Call for Olympics boycott

It's been fairly mild along the eastern seaboard here from New York south, but to the north of us the first snows are starting and, of course, out in the far West, the Rockies and the Sierra are already huddling deep in their winter coats.

February and March are the blizzard months for practically two-thirds of this continent and February and March are the months when anybody who's not a wage slave – retired oldsters, businessmen with a couple of weeks off, fashion models, the rich, the New York cab driver who, at some time or other, was able to dig up the prodigious price necessary to purchase a city medallion and buy his own cab ($65,000 is the going rate) – all these take off for Florida or the desert or the Bahamas and wake up in the mornings to scan with satisfaction the headlines: 'Storm Paralyses Chicago', 'Upstate New York Gets 15 Inches', and so on.

In upstate New York the other morning, in New York's capital city of Albany, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said, 'The atmosphere is tense. All the world will be looking at the Olympics. If somebody wanted to send a message like they did in Munich, the stage is there. We're hoping it never happens.'

He wasn't talking about the summer in Moscow, he was talking about Lake Placid, New York, in the Adirondacks, where next month they will stage the Winter Olympics. Now what's an FBI man doing there?

Well, for I think a little more than two years the FBI has had a special team of men – they are known as SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics Team) – rehearsing in the mountain snows of the Rockies in Colorado the worst that might happen in the mountain snows of Lake Placid in the Adirondacks and they're doing this in every sort of ghastly weather, hail and rain, more often in ice storms or after very heavy falls, and at 20, 30 below zero, they've been chasing imaginary culprits or stand-ins on skis, four-wheel drive trucks, snowmobiles and snow shoes, covering a 40-degree slope or a mountain valley as a city policeman blocks off a suspect street or a shopping centre.

I must say that this 'mission possible' of the FBI is not something that's been on our minds but the Summer Olympics in Moscow are much on everybody's minds, not least on the minds of the presidential candidates who, so far, have been pretty cagey, most of them, about committing themselves. When President Carter made his now-famous confession that overnight he'd changed his whole view of Soviet aims and strategy, he declared, in the first flush of the Afghanistan invasion, that the United States was weighing the possibility of boycotting the Summer Games in Moscow and the boycott has become a lively and popular issue.

In the beginning people seemed to divide into two downright camps. One camp cried, 'Boycott the Games now! What could be worse than our deploring everything the Russians do and then go crawling to Moscow to play games?'

The other camp, recruited mostly from athletes and Olympic organisers, said stolidly, 'Politics should have nothing to do with sports.'

Well, the answer to that one is easy. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. When a war comes, sportsmen shut up shop, plough under the fairways, close the racetracks and see themselves first as citizens and the question at the moment is how much, short of war, is a man or a woman a citizen first and a sportsman second?

Since the first shock of Afghanistan, the pros and cons of boycotting the Olympics have been gone into by more people than indignant citizens and simple sportsmen and the interested parties go beyond politicians and the Olympic authorities and, at the moment, they are deeply divided but fairly forthright about what they believe.

The Wall Street Journal, which has a knack for spotting the complexity of an issue early on, has thrown the question at about 50 executives, many of them, frankly, with business interests in the games, as, for instance, the broadcasting network which stands to lose an estimated $30 million in profits, a San Francisco company which is making the athletes uniforms, a canteen corporation that's shipping the food, a computer service corporation, a beer firm, the company that has a contract to supply over $15 million worth of video broadcasting equipment. They're already deeply involved, since the government has licensed the equipment for export, some of it's gone off and been paid for, but the rest could be stopped.

Now you can imagine that many firms, makers of sweaters and footballs, food containers, track shoes, all the other necessities that the Russians evidently preferred to buy here, many firms are already working overtime to get the stuff overseas before the president stops them. But the surprising, to me surprising, result of this survey is that of the 50 presidents, vice-presidents, other top executives of all these busy and involved companies, of the 50, only four are inclined now to pull out of the Moscow Olympics. That shouldn't, by any means, imply that the other 46 are all for going ahead, the overwhelming majority of them either refused to say anything or said flatly it was up to the government. Not one of them, so far as I can discover, came out with the argument that sports and politics are separate issues. In fact, the vice-president of the athletic uniform company put that simple, popular issue succinctly, 'We', he said, 'we support the principle of the Olympic Games but we also support our foreign policy. I think sport should be free of politics but that's not a realistic position.'

And outside the businessmen are the athletes themselves and their trainers. And, just now anyway, they are sending up an SOS with a marvellous indifference to the politics of the situation or even, some of them who've been questioned with only the very haziest idea of where Afghanistan is, they are letting off such hurt cries as, 'What are they doing to us? I've been working my tail off for four years for Moscow! All my family's money, loans from promoters have gone into my training, I can't just check out now!'

And then there's a sportsmen's argument which grows more popular by the minute among athletes. It goes like this, 'It would be madness to withdraw from Moscow. What could be a better lesson to the Russians than for our boys to go in there with a new incentive and beat the pants off the Ruskies. Remember what happened to Hitler and Jesse Owens?'

Well, that reminder goes back to the most memorable moment, certainly the most famous bit of newsreel, to come out of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin when Jesse Owens, an American and a black man, having won the long or broad jump and then won the 200 metres and then the 100 metres, came flashing through the tape to the roar of thousands of obedient Germans as their Fuhrer was seen to turn in disgust and frustration in his box and walk out to spare himself the supreme embarrassment of congratulating a black man on his brilliant conquest of the master race.***

I can see that many an American athlete, a demon for practice and discipline but rather vague about whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, might dream of the moment that he limps, weighed down with gold medals, up to Mr Brezhnev as the Soviet athletes skulk and hang their heads. It's a pretty picture and undoubtedly its moral would not be lost on the millions of people who saw it around the world IF only the Americans have duly supplied all the necessary broadcast equipment.

But, to put it mildly, this is pretty unrealistic too, considering how the Russians have been doing in the recent Olympics. No doubt the White House has been bombarded with telephone calls from every sporting lobby in the United States.

The President's instinct from his first threat of a boycott was to leave the decision open so he would not look foolish and the United States would not appear vengeful IF the Russians, sometime between now and the spring, retire from Afghanistan. Worse, if they managed to prove to the satisfaction of the world outside America and the Soviet Union that there had been American meddling in Afghanistan or that the Afghan refugees in Pakistan had been encouraged to fight in defence of the border by the United States.

So much can happen, so much can come out about the origins of the Afghan war between now and spring, so many large and seemingly magnanimous gestures are open to the Russians that Mr Carter could, well, he could have lost more than face if he first announced a boycott and then waited two or three months before saying that he'd changed his mind again about Soviet aims and strategy and was willing to forgive and forget and go to Moscow after all.

In the meantime, the White House is looking into other matters to try and calculate what sort of sanctions, punishments are likely to hurt the Soviets most.

The New York Times now contends that to withhold from them the means of producing oil and natural gas would only aggravate the world's energy shortage, that it could force the Soviet Union to become an oil importing country and thus remove from the world market between three and five million barrels a day within the decade which, the Times said, would be the equivalent of losing all Iran's production and thus threatening American security as well as its economy.

The Times suggests that instead of punishing the Russians by curbing their oil, life could be made very much harder for them if America stopped building them aluminium smelters and, particularly, if it banned the export of commercial computers.

Well, the White House is at the moment reviewing this field in the belief that denying the Russians what we call 'high technology' might be more painful, more crippling, even than cutting their meat supply through the recent ban on grain or even more humiliating than withdrawing from the Olympics.

***This much-repeated version of events at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is now accepted as a myth; Hitler did not walk out as Owens won, and there is no newsreel tape showing this.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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