COLUMN ONE : Olympics’ Anthem of Politics : In the Winter Games, it will be hard to tell the players without a new world map. With so many new nations, there will be big changes in the lineup and the scores.

Sports officials from five former Soviet Union republics that will be represented by athletes in the Winter Olympics decided last month on a name for the team--the Commonwealth of National Olympic Committees of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Aware, however, that the initials would not fit across the front of even the most broad-chested athlete’s uniform, they also chose a simple alternative: United Team.

But as athletes and officials from the new Commonwealth have tried to adjust to life without the Soviet Union in time for next Saturday’s opening ceremony of the XVI Winter Olympics in the French Alps, they have found the transition anything but simple. Nor have they been particularly united.

In the European championship figure skating meet two weeks ago at Lausanne, Switzerland, organizers were clearly confused, identifying some Commonwealth athletes in the official program as Soviets and others as ex-Soviets.

When competition began, those skaters were introduced as representatives of the Commonwealth of Sovereign States. By the end of the week, that had been changed to the more politically correct Commonwealth of Independent States.

As for the skaters, who still wore their CCCP--the Cyrillic equivalent of USSR--warm-up uniforms, they were not thrilled with any of their new names. The Russians wanted to be identified as Russians, the Ukrainians as Ukrainians.

Such is life today in international sports, in which leaders have faced as many challenges in the last two years as map makers--and for many of the same reasons.

Despite protestations that politics and sports do not mix, the International Olympic Committee has been unable to escape political influences in recent years, beginning with the student riots in 1968 at Mexico City and escalating to the massacre of 11 Israelis by Palestinian terrorists in 1972 at Munich, the African boycott in 1976 at Montreal and the reciprocal boycotts led by the United States in 1980 at Moscow and the Soviet Union in 1984 at Los Angeles.

But in 1988, 160 of the IOC’s 167 member nations participated in the Summer Olympics at Seoul, and IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch predicted that the attendance record would be even better for the 1992 Summer Olympics in his hometown of Barcelona.

He declared that the next four years would be devoted to the war against performance-enhancing drugs, the first significant shots having already been fired when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was relieved of his gold medal after testing positive for an anabolic steroid at Seoul.

Instead, though, politics again has dominated the IOC’s agenda, severely testing the diplomatic skills Samaranch honed as Spain’s former ambassador to Moscow.

Issues confronting the IOC since 1988 have included:

* The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ramifications for its former republics, such as the newly independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and satellites, such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

* The reunification of Germany.

* The gradual dismantling of the apartheid system in South Africa, leading to its readmission by the IOC after a 21-year ban and its probable return to the Olympics in many sports at Barcelona.

* And, most recently, the civil war in Yugoslavia.

Assigned special powers by the IOC executive board, Samaranch and four vice presidents granted provisional recognition in mid-January to two of Yugoslavia’s breakaway republics, Croatia and Slovenia. That will enable them to compete as independent nations in the Winter Olympics if they are confirmed, as expected, by the IOC’s full membership in a session this week at Courchevel, France.

Skiers raised in Slovenia’s Alps arrived last week to train on the Olympic slopes at Val d’Isere, Meribel and Les Menuires-Val Thorens in hopes of winning medals and recognition for their country. In 13 previous appearances in the Winter Olympics, 162 of Yugoslavia’s 166 competitors, and all three individual medalists, were from Slovenia.

Without the Slovenians, Yugoslavia will have little more than a symbolic presence in France.

“They’ll need flashlights to find their way back from the rear of the pack,” the secretary general of Yugoslavia’s Olympic Committee, Caslav Veljic, said of his country’s athletes in a recent interview with The Times. “We don’t even have a single, outside chance for a medal.”

Yugoslavia will be better represented in the Summer Olympics, although some of its traditionally strong teams are bound to suffer because of the loss of athletes from former republics.

With the notable exception of the Lakers’ Serbian center, Vlade Divac, the best players on the silver-medal basketball team in 1988 were Croatians. The Soviet Union, which won the gold medal in basketball in 1988, is in a similar situation. Most of its best players were from the former republic of Lithuania, which will have a team of its own at Barcelona.

Basketball is an example of how fast the Olympic movement moves. Who could have predicted four years ago that the leading medal contenders in 1992 would be Croatia, Lithuania and a U.S. team consisting almost entirely of NBA stars, among them Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing?

The acceptance of NBA players and professionals in other sports into the Olympics has long been supported by Samaranch, who believed that athletes from the West should be on equal footing with those from the state-supported East Bloc.

It is ironic, then, that just as Samaranch reached his goal of eliminating amateurs from the Olympics in most sports, the Communist governments that created the tilt toward the East Bloc imploded. Going down with them were their well-funded, highly efficient sports systems, which identified children with athletic potential, put them in special sports schools and developed them into champions.

Most successful were the Soviet Union and East Germany, which became Olympic superpowers.

Beginning with its first appearance in 1952, the Soviet Union finished first in the medal standings in all but three of the Summer Olympics, not including the one it boycotted, and in all but two of the Winter Olympics. East Germany never finished lower than second in the Winter Olympics after its first appearance as a separate country in 1968, beating the Soviets in 1984, and was second in the last three Summer Olympics in which it participated.

Now, considering the turmoil among former Soviet republics and the merger of East and West Germany, the United States could eventually regain the superiority it once enjoyed in the Summer Olympics and improve its stature in the Winter Games.

“In Albertville and Barcelona, the (former Soviets) will be No. 1,” Samaranch said. “After Barcelona, it is unpredictable.”

Accompanying reunification were predictions that Germany would finish first in the medal standings in France. Four years ago at Calgary, the Germans won 33 medals--25 by the East--four more than the Soviets.

But the total has not equaled the sum of its parts as the Western- dominated government dismantled the East Germans’ system of sports schools and clubs, which was so successful in producing Olympic medalists that it became known as “the Miracle Machine.”

As part of the reunification agreement, the university of sports and physical culture at Leipzig, where East Germany schooled its coaches, remains open, but enrollment has decreased, as have the staff and budget. One training field was converted into a used-car lot, where, no doubt, some German versions of Cal Worthington are touting a different type of miracle machine.

The de-emphasis of sports has had the greatest impact on former East German women, who ruled the world in several sports before reunification but are now vulnerable. In speedskating, for example, East Germans won 19 of 27 medals available in the last two Winter Olympics. But even though some of the same speedskaters now compete for the unified team, German women are expected to win no more than five of the 15 medals available in the sport here.

It has been widely speculated that one reason for the former East Germans’ decline is that they have been cut off from their drug programs. Because it has been verified by so many former East German sports officials, coaches and athletes, it is no longer rumor that “the Miracle Machine” was systematically fueled by steroids and other illegal, performance-enhancing substances.

“I had East German coaches talk to me about what they were doing, tales that make your hair stand up on your back,” said Peter Mueller, a former gold-medal speedskater for the United States who coached in West Germany for three years before returning home last spring to work with the U.S. team.

“You can do a lot of things with good sports medicine. They had a lot of good sports medicine.”

The subject remains sensitive for many former East Germans. When one of them, Jens Steininger, recently implicated his biathlon coach, German officials fired the coach from the national team. Since then, Steininger has been sleeping with his equipment, including a rifle--the biathlon combines cross-country skiing and target shooting--to prevent sabotage by the former East Germans among his teammates.

Reunification has not resulted in unity. Largely because of the drug issue, many former West German athletes, fearful of losing their places on national teams, mistrust their new teammates from the East. And the East Germans are resentful because the sports system adopted by unified Germany more closely resembles the West’s, even though the East had by far the better results.

Although two-thirds of the athletes on Germany’s national teams since reunification are former East Germans, two-thirds of the officials and coaches are West German. Thousands of coaches and officials from the East lost their jobs, making it appropriate that the former headquarters for East German sports in Berlin is now an unemployment office.

Noting that former East Germans also have had to learn to live without a sports system that nurtures them from childhood to retirement, Mueller said:

“They’re learning there’s more to sport than sport 24 hours a day. They have to go to school and worry about what to do after they finish skating. Not everyone is going to wait on them hand and foot, like they were. Welcome to the real world.”

The former Soviets have been greeted by the same cold reality.

One of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s last official acts in December was to shut down the sports bureaucracy, Gossport. Since then, the All-Commonwealth Sports Council, representing 11 former republics, has been trying to take over Gossport’s bank accounts.

With help from the IOC and a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, the German sports-shoe company, the Commonwealth of Independent States’ Olympic Committee raised the final $800,000 required to send a team to France. But its president, Vitaly Smirnov, said recently that $3.3 million is still needed for the Summer Olympics. He said the committee is trying to raise money by offering land in the Far Eastern part of the former Soviet Union to Japanese golf course developers.

Smirnov expressed confidence that political leaders in the various republics will not forget sports in their budgets, but other officials believe athletes will have to learn to support themselves, as most Olympic athletes in the West do, through sponsorships, donations and jobs.

“It would be a tragedy for sports if the best athletes wind up making cigarette lighters rather than doing what they do best,” the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Vladimir Vasin, told the Russian Information Agency.

It has not yet come to that for Coach Tamara Moskvina’s figure skaters at St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, but she said recently that she has to scour the virtually empty markets each morning so that she can feed them.

“This is the end, our last breath,” she told reporters during the European championship meet at Lausanne, where her three pairs teams swept the medals. “We know the money is not there anymore.

“The Russian government should still support us, and the Ukrainian government, too. But how can they when people are hungry and money is needed for food?”

Although Albertville may represent the last hurrah in the Winter Olympics for the old Soviet Union, it will be the first in many years for three of its former republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are competing as independent nations for the first time since before World War II.

Latvians are medal favorites in the bobsled, largely because their country has the only modern track in the former Soviet Union. Russian bobsledders who used it for training this winter had to pay a fee.

The Baltic states have made it clear that they want little to do with their former “occupiers,” even in sports. Ivan Klementjev, an ethnic Russian who has won five world championships in canoeing, lives in Latvia, but some native Latvians now consider him a foreigner and prefer that he compete at Barcelona for the Commonwealth.

Who can predict whether there will even be a Commonwealth team at Barcelona?

When Samaranch and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin met recently, they decided that the 11 former republics included in the Commonwealth will send another “United Team” to the Summer Olympics. But officials and athletes from Ukraine, among them three-time world champion pole vaulter Sergei Bubka, are holding out for their own team.

What delicious irony there was in the opening line of the old Soviet anthem, which was heard so often in previous Olympics: “The unbreakable union of the free republics . . . .”