American Notes FITNESS

Are American youngsters as physically fit as their Soviet counterparts? No, says the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. To prove it, the council has arranged for 20,000 Americans to take a fitness test given yearly in Soviet schools; in exchange, the U.S.S.R. Committee on Physical Culture and Sport will try the council's test on an equal number of Soviet youth. The experiment started earlier this month in El Segundo, Calif., where 250 students ages seven to 17 sweated through the Soviet test.

Fitness Council Chairman George Allen expects that Americans will look bad compared with Soviet students, who exercise an hour daily. He hopes the test will spur the U.S. into putting physical education "back in the school + systems, an hour a day, five days a week, kindergarten through twelfth."