COLUMN ONE : Bittersweet Games for S. Africans : It’s great to be back in the Olympics after 32 years, all rooting for the same team. But for many blacks and whites glued to the TV, the legacy of apartheid spoils the thrill.

The Skhosana family, being black, and the Euijen family, being white, have never had much in common in the land of their birth.

The Skhosanas live in a small township house west of Johannesburg, the Euijens in a large house in a leafy, well-to-do suburb.

But this week, the Skhosanas and the Euijens have been glued to their television sets, watching the first live broadcasts of the Olympic Games ever received in South Africa.

And the two families, though still separated by generations of distrust and discrimination, were rooting for the same team--South Africa.

In any other country, that patriotic spirit probably wouldn’t be news. Here, it’s a small miracle.

“For the first time in my life, I had this feeling of national pride,” said Gideon Skhosana, a 37-year-old restaurant manager and father of two. “I’ve never had that feeling before.”

“It’s great that we’re back in the Olympics,” said Erin Euijen, 34, watching the Games with her husband, a Johannesburg lawyer. “It’s just a relief for life to be kind of normal. And maybe it will engender a sense of national unity. We could do with some of that right now.”

From the “matchbox” homes of the black townships to the mansions of the white enclaves, hundreds of thousands of televisions in South Africa have been tuned in to the five hours of daily Olympics coverage this week.

The proceedings in faraway Barcelona, Spain, have offered a rare rallying point for the sports-mad people of this nation. But the Games also are a stark reminder of the string of controversies that preceded this country’s return to world competition after 32 years and the political differences that still grip black and white South Africans.

For many blacks, the South African team itself is a clear symbol of decades of inequality in sports. On the 95-member team, whites outnumber blacks by more than 10 to 1. At home, blacks outnumber whites 5 to 1. But denied facilities, encouragement and resources, blacks have lagged far behind whites in developing their athletic potential.

And many blacks, despite their small burst of national pride, are finding it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the Games.

They still have no vote in South Africa. Constitutional negotiations have been suspended. A two-day national strike looms. Their papers are full of renewed allegations that police are killing black suspects in custody. And the white government has yet to meet the demands of its opponents in the African National Congress (ANC), the country’s primary black opposition movement.

“We all sat down and watched the opening and enjoyed ourselves,” said Nthato Motlana, a physician and anti-apartheid activist in Soweto. “But I didn’t feel the kind of pride I might have felt for a national team that met with the approval of all of us.”

“As a South African, to watch the Olympics live is something great,” said Mohammed Dawood, a 35-year-old Indian who oversees sales for an engineering firm in Klerksdorp.

“But I still have reservations about us participating now,” Dawood added. “It’s a bit premature. When I was in school, I was the 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter champion, but I couldn’t compete against other race groups. That’s why South Africa is not yet ready.”

For many whites, too, their return to the Olympics has been bittersweet. They have long pined for a chance to test their athletic prowess in the world’s great sporting arenas, and, because of that, the Olympics have been a dream come true.

But many whites resent the absence of their national anthem, “Die Stem” (The Voice), and their national sporting symbol, the springbok. They even complain about the new shade of green and gold on the Olympians’ uniforms.

Bowing to pressure from the ANC, the South African Olympic Committee chose neutral symbols for the team. “Ode to Joy” was selected as the anthem, and a stylized insignia of Olympic rings became the South African team’s symbol. And the traditional green and gold of South African athletes’ uniforms looks, to some whites, suspiciously like the colors in the ANC’s black, green and gold flag.

Some whites believe the Olympic team, despite its racial makeup, has been hijacked by the ANC, which spearheaded the worldwide sports boycott and then called it off, enabling the International Olympic Committee to allow South Africans back into the Games.

“I see our athletes there without a proper flag, without an anthem, with a watered-down green and gold,” said Malcolm Spence, 54, who won a bronze medal for the 400-meter dash in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, the last South African Olympic medal.

“It makes me sad,” Spence added. “I don’t apologize for having a very great loyalty and emotions tied up with the flag and the springbok. This team is not representing South Africa. The ANC has poisoned the one great and honorable way of uniting our country.”

The sight of ANC President Nelson Mandela, smiling and waving during the opening ceremony Saturday, also galled many whites.

“He was acting like a head of state,” one white viewer remarked. And a white caller to a local radio talk show Tuesday complained that Mandela “didn’t even stand” as the South African team passed by.

The poor performance of the South African team thus far also has dampened much of the enthusiasm for the Games, making them little more than an interesting curiosity in many homes.

Marianne Kriel, a white swimmer, has made the best showing, setting three South African records. But she has yet to swim in a medal final. And some South Africans hope the team will do better in the track and field events, where the country’s strongest athletes--and most of the blacks--will compete later this week.

On Tuesday, Chris Gibbons, the news anchor of Radio 702 in Johannesburg, held the following on-air conversation with the station’s sports reporter, Gary Bailey, in Barcelona: “We finally managed to win something, right, Gary?” Gibbons said.

“Yes, Chris,” Bailey said. “But only because we were playing against ourselves.”

Indeed, South African tennis star Wayne Ferreira had won his first-round match against Christo van Rensburg, also of South Africa.

Nevertheless, most South Africans, and especially whites, are delighted to be back. The sports boycott, one of the strictest the international community has ever maintained, was designed to force South Africa to end the policy of apartheid that for years prevented blacks and whites from competing on the same teams, or even on the same field.

For whites, the boycott was among the most psychologically biting of all sanctions imposed on South Africa to pressure them to end their policies of racial separation and to share power with the country’s black majority. Isolated from Africa and the rest of the world, they longed to see how their rugby and cricket teams, their sprinters and swimmers, would stack up. They debated the subject constantly, often drawing up dream national teams on cocktail napkins in taverns.

But it wasn’t until President Frederik W. de Klerk launched his reform program in 1990, and removed most of the apartheid laws from the books last year, that they got their chance.

In a rush, black and white sporting bodies in the country merged and vowed to pour money into sports facilities and development programs in the black townships. And, with the ANC’s approval, the International Olympic Committee invited South Africa back.

Now the country’s return has given viewers back home their first glimpse of the Olympics. In 1960, the last time South Africa appeared in the Games, television hadn’t arrived here. And when television finally came, in 1977, South Africa was barred from broadcasting the competition.

This time, the South African Broadcasting Co. (SABC) paid $6 million for the rights to show the Olympics, which are being hosted by one black and two white anchors--who alternate between English and Afrikaans, the language of South Africa’s ruling Afrikaners.

In a survey of viewer attitudes, SABC found that 83% of whites and 85% of Indians and Colored viewers would rather watch the Olympics than their regular television programs. But the SABC, which is still run by the government, didn’t bother to do a similar survey of black attitudes.

For black as well as white South Africans, the most emotional moment was the opening ceremony, when their national team won loud cheers from the crowd in Spain.

“My family and I felt very proud of that South African team,” said Livingstone Hlela, 36, who was watching in his living room in the black township of Soweto and, this week, catching Olympic updates on the TV sets in a Johannesburg department store.

“I wasn’t really looking at the color of the athletes,” said Gideon Skhosana, the black restaurant manager. “It is a South African team. And I felt good about that.”

“It was very emotional,” agreed Frank le Roux, a white Johannesburg lawyer and member of the right-wing Conservative Party. “Our athletes had made great sacrifices to be there. But it was very disconcerting that my national anthem and my national flag weren’t there. It was like having food without salt.”

And, he added, “it goes against the grain” to see whites and blacks on the same team representing South Africa.

For some, the opening was even a bit confusing. With all the pre-Olympics debate over the national anthem and the national symbol, some viewers, like Erin and Mark Euijen, weren’t sure where to find the South African team.

“The opening was so laborious and drawn out,” Erin said. “And we didn’t know what name South Africa was going to appear under. South Africa? The Republic of South Africa? Or maybe Azania,” she said, referring to the name favored by radical black groups.

So, when “L.A. Law,” the most popular dramatic program in South Africa, came on the air, the Euijens switched channels, missing the appearance of “ L’Afrique du Sud, “ at the top of the alphabet behind Greece, the traditional opening ceremony leader, and Afghanistan.

After “L.A. Law,” “we watched part of the Rs and all the Ss, but we missed it,” Erin admitted with a laugh.