THE OLYMPIC GAME
A top sports reporter looks at the high cost of winning, the new focus on drug abuse, and the false note of patriotism
Dwight Chapin - Playgirl Magazine, January 1977 (Excerpts)

If you're a journalist you don't really cover the Olympic Games, anymore than you merely participate in them if you're an athlete. You live them.

Take the involved, frustrating pursuit of Nadia Comaneci.  The young man (a former Romanian refugee now living in Canada) sitting at the reception desk in the Romanian delegation spoke English and made snide comments, out of ear-shot, about the Romanians ("No sense of humor, very boring types").

He said I might see Nadia if I would show up at the delegation at I p.m. And even though she was only fourteen years old and had spent eight years doing little but double-twisting somersault dis-mounts, she might possibly condescend to talk about life, her home of Onesti, her father the mechanic, her brother the tag-a-long, her shelf full of dolls, if coach Bela Karolyi, who looked and acted more like Bela Lugosi, decided she should talk.

I was there at 12:45 P.m., to beat the system.  At 12:50 P.M. Nadia, her team-mate Teodora Ungureanu and Coach Karolyi, dressed in matching brown, non-proletarian suits, strode past.  I moved to Karolyi and tried to shake his hand.  No response.  I grabbed Karolyi's hand and attempted an introduction.  Karolyi disdainfully pulled his hand back.  "I'll speak to him for you," the man at the desk told me.

After a long wait the young desk attendant said, "I'm sorry, but if you had been Canadian, it would have been okay.  They have been told not to talk to American reporters."

Two days later they talked to reporters from all over the world - over breadsticks and 84-proof cognac - because the Romanian government apparently decided it was time to share Nadia with the planet.  But there were no revelations - nothing for the teen fan magazines.  This wasn't a young Annette Funicello we were dealing with - simply athletic perfection.

"She's so goddamned perfect I can't believe it," said Gordon Maddux, the ABC analyst.  "She's doing things that have been programmed for her but she does them machine-like, at the nth level of achievement.  An 0. J. Simpson or a Julius Erving reacts to situations.  She creates them.  She has a good day against an absolute, not an opponent.

While the Comanecis and the Tour-ischevas and the Kims and the Korbuts were doing their thing in Montreal, it was kind of sad to watch the American girl gymnasts.

The major difference?  "No good Euro-pean gymnast," said Maddux, "leads what we would consider a normal life.  One of our top gymnastics people, Frank Bare, said he was asked why Nadia had an almost transparent quality to her skin.  He said he's been with her several times and he's never seen her eat.  She only takes pills and food supplements before competition."

After Olga Korbut's performance in Munich in 1972, thousands of girls world-wide took up gymnastics - including many in the U.S. But they came from nowhere, started too late, and simply don't have coaches such as Bela Karolyi, whether you approve of his methods or not.

With the U.S. women swimmers, the problem is a little different.  You don't have to look like anything but a little girl to resemble Comaneci and Korbut.  If you want to look like Kornelia Ender - or, more directly - if you want to perform like her, you've got to build shoulders like Mac Wilkins.  You've got to make weight-lifting a major part of your training program.  You've got to look - perish the thought - unfeminine!

For the first week, Montreal was a women's Olympics.  On day one, the traditional bearer of the Olympic flame turned out to be bearers - fifteen-year -old Stephan Prefontaine and sixteen-year-old Sandra Henderson.

In the days just after came Nadia and Olga and Kornelia; Princess Anne falling off her horse and shooter Margaret Murdock joining gold medalist Lenny Bassham on the ceremonial stand because Bassham "wanted to show that I felt her performance equalled mine." And 6'11", 281 pound luliana Semenova, the Russian basketball center.  No one knew quite what to make of her but the most asked question was, "Do you think she'll ever get married?" "Oh, yes," a Soviet spokesman answered.  "She is dating a boy about her size."

Comaneci probably will be the name most associated with the Montreal Olympics, although others had a claim as Best in Show - such as Ender and Naber; trackmen Alberto juantorena, Lasse Viren and Bruce Jenner; boxers Teofilo Stevenson and Leon Spinks; weightman Alexeyev.

Bruce jenner will not be back, as a participant, in 1980.  Nadia will.

She'll train and hone and continue to live in a vacuum where only she and a four-inch beam exist, smiling with her mouth but not with her eyes.  And when she comes out there will be Karolyi, telling her what she did wrong.

Maybe that's okay.  Maybe that pristine world is the place to be.  As for me, I'll stick with Kate Schmidt and John Walker, the New Zealand 1,500-meter champion, slugging down beers so they can produce enough urine for doping control tests and then saying (as Walker did, holding the bottle aloft after his mission was accomplished), "I'm very proud of this.  It was harder than running the race."

Photographed by FREDERICO MENDES/MANCHETE