Olympic Flame

The head of the U.S. Olympic Committee vowed yesterday that there won't be a repeat of the flag-waving display that embarrassed American officials four years ago in Sydney. During the 2000 Games in Australia, bare-chested members of the winning men's 400-meter relay team wrapped themselves in the flag and clowned on the victory stand during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner. " U.S. officials cringed, worried that it sent the wrong message to a global television audience.

Chinese officials say they are tackling the Olympian problem of product piracy, and in one area, they have made noticeable headway: Very few vendors in China sell fake trinkets, T-shirts or knickknacks related to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Markets here brim with phony Gucci handbags, bogus Burberry coats, knockoff Nikes, and pirated DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters. But vendors who hawk pirated Olympics merchandise do so furtively. Authorities offer a simple, if not entirely plausible, explanation.

Gil Hanse has spent nearly 20 years keeping a low profile heading a small Chester County golf course architecture company. He liked that his course designs spoke for him. He liked being on a bulldozer moving ground at a project while listening to the Grateful Dead or Dave Matthews more than being recognized in a crowd. But Hanse's cover has been blown. The Rio 2016 Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games selected Hanse Golf Course Design to create the layout where men and women will participate in the first golf competition at the Olympic Games since 1904.

SILENT GESTURE, that's what Tommie Smith had in mind when his wife bought the black gloves in Mexico City. Then he won the 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympics and he slithered his hand into the right glove and handed the left glove to John Carlos, who had finished third. Silent gesture, indeed. No punches thrown, no bullets fired, no blood shed. Kaboom! Only trigger-quick punishment and the mushroom cloud of controversy and bitterness and anger that hovers to this day. Two black athletes on the victory stand, shoeless, a clenched fist thrust into the Mexico City dusk, heads down while the anthem played.

With a send-off that was schmaltzy, spectacular and as good-spirited as the rest of these Oi! Oi! Oi! Olympics, the lights finally went out last night on a Summer Games that set the bar remarkably high for future host cities. "Sydney, you have presented to the world the best Olympic Games ever," Juan Antonio Samaranch, the International Olympic Committee president, told a proudly ecstatic crowd of 110,000 in Olympic Stadium. When he oversaw the handoff of the five-ringed Olympic flag from Sydney to Athens, where the Games will revisit their birthplace in 2004, Samaranch's official IOC duties ended.

The boxer who won Olympic gold half a lifetime ago, the North Philly basketball star who's on her way to Atlanta, the South Philly activist who left his big-bucks marketing job to teach school - these and other heroes past, present and ordinary - yesterday brought the Olympic flame from the foot of the Statue of Liberty to a later-than-expected arrival at the top of the Art Museum steps. When the torch was finally carried up the museum steps about 12:15 this morning by basketball star Dawn Staley, it signaled the end of the flame's daylong procession - which began in the hands of a TV-show host in New York City and, via a succession of torchbearers, wound its way through central New Jersey under gray, threatening skies.

After five days of rumor, innuendo, carping, harping, backbiting, backstabbing, lobbying, campaigning, there is still no answer to the Olympic question that seems to have been burning longer than the Olympic flame: Will Carl Lewis run for the United States tonight in the men's 4x100 relay? Maybe NBC can answer that. Maybe Nike can answer that. But no U.S. coach can answer it, no runner, no official, nobody. Everybody was being coy yesterday. There would be an answer by evening, U.S. men's team coach Erv Hunt said.

Pernell "Sweetpea" Whitaker scored two second-round knockdowns and landed a withering series of punches to stop Miguel Santana in the sixth round and win the U.S. Boxing Association lightweight title yesterday in Norfolk, Va. Referee Al Rothenberg stopped the fight at 1 minute, 10 seconds of the round as the crowd at the Scope roared with approval for the home-town winner. Whitaker, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist who had entered the fight as the reigning North American Boxing Federation lightweight titleholder, ran his record to 14-0.

About three hours after the Olympic flame is lighted here this afternoon, the U.S. Olympic hockey team is expected to torch an overmatched team from Austria. And the optimism will begin. Although U.S. coach Dave Peterson is preaching caution, there appears to be little question that the U.S. team, which will rely heavily on the play of defenseman and captain Brian Leetch and a balanced offense, will win tonight. "They have a lot of guys who can play," Peterson said of the Austrian team, which relies on six Austro-Canadians, including forward Robin Sandler, a first-round draft pick of the Montreal Canadiens in 1976.

What would William Faulkner, the Mississippi-born writer who won a Nobel Prize by turning an unflinching eye on the changing soul of the South, think of all this? Cast an eye across Atlanta, with a sparkling-as-new skyline that seems cut out and pasted against the intense blue of a summer sky. At the top of a 67-story glass cylinder hotel straddling Peachtree Ridge, the bar revolves, and for the price of a drink one can look down on the glitz, glitter and garishness the Centennial Olympic Games have brouyht to this city.