The Olympics: For Gold, Silver & Bronze

On and on they came—purple-turbaned Indians, saffron-robed Ghanaians, Bermudians in (what else?) Bermuda shorts, Americans in L.B.J. hats, Russians waving red ribbons at the cheering crowd. Trumpets blared, cannons roared, and screaming jets traced the five-ringed Olympic symbol in the sky. Onto the rust-colored track at Tokyo’s National Stadium trotted Yoshinori Sakai, a 19-year-old student who was born near Hiroshima just hours after the atomic bomb fell on the city. Carrying aloft the blazing Olympic torch, Sakai bounded up a flight of 179 steps, thrust it into a cauldron of oil. Flames leapt up, and halfway around the world, in Manhattan and Mexico City, sports fans watched the dramatic moment on TV—relayed with marvelous clarity by the satellite Syncom III, orbiting 22,000 miles above the International Dateline. The XVIII Olympiad had begun.

A Show to Remember. Tokyo was scheduled for the 1940 Olympics, but the games were canceled because of the war. Now, at a cost of $2 billion, the sports-mad Japanese were determined to make up for it—with a show the world would never forget. Flags honoring 94 nations flew everywhere in Tokyo—7,000 of them, tended by 10,000 uniformed boy scouts. Hotels were jammed with 130,000 foreign tourists hard put to take in all the shrines, nightclubs and kabuki shows. Special police squad cars manned by a corps of smiling interpreters cruised the city searching for the lost, or merely bewildered-looking foreigners. Quaint old Japanese customs were put aside to make sure that Tokyo presented only its most decorous face to the visitors—five people were summarily arrested for urinating in the streets—and signs in the subways carefully instructed young chosans in the mysterious ways of the West with polite reminders that “lady-first etiquette is common practice overseas. Do not mistake it as an expression of love.”

Probably no athletes in history have ever been accorded such tender loving care. In the Olympic village, 650 bicycles stood ready in case any Olympian tired of walking. An International Club helped while away their idle hours, dispensing free milk and Ovaltine to the strains of a red-hot jazz combo. In the dining rooms, 300 chefs labored mightily to prepare 490,000 meals, whomping up everything from scones to sukiyaki for their charges. And there, among the hustling waiters, was Hirohito’s grandson, who signed on for $1.95 a day. It was all too much for a pair of Australian girl swimmers; in three days they gained six pounds apiece, and then their coach started counting the calories.

As always, somebody tried to make political hay out of all the fun and games. Just before the balloons went up, North Korea and Indonesia angrily withdrew when the Olympic Committee refused to lift its ban on athletes who had competed in President Sukarno’s blacklisted Games of the New Emerging Forces last year. But they were hardly missed among the 7,000 sturdy youngsters competing for 499 gold, silver and bronze medals in 20 sports.

From All Quarters. The U.S., fielding its biggest and strongest team ever, was favored to win 13 gold medals in track and field alone, another 14 in swimming. But the rest of the world was catching up fast, and the competition was coming from all quarters: Cuban and Venezuelan sprinters, a German pole vaulter, a Czechoslovakian discus thrower, a Chinese in the decathlon. Plus, of course, the Russians. Lest they succumb to the charms of Tokyo, they were bundled off to the mountain resort of Nikko, 100 miles away, for a week of seclusion before the games.