The Games: Up in the Air

It is an Olympiad of contradictions. There she stands, poised on the balance beam--a 4-in. strip of spruce, 16 1/2 ft. long, 4 ft. above the padded flooring. The palms of her hands are coated with gymnasts' chalk that is as white as her uniform, as white as her face. She is an infinitely solemn wisp of a girl, 4 ft. 11 in. tall, a mere 86 Ibs.; dark circles above her cheeks; a Kean-eyed elf. Then, with no more strain than it would take to raise a hand to a friend, she is airborne: a backflip, landing on the sliver of a bar with a thunk so solid it reverberates; up, backward again, a second blind flip, and a landing. No 747 ever set itself down on a two-mile runway with more assurance or aplomb. She leaps, twists, spins, and the 18,000 people in Montreal's Forum realize that they are witnessing an exhibition of individual achievement that is truly Olympian. The judges agree. Their verdict on Nadia Comaneci, 14, of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Rumania: she is perfect.

Never before in the modern Olympic Games, which date back to 1896, has the performance of a gymnast been judged perfect. But within five days last week Comaneci earned the 10.00 mark seven times. Yet never before have the Olympics seemed less perfect. Plagued first by the bitter international dispute over the participation of Taiwan, then beset by the withdrawal of African and Arab countries, the Montreal Olympics have seen what could prove to be irreparable damage (see box) to the notion that nations that play together stay together.

The parade of athletes at Saturday's opening ceremonies moved in a hastily assembled new order as country after country--Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda--kept their flags furled and their representatives in the Olympic Village. This shortened the parade, which may have somewhat comforted Queen Elizabeth, who stood for an hour and 15 minutes as the banners passed in review. But the athletes involved were furious, driven to tears and even threats that they would renounce their citizenship; years of training had availed them little more than an unpack-pack-up look at the Olympic Village. There, late Saturday afternoon, a group of New Zealanders, clad in their black-blazered parade uniforms, stood with their arms around several disconsolate Kenyans, still wearing the red warmup suits they had on when they learned of their government's "withdraw immediately" decision that morning. By week's end 25 countries represented by 697 athletes were out of the Games. Gone with them were such potential gold-medal winners as Track Stars Mike Boit of Kenya, Miruts Yifter of Ethiopia and John Akii-Bua of Uganda. Gone too was any hope that such prestige races as the 800 and 1,500 meters could have the stature of world-championship events.

In the only way they could, the athletes avenged the indignity of political manipulation and the armed-camp atmosphere of the Montreal Olympics (Canada's 16,000-man security force was omnipresent); they mounted an unparalleled assault on their own common enemy, the record book.

From the opening days of the XXI Olympiad, the athletes performed so stunningly that the scorekeeping computers had to be reprogrammed to process the data of perfection. Shattering eight world records in their first nine finals, East Germany's women and America's men proved themselves the greatest swimmers the world has seen since mankind's forebears forsook the primeval ooze. In one 27-minute period, East Germany's incomparable Kornelia Ender, 17, won two gold medals. Meanwhile the U.S. men obliterated all opposition; their totals in the first five days' nine events: nine golds.

But it was not the swimmers who provided the opening week of the Montreal Olympics with their reigning deity. That huge mantle fell upon the tiny shoulders of Nadia Comaneci, who electrified the crowds and bollixed the computers by compiling the first perfect gymnastic scores. Performing her bold and difficult routines with consummate control, Comaneci (pronounced Com-a-netch) tallied three 10s in the team competition, two in the individual all-around contest, and two in the individual-apparatus competition--showings good enough to win her three gold medals, one silver and one bronze. Whether doing backflips on the beam or rocketing herself around the uneven bars, the deceptively frail-looking sprite (she watches her diet strictly--no junk food) was so much in her element that the audience had no more fear of her falling than of a fish drowning. ABC's Jim McKay, offering television's best-turned phrase of the week, described her as "swimming in an ocean of air." Reassured by Nadia's self-confidence, the sellout crowds (scalpers got $200 for $16 tickets) gasped not in apprehension but with delight and awe. Indeed, Nadia seemed as at home on the balance beam as Br'er Rabbit was in the brier patch--hopping about as if she were born there.

Said Frank Bare, executive director of the U.S. Gymnastics Federation: "The tiny point spreads she won by don't begin to indicate how much better she is than her nearest rivals. There has never been anyone like her, never been anyone who approaches her."

Comaneci's achievements seemed so effortless that it was easy to forget she was not merely doing what comes naturally. Although her debut in senior international competition came only last year, when she leaped out of Rumanian obscurity to take the European Championship away from the Soviet Union's five-time winner, Ludmilla Turishcheva, 23, Nadia had been preparing for last week's moment of golden triumph for more than half her life.

Born in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a city of 60,000 in the Carpathian Mountains, Comaneci began her training with Bela Karolyi and his wife Marta, the gymnastic coaches at a special sports lycee in her home town. They had spotted her frolicking in a kindergarten playground and been impressed by her lack of fear. She was six years old. "At first it was like a game," said Nadia last week, showing no trace of nostalgia for those presumably more carefree days. "But by the age of eight," Coach Karolyi noted, "the students must be serious about gymnastics." Asked if Comaneci was exceptional then, he answers: "Many were. The important thing is that she is exceptional now."

Whether or not it is the daily regimen of five hours' classroom study and three to four hours' gymnastics training that has made her so, Comaneci is an extraordinarily somber child. Although she struts about and fidgets on the sidelines during competitions as if she were trying to release an inexhaustible flow of energy, she is almost eerily still outside the arena. While waiting to take her daily medical checkup one morning, she watched Olympic swimming heats on TV, her dark, unblinking eyes fixed on the action, her pale face expressionless, her hands folded decorously in her lap and her body perfectly still. The same, somewhat unsettling demeanor marked her press conferences. At times she would walk about clutching tight to a large doll. Asked how she felt about becoming the focus of world adulation, she deadpanned: "It's nothing special. I feel just the same as before." Did she ever think she might not win a gold medal? "No, I knew that I would win." Deadpan too was the way the press in Rumania handled her conquests; the achievements of the team as a whole were extolled, instead of Comaneci's.

At the end of each flawless performance, Comaneci would flash an automatic smile across her face as if it were an electronic scoreboard and prance briefly around the platform. But the show of enthusiasm almost seemed rehearsed, and she would subside immediately into the deep reaches of her concentration and composure. The smile and quick little dance steps about the floor were the only concession she made to the audience's clear desire that she refashion herself in the image of that ponytailed starlet of the 1972 Olympics, Russia's Olga Korbut. She is not an Olga.

Neither, any more, is Korbut. Now 21, Olga provided the Montreal Games with a haunting figure that may be remembered as vividly as the little girl who won two individual gold medals and one silver at the '72 Olympics in Munich. Her hair unkempt, the red bows on her two pony tails askew, her face at moments haggard beyond middle age, she displayed an overwhelming desire for victory while faced with certain defeat. She ignored Comaneci, refused to watch her rival perform. At one point Korbut burst into tears, at another ostentatiously iced an ailing ankle ("Every athlete always has something that hurts. If you don't, that's when you should start to worry"). When the stadium rocked with applause after Comaneci received her fourth 10 during the all-around individual competition, Olga slowly but pointedly walked halfway around the Forum to the water fountain. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes bungling (one night she even fell off the balance beam), Korbut still held the crowd. And when her last exercise of the Olympics ended (a sparkling 9.90 on the beam that earned her a silver to add to her team gold), the farewell applause dinned for minutes. "I gave all I had," she said later.

Gone, too, for good was the Soviets' mistress of gymnastic elegance, Turishcheva, impeccable as ever and rewarded for it with four medals: one team gold, two silver, one bronze.

Before accepting her bronze in the all-around, she bestowed a queenly kiss on the two youngsters who had upstaged but not outclassed her, Comaneci and a bright new Russian face, Nelli Kim, 18. Daughter of a Korean, Kim won two 10s herself from the judges, one in her specialty, the vault, and one in the floor exercise. She took two individual gold medals and one silver, and firmly established herself as the personable, expressive new star of Russian gymnastics.

While Russians and Rumanians were whirling their way into the hearts of the packed houses at the Forum (a total of 86,000 watched the gymnastics), a much less diminutive set of women turned the Olympic swimming pool into their own private splash party. The East German women's team, which had never won an Olympic gold medal, took nearly all of them last week--and a lioness's share of the silvers and bronzes too. In fact, for a time the simplest way to keep tab on the women's medal count was to tally the ones the East Germans did not get. It was not until the fourth day that their domination was broken, and then not by the U.S. but by the Russians, who swept the 200-meter breaststroke. Through the first five days, Shirley Babashoff, who was the United States' one gold-medal hopeful, was kept to a respectable but disappointing harvest of two silvers--in the 200-and 400-meter freestyle. Canadians, Soviets, Dutch and Americans took eight other medals. That left the East Germans with the remaining seven golds, four silvers and two bronzes.

Four of the golds were won by East Germany's imposing (5 ft. 10 in., 155 Ibs.) Kornelia Ender, who came into the Olympics holding four world records and by Saturday had set three new ones. When the East Germans suddenly emerged as a swimming superpower three years ago, disgruntled rivals speculated that gold-crazed East bloc coaches were giving their women swimmers male hormones and then subjecting them to a training so regimented that it turned them into aquatic automatons.

But at a warmup session last week, the East Germans laughed, smiled and swam their laps to the sounds of pop music that their coaches had insisted be piped into the pool. They looked for all the world like candidates for a California swim club--but their training is a lot tougher. With typical Marxist determination, East Germany has established a policy of scientific selection for finding swimmers; it is based partly on early assessment of a child's cardiovascular capacity and body type. Great emphasis is put on weight lifting to build strength. The average East German woman swimmer was 5 ft. 8 in. and 150 Ibs.; not that much larger than her U.S. counterparts but substantially more muscular. Their sexual identity, like that of all women competitors, had been officially confirmed by the Olympic "femininity control clinic" (a simple chromosome test that involves taking cells from the inside of the cheek is used, but many women athletes still find the idea of such examinations offensive).

Ender, who started swimming at five and won three silver medals as a 13-year-old at Munich, has since turned in a score of world-record performances. Arguably the best woman swimmer of all time, she explodes from the starting block with such force that she is often 3 feet ahead of the field when heads break water. She dives shallow and planes high like a speedboat, with much of her body out of the water. Her motion is so efficient--though not stylish--that she is able to set world records while taking substantially fewer strokes per minute than the women she leaves in her wake. After the Olympics, Ender may retire and next year begin pediatric studies at medical school. Says she: "Swimming is just my hobby."

One aspect of the swimming competition was not in the pool at all, but in the supremacy battle between the East German women and the U.S. men. By Saturday the U.S. men had swum nine events, won them all, and set world records in eight. John Naber, 20, the 6-ft. 6-in. paddlewheel of the American contingent, had won three golds and a silver (and possibly one more gold ahead). With his red, white and blue knit cap cocked rakishly on his head, his gawky arms nailing greetings to the crowd and a slack-jawed grin permanently fixed on his rubbery face, he also won the amused affection of a worldwide audience. "I don't want to play the role of a clown," said the psychology major from the University of Southern California. "But I like to involve the audience with me. I enjoy it."

What turned out to be the most enjoyable day of Naber's swimming career came within a split second of being the worst. On Monday he carelessly cruised through his morning heat in the 200-meter freestyle and wound up qualifying eighth, a risky .23 sec. away from elimination. That evening, in his long-anticipated 100-meter backstroke confrontation with East German Champion Roland Matthes, Naber stayed frozen to the starting block in what happily turned out to be a false start. At the real start he burst in front with his first three strokes, executed an explosive turn that nearly drowned the judges at poolside, and plunged home to smash Matthes' four-year-old record of 56.19 sec. by .7 sec. "That's about the end of my swimming career," said Matthes; but he has a lot of poolside time in his future. His doting fiancee, who carefully handed her engagement ring to a judge before each race, is Golden Girl Ender.

Naber, however, was far from through. After beating Matthes, he retreated to a training room, turned off all the lights and mentally raced the 200-meter freestyle. Less than an hour later he was racing it in reality. This time he left the starting block punctually, but at the finish was .2 sec. off U.S.C. Teammate Bruce Furniss's world-record performance of 1:50.3. And Naber, too, had broken the record, by .2 sec.

Other American gold medalists included Mike Bruner, a 20-year-old Stanford University sophomore who shaved his head right down to his eyebrows to help himself win the 200-meter butterfly; John Hencken, a 22-year-old Stanford graduate who set two world records for the 100-meter breaststroke in two days; Matt Vogel, a 19-year-old from Fort Wayne, Ind., who led the U.S. to a three-medal sweep in the 100-meter butterfly; and Brian Goodell, the 17-year-old California high schooler who shattered world records in both the 400-meter and 1,500-meter freestyle.

Although the U.S. women's swimming team had to settle for silvers, the crowd at the Olympic Pool did get to savor one golden performance by an American girl. Jenni Chandler, a 17-year-old high schooler from Lincoln, Ala., won a gold medal for a nearly flawless performance in the three-meter springboard diving event. Because, in part, of one East German judge's chauvinistic preference for his countrywomen's diving, Chandler was the clear favorite of the crowd, which hissed loudly whenever she was given a low score. Through no fault of her own, she was the target of anti-American catcalling in the Pan-American Games held in Mexico City last year; she burst into tears at the boos, and still finished first. In Montreal, Chandler responded to the cheers with a remarkably consistent series of dives into the ink-dark pool (colored that way to help the divers judge the surface). Throughout the week the spotlight was focused most intensely on the triumphs of East bloc women and U.S. men, but as always, there were other moments of glory, gallantry and gall:

> Gymnast Shun Fujimoto will return to Japan next week wearing an Olympic gold medal--and a hip-to-ankle cast to lock his broken right knee. He injured it during the floor exercises in last week's team competitions but decided to "forget about the pain" and perform on the rings, his strongest event. Finishing with a triple somersault and twist, the 26-year-old physical education teacher managed to keep his footing as he came down. "How he landed without collapsing is beyond my comprehension," said the doctor, Jean Paul Bedard, who examined Fujimoto afterward.

> For a few happy hours on Wednesday, Margaret Murdock, 33, of Topeka, Kans., the first woman U.S. shooting-team member to be in contention for the gold medal in the smallbore rifle event, thought that she had won the gold. Correction of a clerical error left her tied for first place with Teammate Larry Bassham. Then re-examination of the final targets gave Bassham, a 29-year-old Army captain from Texas, the gold. Bassham called the technicalities "arbitrary rubbish," and when the medals were awarded, he insisted that Murdock join him at the top.

>Russian Pentathlete Boris Onischenko was quietly whisked from his room at the Olympic Village one night last week and driven to the airport for a hasty departure from Montreal. Onischenko, a 1972 silver medalist who was the favorite for the gold, had been caught using an electronically rigged epee that scored touches even when no contact had been made. Onischenko protested that the equipment he used was not his own, but that he had borrowed it.

The final week of the Montreal Olympics will inevitably add its quota of such human errata to the history of the Games. But the main text will be provided by the track and field athletes performing in the $700 million concrete stadium that hovers over the Olympic Park like the fossil of some monstrous crustacean. And immediately the absence of Black Africa's runners was felt. In the first day of track heats, New Zealand's John Walker, the world's fastest miler, failed even to qualify for the 800-meter semifinals. This was only a tune-up for the 1,500-meter race Walker runs this Saturday--an event that will not include Tanzania's record-holding Filbert Bayi--but the poor showing still was unexpected. "I wish Bayi were here," said Walker. "I lost my pacemaker."

Russia's Valery Borzov, 26, the defending champion in the 100 meters, had the opposite problem--plenty of pacemakers. After flirting with withdrawal, Jamaica decided to keep its engagement in Montreal, leaving Don Quarrie, a current world record holder, in the race. In, too, was Trinidad's Hasely Crawford, 25, who won the 100-yard dash for Eastern Michigan University in last year's NCAA Championships. And stalking Borzov most obviously was Harvey Glance, a 19-year-old freshman from Auburn University. Glance won Friday's heat with the day's fastest time (10:23), and beat Borzov in the semifinals Saturday morning, but the finals were a different matter. Off the blocks first was Trinidad's Crawford, and there he stayed, fighting off Borzov midway, then Quarrie at the wire in 10:06. Borzov and Glance were third and fourth, as one of the Olympics' smallest countries ran off with a big gold.

The second week of women's events promised to bear a marked resemblance to the first. The East German women, holders of seven of the 14 records in track and field, took an immediate giant step forward when Angela Voigt, 25, won the long jump with a leap of 22 ft. 1/2 in. Right behind Voigt, and indeed, perhaps past her if she had not, fouled on her last try, was high-flying Kathy McMillan, 18, of Raeford, N.C. Not since 1968 at Mexico City had the U.S. women won a silver or gold. Saturday afternoon the East German lightning was hurled by Ruth Fuchs, 29, who dramatically speared the hopes of U.S. Champion Kathy Schmidt with an Olympic-record javelin throw of 216 ft. 4 in. Schmidt's best, 209 ft. 10 in., came on her last chance, and won the bronze.

Meanwhile, her work over and her medals packed, Nadia Comaneci, the solemn muse of the Games, could leave for a Black Sea vacation with little concern that the second week of the Olympics would produce a star to outshine her. One cannot expect perfection too often.

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