THE SEOUL GAMES : There’s No Olympic Fever, but South Koreans Ready for Games

In a stadium shared by nearly 14,000 athletes and officials, more than 75,000 spectators, hundreds of doves and an unknown number of anti-terrorist specialists, the greatest Olympic Games in history will announce themselves to a waiting world Saturday morning.

Although it will only be Friday night in the United States, Sept. 17 will have dawned in the Far East, site of the Summer Olympics for the first time in 24 years. The long wait for an Olympics uniting East and West will be over. The nightmare of superpower boycotts will have been shaken off. The Olympics of the Soviet Union, the United States, East Germany, West Germany, China and 155 other nations will have finally arrived.

The opening ceremonies of the Games of the 24th Olympiad will begin at 10:30 a.m. in Seoul (8:30 p.m. EDT). Boxing, diving, taekwondo and volleyball competition will follow in the afternoon and evening. By nightfall here, spectators will have filed into and out of five different stadiums, and although no medals will have been won, the Games most definitely will be under way. By Sunday, competition will have commenced in 13 sports.

“Today, I’m more confident than ever that these will be the greatest Olympic Games ever,” said Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee President Park Seh Jik, the Peter Ueberroth of these Games. “This is the final leg of a magnificent Olympic journey. Almost the entire sporting world wants to join us and help us to the finish line.”

“Many people thought that it would be impossible to hold the Games in Seoul,” the city’s mayor, Kim Yong Nae, said this week. “But the perseverance of our citizens has made it possible.”

All but seven nations will be here. North Korea, Cuba and Ethiopia are the most noticeable no-shows, not allowing their athletes to compete due to political differences with South Korea. Compared with the massive boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, and even to the 1976 boycott by African nations, their absence is minor. But it will be felt, nonetheless, especially in baseball and boxing, where the Cubans’ places on the medal stands will have to be filled by someone else.

These are a most politically conscious Olympics, held in a nation still officially at war with the Communist North, just an hour’s drive from Seoul. Metal detectors will greet spectators at every gate in the Olympic Stadium. Bags will be searched. Hundreds of police officers will prowl the stadium from the basement to the sweeping roof.

There is a threat of terrorism here and officials say that only the finest security system in the world will deter possible violence. They believe they have that system, and express full confidence that nothing like what happened 16 years ago in Munich will happen here.

“We are doing our utmost, but there are things one cannot predict, so unexpected events may occur,” Park said. “Unfortunately, the world is threatened by terrorism. Therefore, no place is terror-free.”

Although the mayor and other officials have been predicting for months that an “Olympic fever” would soon grip their citizens, the mood in Seoul does not appear to be one of exhilaration.

Many South Koreans are too cynical, too contrary, to get excited when their government tells them to. They also are preoccupied with the very real challenges that face and will continue to face this divided and developing country when the Games end and the foreigners leave.

But many citizens do express a sense of satisfaction in what has been accomplished, and a determination to make the next 16 days a success. Even on the nation’s campuses, where the Games have been damned as a dictator’s tool to maintain power, some students expressed a grudging acceptance this week.

“We have invested so much -- so much money, so much effort by our people,” said Cho Kyu Min, 19, a freshman majoring in computer science at Seoul National University. “We have to harvest some fruits of that investment.”

The nearly universal agreement on that point was underscored Friday when, on the first day of a voluntary Olympic traffic-control plan, half of the city’s drivers left their cars at home. City streets improved from impossible to merely frantic.

Turmoil seems to be a way of life here. Since Seoul won the right to host the Games in 1980, South Korea has survived a presidential assassination, a military takeover and geeneral political unrest severe enough that only one year ago U.S. legislators were calling for the Games to be moved.

The nation also endured years of fractious direct and indirect talks with the Communist regime in North Korea, which demanded the right to co-host the Games. South Korea, supported by the United States, and its Communist rival, backed by China and the Soviet Union, have maintained a hostile truce since the Korean War ended in 1953.

Still, some of the turmoil has faded. Massive street protests last June gave way to democratic elections and, in February, the nation’s first peaceful transition of power took place. Opposition politicians, labor unions and leftist student groups won new power, and agreed to set aside their conflicts during the Olympics.

The opening ceremonies, scheduled to run about three hours, will begin in the form of a boat parade on the Han River, which flows beside the stadium. The parade will move inside the stadium, taking thousands of choreographed children, dancers and taekwondo performers along for the ride.

The ceremonies will be less technical and splashy than those held in Los Angeles four years ago. The Games have moved far from Disneyland. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be entirely enchanting.

The ceremonies will start with Korean songs and dances and a human kaleidoscope of 1,600 dancers who eventually will spell out “Welcome” in English and Korean. Later, 76 parachutists will descend from the sky -- some after free-falling in the shape of the five Olympic rings -- and hopefully will land inside the stadium. The final three sky jumpers will be wearing minicams on their helmets to record the scene. Eventually, hundreds of boards will be broken in half by athletes praticing taekwondo, the Korean martial art, in unison.

The singing and dancing will be interrupted by the nearly two-hour-long official ceremony, which will include the entry of South Korean President Roh Tae Woo and International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch. The parade of nations, a majestic but long process, will begin with the arrival of the athletes from Greece and will continue in alphabetical order.

After Greece will come Ghana, Gabon, Guyana and Gambia. Soon, Mongolia will come along, followed by the United States, then Vanuatu, a tiny country in the southwest Pacific 1,200 miles northeast of Australia. The Soviets will not be far behind, sandwiched between St. Vincent and Grenadines, and Somalia. Iran will come later, separated from Iraq by several countries specifically placed between the two. The Korean alphabet otherwise would have had them march in back to back.

Iran also will be the only country of the 160 participating nations to have a man carry in its name card. Tradition says women carry the cards, but Iranian Olympic officials refused to allow their team to follow a woman, so Seoul organizers relented.

Each nation’s athletes will select a flagbearer, one of the greatest honors an Olympian can receive. The organizing committee has chosen its final torchbearer, the man or woman who will run the final leg of the Olympic torch relay and light the massive cauldron standing at one end of the stadium. Although no one knows who it is, speculation centers on Sohn Kee Chung, 76, winner of the marathon at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

“The Olympics is a drama,” Park said. “It is better for you to have your curiosity unsatisfied.”

Park was referring, of course, to the choice of torchbearer. But he might as well have been talking about each of the next 16 days in Seoul.