REFLECTIONS OF THE L.A. GAMES : Four Who Played Important Roles in 1984 Olympics Reminisce on the Magical Moments They Encountered : A JOURNALIST : City Showed World How to Put On Event

The 1984 Olympics went right when so many people here and abroad thought they would go wrong.

From the inception of Los Angeles’ bid for the Games in 1977, which followed closely the financially disastrous Montreal Olympics, there was strong public sentiment that an Olympics here would more likely than not lose money.

Had anyone predicted that the Games would actually turn a profit of $222.7 million, as they did, he would probably have been laughed out of the city. In fact, when Olympic chairman Paul Ziffren said in the spring of 1978 that they could make $100 million, it was hardly reported.

And the International Olympic Committee thought a surplus was such a small possibility it didn’t even bother to contractually reserve any of it for itself, a mistake it has not made since.

The pessimism extended well beyond the fiscal. Traffic experts freely predicted gridlock. Security experts expressed fears of terrorism. After the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, there were widespread concerns that an Eastern Bloc boycott could ruin both the quality and spirit of the 1984 competition.

The contract that brought the Games here was ratified by the Los Angeles City Council with just one vote to spare. When Peter Ueberroth took over the fledgling private committee that would run the Games, it was already $300,000 in debt and had trouble getting office space.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s proposal to spread Olympic events widely through the city drew a strongly negative response in the San Fernando Valley, where public sentiment blocked the placement of any facilities. Ueberroth finally had to spread the Games over Southern California.

Yet the Games were a triumph. The traffic was the best in the city it had been for years, or has been since. There was no terrorism. The Soviets did boycott, but it did not dampen spirits; it may have even fired them up. A mellow mood fell over Los Angeles as the competition went on, and the attendance at Olympic events was the highest in history.

The 1984 Games thus came to symbolize that this city could still put on a hell of a party, and that all of our modern fears and hesitations were unjustified. It was those who had faith, and not the skeptics, who were vindicated by events.

But, of course, all of that did not happen through faith alone. The Olympic organizers were idealists, yes, but they were hardheaded, hard-working idealists.

The hardest headed was Ueberroth. On the eve of his selection as president of the committee he had expressed his determination to leave the post if he ever felt the Los Angeles Games were headed for a fiscal deficit. He was so diligent in seeing to it that this did not result that he pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes about just how big his surplus was growing. Even his own auditors didn’t realize how much cash he had hidden away. He negotiated with outsiders as if he had no cash reserves at all.

Ueberroth and his top deputy, Harry Usher, proved to be shrewd judges of whom to hire and how to shuffle the Olympic staff. Not everyone who worked at the committee could stand the shuffling. Some quit and others were fired. It was by no means a two-man show, however. The Olympic committee had many talented people, and a good number have shown their ability since. Events of future years, not the least the soccer World Cup that has been awarded the United States, will make full use of the staff talents developed in Los Angeles in 1984.

But it was the citizen volunteers, 40,000 of them, who perhaps best typified the high spirit that came to mark the Games.

And in the end, even the bureaucracy, police and civilian, performed beyond expectations. When Police Chief Daryl Gates came back from the Winter Games of that year in Sarajevo, he challenged his force not only to watch out for terrorists but also to extend the cordiality to visitors demanded by Olympic ideals. The security units performed as he prescribed.

The world Olympic movement as a whole was strengthened by the Los Angeles Games. In 1978, for the only time in modern Olympic history, there was only one bidder when the International Olympic Committee met to consider a site for the Games to be held six years later. Since Los Angeles came up with such a large profit, there have been many bidders.

The memories of the 1984 Olympics live on among all of those who witnessed them. They are diverse memories--of the torch runner coming over the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley whose citizens had, initially, expressed uninterest. Of the 100,000 in the Coliseum participating in a card stunt that formed the flags of many nations. Of the Moroccan runners Said Aouita (5,000 meters) and Nawal El Moutawakel (women’s 400-meter hurdles) giving their country its first gold medals.

But the greatest memory of all, perhaps, is that the city welcomed the world with style and grace, and became part of the strivings for the Olympic ideals of universality and peace. To those who participated in bringing off the Los Angeles Games, we owe a debt of thanks.