My Olympics rankings: Montreal No. 7

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BEIJING -- I apologize in advance to the Quebecois.

Somebody had to be No. 7. If it makes you feel any better, you were far ahead of No. 8 Atlanta.

Montreal in 1976 was the first Summer Olympics I covered. Beijing will be my ninth.

I learned a lot there about covering Olympic sports. First, I should know something about them before writing about them. Nadia Comaneci was a revelation to most of us in the mainstream media covering those Games. She shouldn’t have been.

Former gymnast Cathy Rigby lectured us one night after another Comaneci 10 about how we should have done our homework. Comaneci startled no one who actually had paid attention to gymnastics for the previous couple of years.

I was working for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1976. But I was outside the L.A. Times office one day when Jim Murray received a call from his sports editor, Bill Shirley, asking him to interview Comaneci.

‘Are you serious, Bill?’’ Murray asked. ‘She’s a 14-year-old Romanian girl with pigtails who plays with dolls and speaks no English. It would be like interviewing Rin Tin Tin.’’

I also met Red Smith, the extraordinary New York Times sports columnist, for the first time in Montreal. We rode in a car together out to see Princess Anne in the dressage competition. If anyone from the U.S. media corps could have gotten an interview with HRH, it would have been Red. I tagged along as he tried. But he was rebuffed.

He had more influence on the Olympic movement a couple of years later when he recommended that the United States boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The Carter White House saw the column, thought it was a grand idea and boycotted.

Besides Comaneci, my best memories of athletes in Montreal are of Sugar Ray Leonard, Teofilo Stevenson, the Spinks brothers, Alberto Juantorena, Edwin Moses, Bruce Jenner and Esther Roth, the Israeli high hurdler whose coach was murdered in the Munich massacre. She became Israel’s first Olympic finalist and finished sixth.

Because of the Munich tragedy, there was, for the first time in the Olympics, very tight security, with barbed wire and armed guards surrounding the athletes’ village in Montreal.

It also was the first Olympics with stringent drug testing. It should have been more so. The U.S. women swimmers complained incessantly about the East Germans. Many of the East German women had deep voices, one sign of anabolic steroid use. When the East German coach heard that, he laughed and said, ‘We’re here to swim, not sing.’’

I wish we had listened to the U.S. swimmers instead of painting them as sore losers. It turned out years later that they were correct when it was revealed how pervasive the state-supported drug program had been in East Germany.

There also was a boycott, though not as extensive as those in ’80 and ‘84, when African nations chose not to compete in Montreal because of a New Zealand rugby tour of South Africa.

I wouldn’t say I was an Olympic cynic when I left Montreal, but I had plenty to think about.

Next: Seoul.

-- Randy Harvey