The Longform Guide to the Olympics

?I arrived at the big stadium early for Wednesday?s 10 a.m. memorial service, after passing en route a number of basketball players working out on a practice court. The Duke of Edinburgh had arrived early, too, I learned. About two thousand chairs had been set up in the field for athletes, though there were four times that number of athletes within walking distance of the spot. The flags, of course, were at half staff?they remained that way for a mere twenty-four hours?but the Olympic torch had not been dimmed, and the big question on many minds was: With the flame already extinguished figuratively, would Brundage and his I.O.C. douse it literally and end the competitions? The only sign of sport in the stadium was one steeplechase hurdle, at the water hazard over which the sensational Kenyan runner Kipchoge Keino had blithely glided to win a gold medal on Monday, which seemed aeons ago. The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra was on hand to open the proceedings with the Funeral March from Beethoven?s ?Eroica? Symphony. At nine-thirty-five, the athletes began to appear?wearing their team blazers but without flags or other national symbols?some marching in formation, some drifting in casually. Soon all the seats reserved for them were filled; what was left of the Israeli team sat up forward, directly in front of the speakers? stand. The Israelis were easy to spot, because of their white yarmulkes, but it was hard to identify many of the others. The electronic scoreboards were blank; their computers had not been programmed for this kind of happening. (So inflexible are these swift machines, we learned yesterday, that the names of the Israeli athletes who were killed will nonetheless appear on future starting lists of competitors?with ?Not Present? after them. Klein?s office has explained, ?We ask you to accept this as a technical necessity, and not as a lack of reverence.? When you can?t remove dead men from a lineup, there must be something wrong with the system.)?

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