BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS: DAY 3 : A CEREMONIAL WRONG NUMBER

The International Olympic Committee forbids athletes from writing articles for newspapers other than those in their hometowns while competing in the Games, a rule it enforced in 1988 against figure skater Brian Boitano, who had been writing a daily column from Calgary for USA Today.

But, despite several warnings from the IOC, Carl Lewis, the U.S. sprinter and long jumper, has continued to provide first-person accounts of his third Olympics to several newspapers in the United States and Europe.

He can’t always be near a computer keyboard on deadline. So during Saturday night’s opening ceremony at Montjuic Stadium, he called in his impressions from the field on a portable phone. Another athlete-author, Swiss swimmer Dano Halsall, did the same.

The IOC complained Monday to the U.S. and Swiss Olympic committees.

Whereas the Swiss took action to prohibit Halsall from writing during the rest of the Games, USOC spokesman Mike Moran said, “We’re looking into it.”

Asked how the IOC learned that the athletes had used portable phones from the field for their free-lancing, an IOC official said, “They were dumb enough to put it in their articles.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.