As we watch the Olympic Games this year, some of us oldsters lament a sort of innocence and sense of wonder that has been lost in the past half-century.
The first cross-oceanic Summer Olympic TV coverage with abundant portions aired live via satellite was in 1972 in Munich, and they proved almost unbelievably tragic (a massacre of Israeli athletes) and controversial (the Soviet basketball team being given three chances to score the winning points for the gold medal over the U.S. squad). There was a sense of sporting innocence shattered, on live TV from across the globe. But to be shattered, the innocence had to be there to start with.
In 1972, all the free-world Olympic athletes were, in actual fact, amateurs. Some were already somewhat famous, but there was a real sense of young people competing for pure love of sport while struggling to make ends meet. There was far less glam and glitter than there is today, and concomitantly far more room for endearing quirkiness.
Today’s swimmers, for instance, shave every 100th of a second off their times with scientifically designed suits, head caps, hairless torsos, and the like. In 1972, though, Mark Spitz won a then-almost-unimaginable seven gold medals while sporting a mod mustache that surely added dreaded nanoseconds to swims. In track, in what still may be the most stunning come-from-behind performance in Olympic history, American Dave Wottle wore a wide-brimmed golf hat — surely an aerodynamic hindrance! — while winning the 800-meter race.
Then there was the Cold War backdrop, despite which Americans showed then what seems rare now, which is that we could separate the athletes from the politics. This was a time when most Americans really feared the Soviet Union would nuke us to oblivion. Still, when the pixieish Belarusian Olga Korbut performed with stunning grace in gymnastics, she became a widely admired sensation here in the United States.
Nineteen years later, it should be noted, Korbut emigrated to the U.S. and is now a citizen. The earlier innocence was rewarded with redemptive freedom. Can this year’s Olympics begin a storyline just as good?