When the announcement came, it was sudden, unexpected, devastating. Two and a half hours after the transcontinental Olympic torch relay got under way in New York City on the drizzly morning of May 8—the first of the festivities leading up to the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics on July 28—the Soviet Union declared that it was pulling out of the Games. By week's end the U.S.S.R. had been joined in its boycott by Bulgaria, East Germany, Vietnam, Mongolia, Czechoslovakia, Laos, and Afghanistan; Hungary, Poland, Cuba and North Korea were expected to follow suit. And the 1984 Games were rapidly becoming just another event on this summer's sports calendar.
Three days after the Soviets stunned the world, the president of the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee, Peter V. Ueberroth—normally cautious in diplomatic matters—had had about enough. He was ready to say what he thought.
In a remarkable survey of the scene for correspondents gathered for a breakfast briefing at the Bel Air Sands Hotel near the UCLA campus, Ueberroth said he felt Soviet leader Konstantin U. Chernenko was "not too dissimilar" in some respects from Jimmy Carter, father of the 1980 Moscow Olympic boycott. Both, he suggested, were political hacks who could think of nothing better in the way of foreign policy initiatives than to go after the Games. And Chernenko had the added incentive of revenge. He'd sat at the side of the late Leonid Brezhnev when Carter was pushing his boycott, trying to ruin Moscow's Olympics.
"Here's a man who has just finally gotten in power," Ueberroth said of the 72-year-old Chernenko. "He has just solidified...all the right titles and all the right positions, and people are saying, 'O.K., world affairs? Let's see, here you are now, you're in charge. Let's see your action.' And he looks at the problems the Russians are facing...and here are the Olympic Games. I mean, that's a fairly vulnerable item. And just whack at it."
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