HEART OF GOLD

When they held the Spectacle of Sydney here Friday night, the sensational opening ceremony that began an Olympic Games in Australia for only the second time, a woman in Newport Beach was 7,500 miles away from where she should have been.

Which was right here, shoulder to shoulder with the 109,999 other people in Olympic Stadium, whose collective outpouring, at an event so awesome that it almost defied description, told the watching world: “G’day, mates.”

In 1956, when Australia hosted its only other Summer Games, in Melbourne, Olga Fikotova was a wide-eyed, 23-year-old from Czechoslovakia, who set the Olympic world on its ear. She wasn’t even the best discus thrower in Europe back then, but she went to Melbourne, stole the gold medal with a throw that was seven feet better than her previous best, and stole the heart of American Harold Connolly, who won the gold in the hammer throw.

Theirs was a romance that would have played big in Hollywood, but it was larger than that. It was a story for the world: Young woman from behind the iron curtain overcomes 10-foot-tall barbed wire fence separating the men and women in the Melbourne Olympic village, meets and falls in love with handsome American hero and eventually marries him in front of 40,000 in Prague. Soon, the pair moves to (where else?) California and eventually has four children.

Olga Connolly remains synonymous with the Melbourne Olympics; for that matter, with Olympics in Australia.

Melbourne was the Games of Australian swimming stars Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose and track sprinter Betty Cuthbert; of U.S. basketball heroes Bill Russell and K.C. Jones; of American diver Pat McCormick; of Hungarian water polo player Ervin Zador.

And, certainly, of Olga Connolly.

Friday night, when Cuthbert and Fraser carried the torch as part of the final lighting at the end of the festivities, their presence was deserved; as Australians, almost mandatory. But Connolly should have been there too, somewhere in the stadium, amid the mind-blowing sounds and sights that celebrated all that is the Olympics and--relative to Connolly--all that has been.

She is more than a former Olympic star. She is an ongoing Olympic humanitarian. She is 67 now, has raised four children and saw the storybook romance end in divorce in 1973. Yet, she has lived and worked the Olympic ideal every day of her life. She competed in five Olympics, but always knew that what was happening outside the discus circle was much more important.

Her life since the Olympics has, for the most part, consisted of 12-hour work days and six-day work weeks for just about every sort of literacy and educational program she could find in Southern California.

Had somebody (U.S. Olympic Committee, Australian Olympic Committee?) thought to bring her here for these Games and have her on hand for the opening, her presence would have been unusual--for her. Opening ceremonies are not really her thing.

“No, I didn’t think about being there,” she said by phone from Newport Beach, just hours before the opening ceremony was to begin. “In my five Olympics, I only marched in one.”

And even that one, 1972 in Munich, was a close call. By then, Connolly was competing as an American, and when her teammates elected her as the flag bearer, the USOC, put off by her outspoken stance on her new country’s war in Vietnam, tried to get her election voided. But the athletes prevailed and Connolly carried the flag.

“One year, I didn’t march because I didn’t have shoes that fit me,” she said. “In Melbourne, I had to compete the next day, with prelims in the morning and finals in the afternoon. I had 100% concentration, so I did not march.”

Melbourne was “my Olympics,” Connolly said, adding that she felt a “special energy, an inner assurance” when she got to Australia.

“All that was on my mind there was to do something good for the Czech people,” she said. “I wanted to do it for the streetcar driver who told me I didn’t have to pay when I got on, or for the man at the newsstand who gave me a paper in the morning and told me I didn’t have to pay.”

She had never been to Australia before, and hasn’t been back since. But she still recalls the great adventure.

“It was a six-day flight, the old-fashioned way, on prop planes,” she said. “I remember one of our stops was in Istanbul and I went out for Turkish coffee. I had never tasted anything so wonderful.

“We stopped in Singapore and I missed our bus and there I was, all alone, with no idea where I was or what to do. Suddenly, this man came and talked to me and I was afraid he was going to shoot me, but we kind of communicated and he said he wanted to take me someplace. I didn’t know what to think, but I went along and it turned out he was a monk and he wanted to show me a huge picture he had of himself at a giant exercise session in Prague. He showed me that and he was so proud of it and then he just took me back.”

She got to Melbourne and immediately made dozens of new friends.

“We had dances every night,” she said. “It didn’t matter what country you were from. Athletes were just athletes.

“We all owed a lot to Earlene Brown, an American discus thrower [and shot putter]. She was so popular, such a good dancer. She was a very large woman, but all the guys wanted to dance with her and she got everybody together.”

After Connolly won the gold medal with her Olympic record 176-feet 1-inch throw, she could not celebrate.

“I had a terrible blister on my foot and had to throw in practice shoes,” she said. “As soon as I got done, they took me and I had surgery. So I couldn’t celebrate. All I could do was limp into the dining room.

“After the Games were over, they took us all to the beach in Melbourne, a beach I remember being beautiful. But I was told to stay out of the water because of my foot. So I was sitting there, alone, when this old Australian man came up to me and asked why I wasn’t going into the water. I told him about my foot and he said to take the foot into the ocean. ‘It is the great healer,’ he told me.

“So I did, and when I woke up the next day, the wound was half healed already. I took it to the doctor and I showed him, and said it had healed. He was shocked. I fell in love with the ocean that day.”

The ocean hasn’t been far away since. Connolly lived most of her life on L.A.’s Westside and just recently moved to Newport Beach. Until late 1998, she was director of education for the California Conservation Corps, a state agency that provides manpower for emergency situations such as fires and floods, while providing those it hires with second chances at education. Connolly’s 12-hour days there, by her choice--after years of a similar work ethic at literacy programs for the county and for USC--started to catch up to her in May ’98.

“I had a little heart attack,” she said, “and then I had another little warning in October.”

So she went to her Social Security office, found out she had enough to live on for a while, retired and sold her house in Culver City. Three of her four children--Jimmy, Marja and Nina--work in Irvine, and so she moved to Orange County. Her fourth child, Mark, lives in Las Vegas.

Jimmy was an NCAA decathlon champion at UCLA, but opted for a computer job over pursuit of the Olympics. Marja was a volleyball star, who also seemed headed to the Olympics, but decided--with gentle pushes from her mother--to stay and get her degree at UCLA, rather than move to San Diego with the Olympic team.

If that kind of parental influence seems unusual for a five-time Olympian, that is because Connolly’s view of the Olympics is unusual.

“I will watch some of the opening ceremony,” she said. “But I am not glued to the TV.

“I have grown up about the Olympics over the years. I see opening ceremonies as a spectacle, and I admire the athletic performances. But I also see the United Nations Health Organization telling the world that 60% of our young people are out of shape. And I see the phys-ed quality in our schools to be way behind.

“It is interesting to me, because the principle of Olympic father Baron de Coubertin was that the Olympic Games reflect the athletic fitness of each country. Now, our Olympic athletes are specially trained and do not reflect our country’s fitness.”

Connolly said that, to her mind, the last real Olympics was Melbourne.

“By 1960 in Rome, it was already bigger, and more of everything,” she said. “Now, I watch and I see, but only in small ways, the Olympic spirit that there was in Melbourne still peeking out from under the rug a little bit.”

So, Olga Connolly, recovered from her heart problems and eager to go back to work any day now, watched from home as the Olympics returned to Australia.

And though she remains proud of her time and her fame on the Olympic stage, and was excited to hear that her name remains on the wall at the Melbourne Cricket Ground--the main stadium in ’56 and a soccer venue for these Games--she also has her own wry image of what the movement has become.

“I was laughing to myself the other day about this,” she said. “I was thinking about how the Olympics started, about how the Greeks used to train for months and be naked for the entire time, kind of so everybody would be equal. I was watching TV and seeing pictures of all of you going through metal detectors, because all the Olympics worry about now is terrorists.

“And it struck me that that is the only thing still the same. Because, when people go through metal detectors, they are naked.”