Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  “Let’s face it,” he said. “This isn’t the Olympics, it’s the Eastern European Games. Look at this … fences, security checks going in and out … I went through nine of them on one trip the other day.

  “This is all supposed to be for friendship between athletes, right? The other night a bloke from Zimbabwe was visiting us in our quarters, and the guard made him leave. He said that athletes aren’t allowed to go from block to block. At other Olympics you always were able to dance at the disco with some of the girls who worked as guides or translators, but they’ve forbidden them here. One night I went in there and saw blokes dancing with blokes.”

  As the competition progressed, I thought of something a Polish boxing coach had told me. “Don’t get too ambitious about winning medals here. The Russians are unbeatable at home.” He sounded like someone talking about playing Alabama in Tuscaloosa when Bear Bryant was coaching or playing the Broncos at Mile High. The Russians had organized a highly efficient Olympic package, but hanging over everything was the pervasive smell of home cooking. I began to keep a record of protest, of things that weren’t exactly right, both in and out of the arena. I called my collection, “Olympic Outtakes,” and although I knew they’d never see the light of day in SI, at least their compilation made me feel better.

  Romania accused the Russians of rigging the scoring system and ganging up on their prize Olympian, little Nadia Comaneci, the gymnast, the star of Montreal. “It was an arrangement to ensure a Soviet winner,” reported the Romanian Communist Party newspaper, Scinteia, under a headline that screamed, “They Stole Her Medal!” East Germany complained that a do-over gave Russian diver Aleksandr Portnov an extra attempt, whereas their own Falk Hoffmann was denied one under exactly the same circumstances. The track was where the strongest protests erupted.

  Triple jumpers Juan Carlos de Oliveira of Brazil and Ian Campbell of Australia, who were expected to mount the most serious challenges to the Russians, were called for fouls on nine of their 12 final jumps. The Australians sent a letter of complaint to the IAAF after the Russian officials ruled that Campbell had dragged his foot on the step part on what would have been a winning effort. British track people viewed the videotape of the jump and rushed to his defense, saying there had been no foul at all, and besides, how could someone possibly drag his foot on the explosive thump that marks the step on a world class triple jump?

  The Finns said the Russians opened the gates for their javelin man, creating a helpful updraft. The British press reviewed replays of Yuriy Sedykh’s world record hammer throw and reported that they showed he clearly stepped over the line. The Cubans complained that phony measuring cost their discus man, Luis Delis, a gold medal. England’s decathlon champion, Daley Thompson, laughed when he discussed how the deck had been stacked against him — wet circle to throw out of in the discus, the circle being scrupulously dried off when the Russians threw. Each Russian high jump and pole vault effort was replayed on the scoreboard screen, an on-the-spot coaching aid denied everyone else. Everyone questioned the curious seeding and lane assignments that awarded the Russians the inside lane three out of four times the 1,600-meter relay was run in heats and final. Complaints came pouring in after a qualifying throw by the eventual javelin winner, Russia’s Dainis Kula, was allowed after it landed hindsight first.

  International Amateur Athletics Association president, Adriaan Paulen, kept his inspectors off the track and left things solely up to the Russians. Privately, IAAF officials said Paulen was trying to wrap up the Russian vote for the day when he came up for reelection later in the year. The GDR amateur athletic head, George Wieczek, stormed out of one of Paulen’s meetings.

  “This is false, absolutely false,” he said. Paulen broke down and sent his inspectors, himself included, out onto the track. The first cheater they caught was Russian pole vaulter Sergei Kulibaba, who was flashing signals to a teammate. And he was doing it in front of the 77-year-old Paulen himself.

  “It wasn’t only him — they all did it,” said the winner Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz of Poland, and that accusation was backed up by Sweden’s Miro Zalar. “The officials, too. They were holding up flags to show Russian vaulters how the wind was blowing.” Kulibaba and the forty thieves.

  Not since London in 1908, when anti-American sentiment overwhelmed the competition and caused British judges to practically carry Italian marathoner Dorando Pietri over the finish line in order to beat America’s Johnny Hayes, had there been such sustained and widespread criticism of the officiating. But why should the Russians, who knew they’d dominate the games, with America and West Germany and so many other nations out of the competition, have to cheat to pile up even more medals? Their overall medal total was topped only once, when the United States ran the table in the backyard Olympics of 1904 in St. Louis. I can only repeat that these seemed to be an overwhelming love of things massive. More, we must have still more medals.

  Maybe they felt that in some way it compensated for the $200 million the country lost in expected tourist revenue that never materialized. Or the cost of importing Beaujolais from France or butter and jam from Hungary for the press dining room, so we would all write about the glorious food and drink — which, of course, would disappear like a mirage once the games ended. Or the cost of making sure the city was sanitized and swept clean of undesirables. Who ever heard of taking a bus to a 103,000-seat stadium half an hour before the competition started and arriving in plenty of time? But that’s what deserted streets will do for you. Which could be laid in part to the cost of bringing in elite security forces from all 11 time zones of the empire. One afternoon a photographer of ours who spoke Russian asked a security officer for directions to the boxing arena.

  “I don’t know. I’m not from here,” he told him.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Siberia.”

  Muscovites, who were brave enough to talk freely, admitted that the loss of revenue was a very big concern, hardly justified by the harvest of medals.

  “Very few of us care anything about the Olympic Games,” said a professor’s wife with whom I talked. “Tourists and journalists come here and they see clean streets and new paint and no traffic. They see all the gold medals the Russians have won. What they don’t see is all the lies. The lies.

  “We have heard that the funding for the games was taken from the budget, particularly the budget for hospitals. We watched the opening ceremonies on TV, and my friend said, ‘There goes another wing on the children’s ward, there goes an X-ray machine.’”

  Western journalists were seduced by the pseudo-comfort, the special food, the precision with which the buses and subways ran and the events were organized, a direct contrast to the sloppiness of Montreal. But they couldn’t help feeling the antiseptic quality of these games, a lack of spontaneity. Athletes who wanted to run a victory lap had to break away from security guards. And here and there, when you turned a wrong corner, you could run into something embarrassing. A wrong turn on the way to opening ceremonies would put you on a street where hundreds of policemen, stretching for miles, stood three feet apart from each other. Or when you came back you might run into a convoy of nearly 100 military trucks, each one packed with the soldiers who had put on a series of card stunts in the stadium half an hour previously. Toy soldiers back in their boxes.

  If you wanted to get out of the journalists’ E-Section, if you wanted to talk to someone in the stands, you met with polite but firm resistance. “Journalists are not permitted to leave their section.” Athletes and coaches were similarly confined to their F-Section. A little Yugoslavian track coach named Daniel Korica began referring to himself as “The Prisoner of F.” I overheard a conversation in which a couple of U.S. journalists, who had never covered an Olympics, were remarking about the efficiency and organization. An old timer overheard it, too, and interrupted the conversation with, “Yes, and Berlin ran a very efficient Olympics in 1936.”

  I reme
mber something the dissident writer, Vasily Aksyonov, had to say before he was expelled from the country.

  “Four years ago when Moscow was chosen for the Olympics, we thought there would be a fraud when the time came, but we expected a fraud of false liberty and false relaxation. We hoped the authorities would arrange a kind of ‘Swinging Moscow’ for three weeks. We never wanted the paramilitary curfew you see in the streets now, or this big clean up and Moscow artificially emptied.”

  By the time the games were in their second week, a sense of ennui was settling over the journalistic community. It seemed that every time you turned on a TV set Russia was playing Bulgaria in something. One day in the press lounge, a few of us were having a drink and in the background was the constant drone of the TV set with its daily Olympic coverage. Suddenly everyone’s eyes became fixed on the screen. The bartender had switched channels, and now there was a children’s program.

  Pro Krasniyu Shapitschku. Little Red Riding Hood. We watched it to the end.

  A week before the closing ceremony, I finally got a real, honest to goodness, serious assignment from Sports Illustrated. It ended up as something that has stayed with me for many years and even now sets off a whole spectrum of mixed emotions. Vasily Alekseyev, Russia’s two-time super heavyweight lifting champion, the strongest man in history, was making a comeback at 38. Nobody knew how he would do. He had been out of competition for a while, supposedly nursing a bad hip. He hadn’t been seen. But if he wanted to compete, he would have to lift the Olympic qualifying weight.

  A few days before the Olympics began, he walked into the Izmailovo Sport Palace, lifted the qualifying weight rather easily and left the hall. He was enormous. He weighed 379 pounds, which would have made him the heaviest man to ever to step on the platform. He said, “I will be lighter for the competition.”

  Alekseyev had been a favorite subject for Sports Illustrated through the years. My assignment — cover Alekseyev on championship night. Win or lose, he would be my story. Fine with me.

  I was told that the Russian weightlifting federation actually had a PR office, which was practically unheard of over there. Their idea of PR usually involved the phrase, “No one is permitted …” But I found it, and it was nothing like what I had expected. Once upon a time, theatrical booking offices in Tin Pan Alley might have looked like that. It had a homey feel, pictures of famous wrestlers and lifters on the wall, a large cluttered desk, a few chairs, including an overstuffed one in the corner, a big couch, which contained, when I showed up, a British journalist fast asleep. Another one was in the big armchair, thumbing through a weightlifting magazine. He had the cauliflower ears of a wrestler. The sleeper showed a massive expanse of chest. They were typical of a certain breed of English writers, people who had once participated in the sport they covered. And they had made themselves right at home in the office of Aleksandr Gavrilovets, who was seated at the desk.

  His official title was director of international sports writers commission of weight lifting. Actually he was more of an information director … I hesitate to use the phrase PR man because he was more than that. He was a person who knew what was what. Late 30s, maybe early 40s, dark, good looking, he wore a navy blue pinstriped suit giving him a polished, Western look. I introduced myself and told him what my assignment was.

  “The big guy, huh?” he said, in perfect English. I was thinking what an unexpected way it was for him to put it. The English writer/weightlifter who’d been sleeping, awoke and got up. “Be back later, Alex,” he said, and Gavrilovets waved as he left. He blew out his breath.

  “He’s not going to do anything, you know.” he said. “He’s not in condition.” I was surprised for the second time. This is not the way Russian federation directors talk about their world class athletes. I told him I had to write about Alekseyev, win or lose. He nodded.

  “And I imagine you’ll want to talk to him afterward.” I said I would. He thought about it for a minute.

  “All right, here’s what you do,” he said. “As soon as he’s out of the competition, come down to the entrance to the dressing room. Don’t wait to see who wins. Come right away. I’ll meet you there and I’ll see what I can do.” I thanked him.

  I don’t know how weightlifting fans are the world over, but the ones in the gray concrete hall called the Izmailovo Palace of Sport that Wednesday night were rough. Weightlifters, if you don’t know it, just don’t come back. The last superheavyweight lifter to make a successful comeback was Samson. The training is too intense. The muscles must be in a constant state of awareness. They don’t just retire to their dacha for a couple of years, say, “Now it’s time to regain my title,” and pick up where they left off.

  When Alekseyev, lighter, as he had predicted at 357, walked out onto the platform, rubbing his hands in front of him — his heavy brows drawn together like those of the famed Cossack chieftan, Stenka Razin — the crown let out a cheer, broken by occasional shouts of “My s’toboi!” We’re with you!

  Twelve minutes later he was finished, the jeers and whistles growing louder and more raucous on each of the three times he failed to get the weight above his head. At one time a shout was heard above the others, and our Russian-speaking photographer shook his head.

  “Brutal, just brutal,” he said.

  “What did the guy yell, Jerry?” I asked him.

  “He yelled, ‘You’ll make a lot of sausages, Alekseyev!’”

  I watched Alekseyev leave the arena to the jeering and I was out of the stands and down to the dressing room entrance. Aleksandr Gavrilovets was already there. “Not now,” he said. “The brass is in there.”

  Again I was struck by his unusual terminology — unusual for a Russian. The door opened, and two serious-faced, middle-aged men walked out. “Now,” said Gavrilovets.

  Alekseyev was slumped against the wall, the sweat pouring off him. Gavrilovets translated for me.

  “The world has not seen the end of Alekseyev,” he said. “You will see. Let them whistle. I’m not finished.” He went on in this vein for a while and then excused himself to take a shower. Then it dawned on me … I had gotten him by myself. I had everything I needed. I was finished. It was a wrap. Write the scene, the jeers, the big guy and his quotes, watch the end to see who wins. All I had to do was get it down. My God, this guy had done everything for me, set everything up, and it was a negative angle at that. How could I thank him? I started to.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “You’ll excuse me … I have to be back out there.”

  So I wrote my story, and it got decent play, and I couldn’t get Aleksandr Gavrilovets out of my mind. Who ever heard of getting that kind of help at those Olympics? A couple of days later, I spotted him in the bar at the Rossiya. He was having a drink with a couple of writers. I waited until he was finished. I had to thank him properly this time. I watched him. There was just something … my antennae were tingling. He’s not one of them. I just knew it. Not one of them.

  I had felt that way on rare occasions in the past. I had felt it with Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Redskins. He isn’t what he pretends to be. I looked at him carefully. Gavrilovets, Gavrilovets. That wasn’t a Russian name. The writers said good bye, and he got up to leave and I went over.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I said. He said, sure.

  “I want to thank you for what you did for me,” I said. He waved it away.

  “It was nothing,” he said.

  “You didn’t have to do it … it was very kind of you,” I said.

  “That’s all right.”

  I was delaying what I wanted to ask him. I knew it. He was NOT one of them.

  Gavrilovets … Gavrilovets … he looked, well, could be Russian, could be anything.

  “Are you Jewish?” I asked him. He let his breath out slowly and looked down at his hands. I hadn’t asked Cooke that question, but after interviewing him one afternoon, I
asked Mo Siegel, the Washington columnist and a friend of Cooke.

  “Now why would you ever ask that?” Siegel said in his Atlanta drawl.

  “I just feel it, Mo,” I told him. “My antennae are telling me.”

  “Well, you’re very perceptive,” he said. “His mother was Jewish. Name of Jacobs. From South Africa.”

  Finally Aleksandr Gavrilovets looked up at me. “You would not be helping me if you pursue this topic,” he said slowly. I told him it was already forgotten. I could feel a deep, overwhelming sadness coming over me. I feel it again right now.

  “Some day, someplace else,” I said, “maybe we could sit down and have a long talk.”

  “I’d like that very much,” he said.

  It hasn’t happened. Maybe some day it will. I think about him quite often.

  The coda to this final Olympic odyssey of mine came at the Moscow airport. I had a bunch of confidential papers, addresses of refuseniks I had met, things they had given me to give to different organizations in the U.S., the kind of stuff I assumed would be of interest to Russian customs officials at the airport. And there would be no way they would find them. I was taking back one large suitcase that would be checked through and an open carry-bag that had my Olympic stuff, statistics, notes I had taken on various events. I mixed the papers in with my notes on the swimming results that were next to the track and boxing statistics.

  The customs official was a woman in her late 30s perhaps, attractive but cold looking with intelligent blue eyes. I put both bags on the counter for her to inspect. She checked the big one and pushed it along without opening it. She stared at the carry bag for a moment, looked me in the eyes and pointed to the pile of event statistics, signaling me to bring them out. I did. She ruffled the pages, stopping at the swimming. She looked at each one of my carefully hidden secret notes, studied them, stared at me again and signaled me to return them to the bag and move along. She had told me without wasting a single word:

  “You can hide nothing. I can find whatever I want. What’s more, I don’t care about any of it.”