Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Next Step : Olympics Outlive Naysayers : The movement has never seemed stronger as a record 172 nations prepare to compete in Barcelona.

It happens, almost like clockwork, before virtually every Olympic Games. Critics emerge with visions that the movement is about to self-destruct.

In the buildup to next week’s XXV Olympiad in Barcelona, Spain, there has been the customary bad-mouthing. Two British journalists have written a book, not yet published in the United States, titled “The Lords of the Rings”--a polemic against International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and other Olympic leaders.

“What a decade ago was seen as a source of security and purity is now tacky, anti-democratic, drug-ridden and auctioned off as a marketing tool of the world’s multinational companies,” the two state at the outset. And they close with a chapter titled “Destroy the Olympics.”

The fact is that barring the unexpected, this should be a glorious year for the Olympics, and many more should follow. Despite the trials of the past, the movement has proven its resilience. Its immediate prospects may never have been better as a record 172 nations and 11,000 athletes prepare to march in the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Games.

By comparison, not only was “purity” lacking in the Games a decade ago, but there was much more trouble than today.

The Olympics were between two boycotts--the U.S.-led protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that disrupted the 1980 Moscow Games and the Soviet-led retaliation against Los Angeles four years later. Many thought the movement would be irretrievably split. Today, it is both larger than ever and remarkably undivided.

In 1982, the effort to fight drug use among athletes was only getting started. Today, ridding the Olympics of drugs is making headway.

As for the International Olympic Committee being undemocratic--that has always been the case. It is certainly no worse now than it was under founder Pierre de Coubertin and later under Avery Brundage. And the rush to market the Games to corporate sponsors was well under way before Samaranch took charge in 1980.

In the years ahead, controversy will inevitably continue over reform of the movement. Plans are already being laid in connection with the IOC’s centenary meeting in Paris in 1994 to make the Games more marketable--eliminating some of the less popular events, adding others and limiting participants by setting stricter performance standards. All proposals will generate strong feelings.

But for the first time since the Soviet Union entered the Games at Helsinki in 1952, the Olympics this year will not be dominated by ideological rivalry. There will be national rivalry. But for now, at least, the days of Olympic contests as propaganda weapons, used to “prove” the superiority of one social system or another, are gone.

The fall of the Berlin Wall also meant the fall of the steroid-fueled athletic factories of the former East Bloc. Along with the Olympic movement’s acceptance of avowed professional competitors from the West--originally meant to balance the de facto professionals from the East--that is putting Olympic competitors on the closest thing they’ve seen to a “level playing field” in decades. In fact, by far the biggest mismatch of this Olympics promises to be on the basketball court, where America’s “Dream Team” of multimillionaire NBA stars looks unbeatable.

Anita DeFrantz, the IOC member from Los Angeles, said the other day that she is “not sure if we’ll notice much of an Eastern decline until 2000” as long as veterans of the old subsidized systems compete. Others think the time will be shorter.

Already, the new combined German team, which is definitely not run on East German principles, got the most medals at the Winter Games this year in Albertville, and some believe that the United States, with the largest contingent of competitors at Barcelona, could win the most medals there. If the Germans don’t.

The former Soviet republics will be in Spain, as they were in Albertville, as the “Unified Team,” excepting only the Baltic states, which will compete on their own. But this is probably the last Olympics for such a unified team, and already athletes from the former Soviet Union have been cut off from the vast resources once available to them. (With the individual republics going on their own in 1996, the Games would see the number of competing nations climb over the 180 mark.)

Barcelona will also mark the return of South Africa after a 30-year Olympics ban. While the team is still predominantly white, it is no longer all-white.

Indeed, the dominant theme of these Games is international inclusion. When, as a part of its sanctions against Serbia, the United Nations called for an Olympic ban on Yugoslav participation in Barcelona, Olympic leaders went to work diplomatically and now have won approval to allow even the Serbs to compete under the Olympic flag and anthem.

Cuba, North Korea and Ethiopia--among the few to stay away from Seoul in 1988--will be present in Barcelona.

In fact, so many countries will be present that in contrast to Los Angeles, when teams were encouraged to send more athletes, many teams are now being told to bring only their truly competitive members. And there is talk of sending some home from the Olympic Village early to make room for others.

The Samaranch presidency of the IOC has been dedicated to making the Games bigger, costlier and more professional--much to the consternation of traditionalists. And Los Angeles’ “Spartan” Games notwithstanding, there is little sign that these trends will be reversed.

It is thought-provoking, however, that Los Angeles’ Peter Ueberroth, president of a Games that set many patterns for the Olympic movement, is critical of the increasing professionalism, if not the broader commercial marketing.

“I separate those two,” Ueberroth said last week. “I think something has to pay for sports, either government dollars, charity dollars or private-sector dollars. I think of those three, it’s clear that the only one that should be considered is the private sector.

“But as to professionalism, I’m just clearly against it. This ‘Dream Team’ that we’re putting on in basketball will cause me not to watch. I don’t think that that’s any fun. . . . I think it was a great, exciting thing to see if some coach could take a bunch of college kids, practice with them for eight months and figure that we’ll beat everyone in the world. . . . But if you beat people by 60 points? . . . I think that kind of professionalism takes away, makes it less fun.”

Despite such protests, the image of the Olympics from old Bud Greenspan films--of athletes gloriously staggering to the finish line far behind their rivals, exemplifying De Coubertin’s view that participation rather than victory is the true test--is becoming a thing of the past.

“The word amateur is obsolete,” Harvey Schiller, the executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, observed recently, and the word has even been removed from the world Olympic Charter. Now it’s accepted that an Olympic athlete make at least a minimum living at his sport, and many, of course, do far better.

What is likely to be the impact of all this on the quality of athletic performances at the Games? Possibly weaker East European teams combined with improved and more frequent drug testing may mean fewer world records. But more professional Western athletes may increase the number. Or maybe world records are not a good measure as we approach the limits of human athletic capacity in some track-and-field and other events.

As the athletes are allowed to enrich themselves, the Games themselves are being marketed ever more broadly. The big test this year is pay TV, with U.S. television trying a live cable “triplecast” as well as its more standard coverage.

Broader marketing means more money for the Olympic Establishment. After the Los Angeles Games showed the potential of corporate sponsorships as a source of income, the IOC granted a dozen corporations the right to use the five rings in their advertising throughout the world.

There are plenty of uses for the money. The IOC has put large amounts into a “solidarity” fund to aid Third World countries to train and house teams at the Games, for example. There is more and more talk about using these funds to defray the transportation costs of the economically deprived countries.

That is all to the good. But growing IOC income also goes to pay for the high lifestyle of IOC members, including first-class travel wherever they go on Olympic business, deluxe hotels throughout the world and lavish meals and entertainment. This is costing millions a year, and there are some who feel it has gone too far.

Another problem that seems certain to bedevil future Olympics is involvement in international politics. Let there be a Yugoslav crisis, or let South Africa take steps to eliminate apartheid, and the Olympic movement has been sure to become involved. In 2000, China is bidding to hold the Olympics in Beijing, and that nation’s human rights policy will inevitably be an issue in the selection.

Movement leaders repeatedly proclaim their aim to help bring about world peace. They openly covet a future Nobel Peace Prize. Paradoxically, they continue at the same time to encourage the national symbolism at the Games that invites the intrusion onto the playing field of disputes that have nothing to do with sport.

For most, however, the controversies begin to fade when the torch run begins. Soon come the opening ceremonies. A mellow mood takes hold in the Olympic city. And through much of the world, enthralled millions watch for youth and excellence to prevail.

Nearly all are won over by the end of each Olympiad.

Reich is the author of a book about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and continues to follow the Olympic movement.