The Olympic Games: It’s Sports, but Much, Much More

It is supposed to be the world’s showcase for itself, a display of the highest ideals of peaceful competition. Nations paused in the evil of making war in order to hold Olympic Games, in which nobody died. But, of course, that was a long time ago when the custom was determined by the ancient Greeks.

It’s still the showcase for one thing or another, although not quite as intended when the Games were reborn in Athens 100 years ago. Now the Games are in our country, Atlanta, not a commemoration in Athens, because there’s big business in Atlanta. Coca-Cola and AT&T; have put up about $40 million each to bring the Games to our country -- to the New South and the great showcase only America can provide.

Some athletes will compete for the riches that will come and many more will empty their hearts and souls to do their best against the best. Idealism, bloated commercialism, progress, warts and all. It is the Olympic paradox, as usual.

The first look at America many athletes will get is Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, which like the city of the New South and the several state-owned venues, lies under the flag of the state of Georgia, which defiantly brandishes the stars and bars of the Confederacy. It is the symbol of slavery added to the state flag in 1956 in opposition to school integration and voting rights for black Americans. Three years ago efforts failed to change the flag, which ought to be objectionable to a lot of athletes.

The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games wants to prohibit displays of the flag inside those venues. And a spokesman for the pro-flag people calls it “arrogance” to have “such an event in the middle of the South and do everything they can to hide the fact they’re in the South,” as if to deny any intention of racial progress.

Yet, two Cuban boxers, one of whom won a gold medal in Barcelona four years ago, and another likely medalist in these Games, have defected from the self-styled racial utopia to seek life in America. They have given up their chance to compete in Atlanta. “Everybody tells you what to do and when to do it in Cuba,” Ramon Garbey, a super-middleweight, has been quoted as saying. “You can’t contradict them or give your own opinions or you’ll end up in trouble, like we were. The only way to contradict them is to be here (in the U.S.)”

Joel Casamayor, the defending bantamweight champion, said, “believe me,” lots of Cuban athletes in Atlanta would be thinking about doing what they did. Both men were sent to a special sports academy to produce champions before they were 10 years old.

Perhaps they fled for personal freedom to live their lives as they saw fit; perhaps they did it for the personal freedom to get rich the American way. We know they risked whatever special privileges they had in Cuba to try to leave.

A long time ago at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, which some black American athletes boycotted, a black American woman athlete told me of how some Soviet athletes at the Olympic Village had tried to talk her into defecting. She said she laughed at them. I can’t recall any American athlete defecting the other way, can you?

It’s a revolution of heart and mind that in several communities of the deepest South, black athletes from Africa have been welcomed to train and have been celebrated as guests. In Hattiesburg, Miss., runners from impoverished Malawi came in ragged shoes and without uniforms, and have been shod and redressed by the community’s needlework. They train on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, eat -- the mixed blessing of southern-fried steak -- and sleep there. They are driven about the cityby volunteers. Hattiesburg has also been host to the team from Kenya. Athletes from Equatorial Guinea train in nearby Poplarville. LaGrange, Ga., is host to several teams from Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Who could have imagined that, at the time Georga was saying “Never!” to school integration and the state flag was being remade, that the South would be eager hosts to those black athletes?

Yet, the city of Winder, Ga., rejected the Somali Olympic team last year, and Cobb County, Ga., where the celebrated Newt Gingrich lives, lost the volleyball preliminaries after it passed anti-gay legislation. When the decision was made to have the torch relay bypass Cobb County, Spartanburg, S.C., said, “That goes for us, too,” and so the torch made another detour.

All that comes during a time when more than two dozen black churches have been burned, primarilly in the South.

Note also that the William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta will open in time for the wave of Olympic visitors. It will remember the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Two of its other displays focus on the 1958 bombing of the city’s major synagogue, and the lynching by an anti-Semitic mob in 1917 of Leo Frank, who was wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a young woman employee. He is the last white man lynched in America.

Here, in Atlanta, Margaret Lambert of Jamaica Estates, Queens, will be guest of honor of the German Olympic team, 60 years after she was barred from the German team as a Jew.

Every four years her story and the story of Marty Glickman ought to be retold as opposite sides of the same coin. At the 1936 Games in Berlin, Glickman and Sam Stoller were denied their place on the American sprint relay team because Jesse Owens, a black American, had so dominated the competition that Avery Brundage, the Fascist head of the USOC, did not want to further offend Herr Hitler with Jews winning gold medals.

Margaret Lambert, then known as Gretl Bergman from the town of Laupheim, may have been the best woman high jumper in the world in 1936. She might have won a gold for Germany. A month before the Games, in the trials at Adolf Hitler Stadium, she equaled the German record. She accepted the gold medal with the swastika and wondered what she would do if she won at Berlin. How could she heil Hitler?

She never had to make the decision. The day after the U.S. team, which considered and decided not to boycott, embarked for Germany, she received a letter informing her that she could not possibly have expected to make the team on the basis of her performance. It was merely Hitler keeping his promise to rid the world of Jews.

The gold medal at the Berlin Olympics was won with a jump of 1.60 meters. That was Gretl Bergman’s height at Adolf Hitler Stadium. She left Germany just in time, and won the American national championship in 1937 and 1938.

Some years ago the mayor of Laupheim invited her back as guest of the community. She said no. Two years ago she was invited to the opening of Gretl Bergman Sports Halle in Berlin. She kept to her vow never to return to Germany; her two sons went to the dedication.

She pondered the Atlanta invitation for some time before accepting. “I finally have to make my peace,” she said recently. “But I still wouldn’t go back to Germany.”

The Olympics are never just games. They are supposed to be demonstrations of our highest intentions. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not.