Sport: A Playground (or Fun

From the beginning, the idea was to make the biggest, costliest and most widely seen sports spectacular in history an “intimate affair.” It seems an improbable feat, but the organizers of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich were resolved to resist “gargantuism,” to emphasize the “human scale,” and to build an “anti-monument sports complex” in a green setting with a “minimum of travel.” Most important for a community that other Germans call “Weltstadt mit Herz” (Metropolis with a Heart) there must be a “touch of gaiety in the air.” The goal, says Willi Daume, president of the German Olympic Committee, is “a more carefree Olympiad, free of both false pathos and the fanatical pursuit of medals.” Daume and the Munich planners have not wholly succeeded—no one could—but they have come close enough by creating what amounts to a vast playground of fun and Games.

Beginning on the outskirts of the city, seemingly every knoll and grassy patch sprouts a grove of flagpoles with pale green, blue and white banners blazing a trail to the Munich Games. On the horizon, the bright blue Bavarian sky is pierced by the futuristic Olympic Tower, a 943-ft. skymark for the Games. Below, sprawling over 740 undulating acres, is the Olympic Park, a verdant retreat with a boating lake, broad tree-lined walkways and facilities for more than two-thirds of the 195 events* on the Olympic agenda. Three of the largest venues are partially under one “roof,” an expansive sweep of acrylic glass that drapes over the landscape like a free-form circus tent. Though striking, the roof has roused the ire of many Munich taxpayers because its cost soared from the original estimate of $3.5 million to $63 million. The overall Olympic bill of $750 million, or more than three times what Mexico City spent on the 1968 Games, caused some unsporting types to start selling posters showing the dachshund Waldi, the official mascot of the Games, using the Olympic Tower as a fire hydrant.

But the new Olympic stadium makes the expense seem worthwhile. It is a convenient, comfortable oval that accommodates 80,000 (including 33,000 standees) within “human dimensions”; promoters boast that the maximum distance between spectator and competitor is only 212 yards. A javelin throw away is the swimming stadium, which is built with 80% of its structure underground lest it appear too imposing. A kind of super sunken bath, it has five pools on two levels, and amenities like a glass-enclosed express elevator to the high-diving platform. Over a nearby ridge is the cycle stadium, a space-age affair that looks as if it could land on the Sea of Tranquillity. The main walkway in the Olympic Park is more down to earth. Called Spielstrasse (Play Street), it is a kind of carnival midway with restaurant, beer garden, refreshment booths, street theaters, pantomimists, painters, puppet shows, oompah-pah bands in Lederhosen, folk dancing, and stands displaying such wares as Olympic dice ($1) and Olympic paperweights ($16).

The outdoor action at the Olympic Village is concentrated in the shopping center, where dozens of athletes crying “Changee!” in a Babel of accents meet to exchange Olympic pins with all the fervor of kids trading bubble-gum baseball cards. The indoor hot spot is the Bavaria Club, a shadowy discotheque in the village’s recreation center. In the rear of the club, couples in their multicolored sweat suits lounge and embrace in a litter of long, pretzel-like pillows strewn around the floor. The play is also heavy on the center’s pinball machines, pool tables, miniature golf course and toy-auto racing course. For the more reflective, there is a “quiet zone” for listening to classical music. Other diversions include a theater for such activities as Bavarian yodeling exhibitions, and outdoor games of chess with pieces so large they have to be carried individually to their positions.

Since her arrival, Jo Harshbarger, a 15-year-old swimmer from Bellevue, Wash., has had only one reservation about coming to Munich. The dressing rooms at the swimming stadium are coed, she explains, and have individual dressing stalls, “but the sides are so small that the tall boys can look over.” As for life at the Olympic Village, she says: “It’s weird but really fantastic.”

Golden Ghetto. A British boxer found the pyramided tiers of the village housing like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It’s very strange to be taken through unfinished corridors to a barren room furnished with three cots, a chest, a table and some chairs, a telly and then, after looking through an uncurtained window and seeing a weird townscape, having a bloke in a German army uniform tell me: ‘Velcome to der Olympic Village.’ This is supposed to be a village?”

Most of the 14,000 inhabitants, however, tend to agree with Village Architect Erwin Heinle that their temporary home is a “Babylon supplied with all the facilities, the distractions, the amenities to make the visitors forget that they are cooped up in a golden ghetto.” The most striking features of the village are the huge color-coordinated “media pipes” that meander throughout the compound at a height of 15 feet; their colors not only lead athletes to their proper buildings but convey power, water and taped music. The starkly modern design and easy atmosphere of the village suggest a kind of Op art campus where the athletes take community sunbaths, refresh themselves with drinks from a free milk bar, and are attended by hostesses in puffy powder-blue dirndls with white aprons and boots fashioned by Courréges. U.S. Track Coach Bill McClure, for one, thinks that there may be too much of a good thing. “The only trouble with the food here,” he says “is that there is too much of it and that it is too good.” But Chris Taylor, a U.S. wrestler who weighs 434 Ibs., has no complaints about the German cooking. Stroking his ample middle, he says: “It fills the empty spot up real well.”

“Surely there has never been an Olympic Village like this one,” says a member of the Dutch equestrian team. “Everyone I’ve talked to is happy. Happy, that is, until the action starts and the moment of truth comes. You must remember that come September 10 this place for the most part will be a village of losers.”

Once the Olympic flame is extinguished, in fact, the Olympic Village —as well as other Olympic housing and sporting facilities—will be transformed into middle-and upper-income housing, schools, day nurseries, a bank, restaurant, cinema, open-air theater and a sports center. Indeed, that is what they were originally designed for in the city’s master plan to use the Olympics to accomplish a “great leap forward.” In other words, the only certain winner in the 1972 Games is Munich itself.

*Basketball and archery will be held at other sites within the city, canoeing, shooting, rowing and equestrian events at nearby towns, and yachting at Kiel, the Baltic seaport 575 miles away.