Letter from Washington

For the past few weeks, independent television stations around the country have been carrying satellite reports from Spartacade ’79, the tune-up games for the Moscow Olympics next summer. Poorly produced under the aegis of the slippery Lothar Bock—the German middleman in the NBC-Moscow deal—these reports have been journalistically lethargic and atmospherically depressing. The harassment of American athletes has been systematic (this viewer found it particularly wondrous that lane assignments, supposedly selected by lot, consistently placed American sprinters in the disadvantageous outside lanes), the treatment of political undesirables tough (Israelis and Chileans were excluded), and the bias of Soviet officials patent and unremitting. Word has already spread through the American track squad that warm-up conditions will be identical next year. The two practice tracks will be divided evenly, one for the Soviets and one for the rest of the world.

While it may have been the result of our erratic viewing habits rather than the programming itself, we did not hear the American anthem played a single time. The Soviet anthem, on the other hand, is now as familiar as the Coca-Cola jingle. Worse still were the man-in-the-street sidebars, designed, it must be presumed, to lend journalistic verisimilitude. One would be lucky to catch so many professionally Nice People in a dragnet thrown over a Jaycee convention. In Moscow, one just stumbles across them—industrious, cheerful folk, alternately quaint and cute. To ensure that nobody would misread the frenzied body-language, the commentators pronounced every minute, on the minute, “We’re so lucky to be here!” Ah, the honor of it all. Participating in the dress rehearsal for the greatest propaganda offensive since Adolf Hitler staged the 1936 games in Berlin.

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For the past few weeks, independent television stations around the country have been carrying satellite reports from Spartacade ’79, the tune-up games for the Moscow Olympics next summer. Poorly produced under the aegis of the slippery Lothar Bock—the German middleman in the NBC-Moscow deal—these reports have been journalistically lethargic and atmospherically depressing. The harassment of American athletes has been systematic (this viewer found it particularly wondrous that lane assignments, supposedly selected by lot, consistently placed American sprinters in the disadvantageous outside lanes), the treatment of political undesirables tough (Israelis and Chileans were excluded), and the bias of Soviet officials patent and unremitting. Word has already spread through the American track squad that warm-up conditions will be identical next year. The two practice tracks will be divided evenly, one for the Soviets and one for the rest of the world.

While it may have been the result of our erratic viewing habits rather than the programming itself, we did not hear the American anthem played a single time. The Soviet anthem, on the other hand, is now as familiar as the Coca-Cola jingle. Worse still were the man-in-the-street sidebars, designed, it must be presumed, to lend journalistic verisimilitude. One would be lucky to catch so many professionally Nice People in a dragnet thrown over a Jaycee convention. In Moscow, one just stumbles across them—industrious, cheerful folk, alternately quaint and cute. To ensure that nobody would misread the frenzied body-language, the commentators pronounced every minute, on the minute, “We’re so lucky to be here!” Ah, the honor of it all. Participating in the dress rehearsal for the greatest propaganda offensive since Adolf Hitler staged the 1936 games in Berlin.