BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 7 : SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : TENNIS IS OLYMPIAN, BUT THE FANS AREN’T

The assessment of the quality of the tennis on the slow, red Spanish clay has been mixed so far in the Olympic tournament. The assessment of the quality of the fans, at least in the eyes of one columnist in the local newspaper El Mundo, is pretty clear cut: They stink.

Pere Gurt wrote, under the headline SIENTENSE, POR FAVOR 27 VECES --Silence was requested 27 times by the referee--that the tennis fans have no idea what the sport is about. He reported that they walk around at the wrong times during points, stand up and move around during play, and, worst of all in Gurt’s judgment, sit in the stands in various stages of undress.

He wrote: “In only two days, it has been made clear that La Teixonese (the Olympic tennis stadium) is not Wimbledon, not even close. . . . To compare with the British tournament is not only ‘mission impossible,’ but to look like a flea market takes nerve.”

Accompanying the column was a large picture of the crowd, the men bare-chested and the woman barely passing the standards of public decency.

Wrote Gurt, “The first days of competition were accompanied by a punishing, unrelenting sun, Bermuda shorts and bare breasts, as the tennis players labored through their journeys.”

Bare breasts? They have plenty of that on the beaches here, but not in the tennis bleachers. Chalk it up to a little literary license.

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.