SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 16 : IT’S LIKE NOTHING IN THE WORLD

I was an Olympic rookie.

I have seen the Super Bowl. The Final Four. The World Series. Big fights. The Breeders’ Cup. I have been to Miami. To Montana. To Dallas. To Detroit. All are spectacular and thrilling and wonderful, each in their own way. But the Olympics are different. The Games are simply overwhelming.

The usual rules do not apply. There are thousands of athletes, each with a compelling story. But so many of them speak languages that I do not.

There is always too much taking place. At most big events, there is one sport. Here there are dozens. There are television sets everywhere, wired into each venue. From the volleyball arena, I watch the United States men lose to Brazil, and on the television, an Ethiopian woman is winning a dramatic gold medal on the track. I sit in the media section at the Olympic Stadium, watching hurdler Kevin Young set a world record; on the TV, wrestler Bruce Baumgartner is winning a gold medal.

It was Ray Fitzgerald, late columnist for the Boston Globe, who said of the Olympics, “I’m always six subway stops away from the news.” And so are we all.

We scramble here. We take buses and trains and we sweat in the Mediterranean heat. Air conditioning is as rare as rain. That’s OK, because the struggle becomes part of the story. Sometimes you get there in time and a wrestler goes crazy, like Elmadi Jabrailov of the CIS did Friday. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a very Olympic story.

Four days from the finish, I became ill, victimized by a plate of mushrooms. A Japanese reporter saw me and, ever so slowly, forced out the phrase: “Help . . . you?” I nodded.

Help. Sharing. I look around the stadium and absorb it. These are the Olympics. See them once, if you can.

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.