Winners All!

By Tom Callahan

Perfection hit its head on a diving board last week and, in a blissful spell of dizziness, thought it heard the Suriname anthem playing on the Olympic Victrola. For just a second there, a 4-ft. 11-in. Turk seemed to be lifting a 420-lb. dumbbell, the equivalent of two Olympic committeemen. A buoyant black swimmer with ordinary thighs was receiving the gold medal. South Korea was rioting in a boxing ring. The phones were working. The laundry was ready. And in the race for regal figure, Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis both came running.

A little nicer, a little faster, Lewis finished the first of his four encores, the 100-meter dash, in his best time ever -- but second to the Canadian who dusts the world. "I've been working twelve years for this moment," said Johnson, the fastest human by a considerable whoosh. "I sailed right through." The Games found an early kind of king in the Jamaican-born sprinter who churns insides in every country. And he was not the only excitement.

On a creaking knee, Jackie Joyner-Kersee won her heptathlon with a world- record demonstration of tossing and turning. "I'm sure I'm tired," she said, "but for some reason . . ." Before moving on to this week's long jump, she paused only to smile. "I'm blessed," she said. "You just don't know. To be able to reach for something you've been striving for for a long time. I feel good." Showing twice as much leg as usual, the whirlwind Florence Griffith Joyner won her 100, and if she missed her record she hardly cared. History's hurdler, Edwin Moses, turned over the stage to a tearful Andre Phillips and left the world to marvel at his last twelve years.

If a matador is too proficient, the danger is forgotten, and the diver Greg Louganis has been a little like that. Tending beyond shy and sensitive to gentle and even delicate, he always seemed more of an artist than an athlete -- until last week. When his head banged the springboard, the Games shook. The world shivered. But a little embroidery work can improve a crown. Louganis came back to win the springboard, making a pedestal of the platform. As unafraid as ever of sentimentality, he was also as slyly pleased with his tonsure as a boy might be with a shiner.

The readiest child of the week was the schoolgirl swimmer Janet Evans, 17, winsome, lithesome and as single-minded as a shark. She ditched the homework she brought from California, but plans to offer the excuse that she had to sing The Star-Spangled Banner three times. After so many trips onto the podium, Evans concluded, "It's always the same -- pure honor." The littlest mermaid sees everything in a race, but nobody can see her. She makes you want to fish her out of the surf somehow, and hoist her up some way, to uncover just what she really does and whether her high-speed rotary blades have twelve arms or only eight. Matt Biondi, the reluctant Mark Spitz, may have been wasting his time studying dolphins.

Time and waste were sore subjects at the stereophonic boxing hall, where a confusing two-ring setup with buzzers and bells froze all four fighters at times. Anthony Hembrick, Kelcie Banks and Byun Jong-Il represented independent melodramas that seemed connected. In a recurring Olympic heartbreak, the Detroiter Hembrick was left at the bus stop by miscalculating coaches. "My dream went down so fast," he said after his disqualification. "You live it every day. You sleep it. You eat it. You train it. I lost my chance to prove I was the best in the world. It will never come again."

His teammate Banks arrived on schedule, completely pleased with himself. "To keep me from the gold," he proclaimed in the fighters' doggerel, "they'll have to knock me cold." They did, in the first round. Even so, finding a softer voice while glancing at Hembrick, Banks said, "I'd rather be carried out of the ring than never to have gone into it." When the Korean Byun lost to a Bulgarian by bitter decision, Byun wouldn't leave. All the black bow-tied referees in white had to pile through the ropes to rescue their brother from local officials and fans. It looked like a battle royal of barbers. When the smoke cleared, Byun was sitting in his corner. For over an hour he sat. After the lights were switched off, he lingered another long moment in the glow of a TV camera before clambering down. Remembering something, Byun suddenly bolted back into the ring, bowed to the four corners in courtly style and departed forever.

At gymnastics, officials were also in the thick of the fight. Judge Ellen Berger, a pin-eyed East German with the soul of Leo Durocher, detected a U.S. irregularity involving the bat boy. Poor Rhonda Faehn: three years ago, at 14, she left Coon Rapids, Minn., for Houston to tumble with the other dolls at the trick knee of the Rumanian defector Bela Karolyi. When she missed making the Olympic team by 0.1 point, he brought her along as a roustabout. Docked 0.5 points for Faehn's harmless presence on the platform, the U.S. women lost the bronze medal to the G.D.R. by 0.3 points. In his understated way, Karolyi expressed how they felt: "Like we were stopped on the highway, robbed, kicked in the butt and sent home naked."

Some weeks ago, he ridiculed the chances of the veteran Soviet Elena Shushunova, 19, scoffing, "She's used up like old battery." But her dry cells powered the Olympics with regular flashes of just slightly imperfect 10s, including a necessary one against Rumania's Daniela Silivas that brought back Mary Lou Retton and little Ecaterina Szabo from 1984. Puberty and Big Macs have reportedly ganged up on Szabo this year. Four years later, it is a rare Shirley Temple who doesn't come back as Shelley Winters.

The Games' sweetest mob scenes occurred when South Korea won its first gold. Incongruous shouts went up at every venue. The press-row televisions were all dialed to Greco-Roman wrestling. At a minor league scoreboard in the press center, where a medal count is kept by hand, a bustle of Koreans hurried over just to watch the tiny gold disk go up for Kim Young-Nam. They sighed.