My Olympics rankings: Los Angeles No. 3
BEIJING -- I confess that I'm biased. How could I not like an Olympics in which I slept in my own bed, ate meals at home and had my own newspaper delivered to my driveway each morning?
It was my first Olympics for the Los Angeles Times. I was proud of being part of the special section we produced each day, one that for years -- while newspapers still had enough pages and money -- was considered the standard for sports departments in subsequent host cities.
The 1984 Summer Olympics were flawed by the Soviet boycott. The Soviets claimed they were concerned about security. Two years later, when I was in Moscow for the Goodwill Games, the head of Soviet sport, Marat Gramov, told a small group of Western reporters that security had nothing to do it with it.
He said the Soviets had boycotted in retaliation for Jimmy Carter's decision not to send a team to Moscow for the 1980 Games. He also said the Soviets wouldn't have boycotted if Yuri Andropov had remained in power. But he died in February and the new regime made the decision in May to remain home.
Despite the absence of the Soviet bloc, many of the athletes who were there are considered among the best ever: Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, Mary Lou Retton, Sebastian Coe, Edwin Moses, Joan Benoit, Cheryl Miller, Evelyn Ashford, Michael Gross ... etc., etc. Steffi Graf was there as a 15-year-old, participating in tennis as a demonstration sport. Another teenager there was swimmer Dara Torres, who is still competing, and winning medals, in the Olympics at 41.
The Olympic movement is still affected positively by the LA. Games. Peter Ueberroth, as president of the organizing committee, established the marketing plan that has, along with television revenue, financed the International Olympic Committee ever since. Ueberroth today is president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Two other members of the organizing committee, Anita DeFrantz and Jim Easton, are IOC members.
The Games also were an inspiration to a generation of young people. Just the other day, one of the equestrian medalists from Davis, Calif., said she knew after seeing the 1984 Games that she wanted to be an Olympian. Marion Jones of Thousand Oaks said the same thing a few years ago, although that didn't turn out so well for her or for the Olympics.
On a more positive note, the Williams sisters began playing tennis in a program in Compton financed by the L.A. Amateur Athletic Foundation, which received its seed money from surplus generated by the L.A. Olympics.
Next: Sydney, 2000
-- Randy Harvey
Past Olympic picks:
Moscow, Athens, Seoul, Montreal, Atlanta
Photo: At the start of the 1984 Olympics, after climbing 99 steps from the Coliseum floor and igniting the caldron, Rafer Johnson stops to reflect. Credit: Los Angeles Times
