On Your Marks, Get Set, Stop!

Carter's drive may keep U.S. out of Moscow Games

It had been launched as a trial balloon--and it took off almost immediately. By week's end the White House campaign had gathered so much momentum that there may be no American athletes competing for Olympic medals in Moscow this summer.

As the Administration gradually increased the pressure for a boycott in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, alarmed officials of the U.S. Olympic Committee tried in vain to stop the campaign, pleading that sports should not be used to promote political ends. But Carter, appearing on Meet the Press at the beginning of the week, put his full prestige behind the policy. Said he: "Regardless of what other nations might do, I would not favor sending an American Olympic team to Moscow while the Soviet invasion troops are in Afghanistan" (see box). He set a Feb. 20 deadline for Soviet withdrawal. In his State of the Union speech, he served the ultimatum again. Meanwhile, White House aides were trying, none too subtly, to win over American Olympic officials. Yes, the aides agreed, the committee has final authority on whether to join the Moscow Games. Yes, in theory the committee was independent of the Government. But, Carter's assistants suggested, the President could ask Congress to change all that. For one thing, the committee is incorporated under a federal charter granted by Congress, and Congress could amend the charter to forbid participation in Moscow. For another, $16 million in federal funds has been appropriated this year to cover some of the committee's operating expenses, and none of it has yet been paid.

Congress, moreover, quickly took up the crusade against the Games. Without White House prompting, four resolutions endorsing a Moscow boycott were introduced on the Hill. By the time the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on one such resolution, the Olympic committee was thoroughly on the defensive. The president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Robert J. Kane, a former sprinter at Cornell and longtime athletic director at the university, found little support as he testified against the ban. "We do have a problem to face if we're out there alone, swaying in the wind," he argued. "If we are the only nation not to appear in the Games, what good would this do?" Asked about the 1936 Olympics, which had been cited as a propaganda triumph for Adolf Hitler that Soviet leaders are now seeking to emulate, Kane objected to such "rewritten history" and contended: "Jesse Owen destroyed the myth of Aryan supremacy in 1936. It was a propaganda victory for our wonderful black athletes in the United States."

Kane's plea proved futile. The House committee promptly approved the resolution by voice vote, and next day it went sailing through the full House by a vote of 386 to 12. The Senate seemed certain to add its assent.

Among U.S. athletes, the dominant sentiment seemed to be against a boycott, but the debate was spirited. Protested Steve Lundquist, 19, a swimmer from Southern Methodist University: "You look forward to this all your life. Suddenly they just pull it out from under you." At first Al Oerter, 43, a four-time gold medal winner in the discus, complained that U.S. withdrawal from the Games was "passive, isolationist, weak." But like many other athletes he had changed his mind by last week. Said he: "I feel we should stop bellyaching and get behind the President. It is time to put personal considerations aside."

The 47-member Athletes' Advisory Council, which serves the U.S. Olympic Committee, conducted its own poll on the boycott. Of the 42 athletes who expressed an opinion, 30 opposed a ban. The findings were given to the 82-member executive board of the U.S.O.C., which was meeting in Colorado Springs.

After closed-door deliberations in the Broadmoor hotel, the Olympic elders indicated on Saturday that they would go along with the President's call for a boycott. The board passed a resolution proposing that the Summer Games be transferred away from Moscow or canceled.

Would the U.S. be as lonely in its boycott as the Olympic committee had predicted? Carter personally asked some 100 foreign leaders to abandon the Moscow Games, and their responses were extremely slow in coming. The early returns were also discouraging. Even in Great Britain, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government strongly supports the U.S. position, the independent British Olympic Association remained adamantly opposed to a boycott. "The Games will be held in Moscow no matter what governments say," contended Lord Exeter, 74, the sixth Marquess of Exeter, and a 1928 gold medal winner in hurdles. "We are not lap dogs to politics."

One other foreign leader speaking for the boycott was Canada's Prime Minister Joe Clark, but he faces a stiff reelection challenge from former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal Party, and Trudeau has been cool to a ban. Mexico has already announced its intention to field a squad in Moscow.

The U.S. did pick up the support of Egypt, Australia, New Zealand and The Netherlands, plus such nonathletic powers as Fiji, Qatar, Djibouti and Saudi Arabia (which had decided not to send a team even before the Afghanistan invasion).

A key nation for the boycott movement is West Germany, which normally would enter a strong team in Moscow. Bonn officials clearly would like their athletes to compete but were nervously watching world reaction to Carter's drive. Having criticized Carter so long for not dealing more sternly with the Kremlin, they found it uncomfortable to oppose his tough stance now.

Elsewhere in Europe, the U.S. was getting little help. France said it would compete. Italy's Olympic committee insisted that only a veto by the government could prevent its participation, and none was in the works. All the Scandinavian nations seemed determined to enter.

As the worldwide debate continued, any formal action either to abandon this year's Games completely or move them from Moscow would have to be taken by the International Olympic Committee, and its position was clear: plans could not, and should not, be changed; on to Moscow.

Despite Carter's opposition to attending their Games, the Soviets still intend to compete in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in February, and other athletic competition between the two countries continued. Last week American wrestling and boxing teams were taking part in long-scheduled matches in the Soviet Union, while a Soviet track-and-field team began a tour of the U.S.

The slim possibility remained that some kind of alternative to the Moscow Games might be staged elsewhere, either as a more limited "free world" competition or as an additional post-Moscow event. Presidential aides indicated that Carter would be willing to seek U.S. financing for such competition. As an alternative site, Canada's Clark offered Montreal, where the 1976 Olympic Games were held, although housing the athletes would be a problem.

Inevitably, and understandably, many of the U.S. athletes who had trained for so long were bitterly disappointed that they might have to forgo the chance to compete in Moscow. But there was growing agreement in the U.S. with Jimmy Carter's declaration that for this Olympics, under these conditions, there were "deeper issues at stake."

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