ON EDGE FOR THE GAMES

When the heralds fanned out through ancient Greece to announce the forthcoming Games at Olympia (see BOOKS), they carried with them the proclamation of a sacred truce that extended for at least a month before and after the Olympics. Since the Games of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal have already become an arena of international acrimony second only to that other supposed citadel of world harmony, the United Nations, the time is ripe for a modern equivalent, however profane, of the sacred truce.

Last weekend the governing body of the Games, the International Olympic Committee, was so irate over a dispute between Taiwan and Canada that it threatened the ultimate sanction, canceling the entire Olympics. The issue: Taiwan's right to fly a flag with the word "China" on it. Canada, which has diplomatic relations with Peking, refused to let the Taiwan team into the country, and the athletes who were en route had to seek refuge in the U.S.

On the same afternoon, Tanzania announced that it was boycotting the Games as a gesture against apartheid (see following story), an action that would yank from the Games one of sport's prestige athletes, Filbert Bayi, who holds the world record for 1,500 meters. Possible too was similar action by other black African countries. One week to the day before the Olympic torch was to be borne into Montreal's stunning $700 million stadium, the Games seemed to teeter on the brink of breakup. C.K. Yang, coach of the Taiwan track team and silver-medal winner in the decathlon (1960), at least put the matter in a hopeful perspective. Said he: "It has been like this for many, many Olympics. I always cross my fingers and they always solve the problems."

The Olympics have become the world's biggest stage--a billion people are expected to view the spectacle on television. As long as that is true, Olympic officials admit, the oil-and-water mixing of politics and sport will continue. With the 1972 Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at Munich all too vividly in mind, there was little criticism of the armed-camp atmosphere at Olympic sites when the 7,200 athletes--and 3,000 functionaries--began arriving.

"The spirit of the athletes may take a beating," says Montreal Olympic Official William Little, "but to protect them, we are going to have to restrict their freedom of movement quite a bit." The tab for "supervision" at Montreal will exceed $100 million--more than $14,000 per athlete--making this the most expensive security operation in history. The police and military force totals 16,000, the largest armed body that Canada has mobilized since World War II.

One of the regrets of the political parrying that surrounds the Olympics is that it threatens to overwhelm the simpler drama of athletes straining to find--and then surpass--their physical limitations. Even if the athlete cannot shave a second off his mortality, he can at least add a moment of timeless honor to the human record.

There was ample evidence last week that the Montreal Olympics would have its share of such moments. Hurdler Willie Davenport, 33, who was advised never to run again after he was carried off the field a year ago with a ruptured tendon in his knee, came to the U.S. trials in Eugene, Ore., spiritually and surgically renewed and won a place on his fourth Olympic team. Long Distance Runner Garry Bjorklund, 25, lost a shoe halfway through the grinding 10,000-meter race. Spurred on by the maddening memory of a foot operation that had kept him off the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, he won an emotional barefoot sprint down the straightaway to finish third and make the squad. Madeline Manning Jackson, a 1968 gold medalist, became at 28 the first American woman to do 800 meters in less than two minutes. Running "on the Lord's behalf," Salvation Army Worker Manning hopes to shave her time of 1:59.81 down to 1:52, four seconds faster than the world record.

Some of the more remarkable feats in this year's Olympics will be performed by athletes from fitness-crazed East Germany, where sport has become a kind of state religion. East Germany won 66 medals at the 1972 summer Olympics, a performance topped only by Russia (99) and the U.S. (94). This year the East German team will advance its assault on the Olympic hegemony of the superpowers and perhaps nudge the U.S. out of second place. One reason: East Germany has never won a gold medal for women's swimming, but by the end of its Olympic trials last month, its women's team held world records in all 13 Olympic swimming events.

There is a global assortment of sentimental--as well as odds-on--favorites. Undeterred by a nasty fall this spring that knocked her unconscious and left her with a hairline vertebral fracture, Britain's Princess Anne will ride with her country's four-member equestrian team at Montreal. Her husband. Captain Mark Phillips, a member of the 1972 gold-medal team, is only an alternate this time.

Another British couple, Brother and Sister Runners Ian (5,000 meters) and Mary (1,500 meters) Stewart of Birmingham, has worked as hard as Anne and Mark. Home-town boosters raised money so that Ian, a factory employee at Birmingham Small Arms Co., and Mary, a clerk at the telephone office, could devote last month to high-altitude training at Colorado Springs, Colo.

Ethiopian fans will be rooting for Miruts Yifter, 27, a potential medalist in the 5,000-and 10,000-meter races--if he has managed to learn from his past mistakes. Yifter once misjudged the distance of an international 5,000-meter race and stopped, thinking he had crossed the finish line a winner when there was still another lap to go. Before a 5,000-meter heat at Munich, a language confusion kept him from reaching the starting line, and he was disqualified.

The grand old man of the Games will be Australian Bill Roycroft, 61, an equestrian appearing in his fifth Olympics. A wiry, gray-haired farmer from the sheep country of southern Australia, Roycroft is best remembered for his performance at the 1960 Rome Olympics. After having to be hoisted onto his horse by teammates because he had broken or dislocated his arm, shoulder and collarbone in a fall during an earlier, cross-country event, Roycroft clinched the gold medal for his team with a faultless show of jumping.

Sentimental favorites provide, of course, only the subplots of sport. Center stage is reserved for face-to-face competition between well-matched and celebrated athletes who have been addressing their lives for months--or years--to a moment of confrontation. Sometimes, even often, others win, but until the last act is over, the limelight is theirs. Five sets of such athletes, both blessed and cursed with each other's achievements, are profiled in the following pages. Four are expected to bring the Olympics moments of high drama. But barring a surprise reversal by Tanzania, the long-awaited meeting of Filbert Bayi and New Zealand's John Walker has been forced offstage by politics. For the moment, at least, Bayi v. Walker seems more symbolic of the '76 Olympics than all the rest.

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