had been dropped. That, of course, did little to console the bewildered Jones, who swore he would never fight again.

It is no coincidence that the worst of the decisions against U.S. athletes were made by European judges, especially those from Communist-bloc countries, which attach great political significance to Olympic performance and seem to regard their athletes as instruments of foreign policy. U.S. Wrestler Wayne Wells, a gold-medal winner, has his own notion: "It's the way they've been brought up. What's cheating to us is not cheating to them." The pivotal problem is that the judges are originally picked by member nations, leaving the Olympic Committee little choice but to rubber-stamp the nominations. One sure way to avoid a recrudescence of suspect decisions at the XXI Olympiad would be to change the system and let one of the international Olympic bodies choose the judges.

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