SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 14 : MONEY MOTIVATES SHIRT DETECTIVES

On the 13th day of the Olympic Games, the horror stories continued at the media village laundry.

Several thousand reporters are lodged at a new apartment city in Badalona, which has everything from a post office, to a cafeteria, to a newspaper shop, to a bank (open until 9 p.m., including Sunday) . . . And then there’s the laundry.

A sore subject, for almost everyone.

The 24-hour service on a bag of laundry, which can run anywhere from $100 to $150, has taxed the patience of nearly everyone who has stood in the lines, to drop off or pick up.

Tales of lost clothes are common and one reporter picked up three shirts--sans buttons.

Then there’s the case of Hugh McIlvanney, chief sportswriter for the Observer of London. McIlvanney said he left eight Brooks Brothers shirts at the laundry last week. For three days, no one could find his shirts. Finally, he said, the laundry manager asked him the value of his shirts.

“ ‘About $350,’ I told him,” McIlvanney said.

“In about 30 seconds, the entire laundry staff was looking everywhere, and I mean behind the paint on the walls. They found them in five minutes.”

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