They Knew How to Keep Track of the Latest News

Our government spends--what?--billions on espionage? I mean, spies, satellites, moles, the CIA, the FBI, wire taps, covert operations, electronic surveillance, ships off the coast, secret documents, false passports. You name it.

Bah!

All they have to do is debrief our track and field athletes.

You know the breakup of the Iron Curtain bloc we’ve been reading about for weeks now? Caught our government by surprise, did it?

Not Jeff Atkinson, the miler. Hardly any of the high jumpers, long jumpers, pole vaulters, discus throwers and low hurdlers.

You see, they could see it coming without going anywhere in false whiskers, tapping phone lines, bribing a guard or even leveling a telescope across a barbed-wire fence.

All they had to do was say out loud, “Hey, Ivan, feel like going out for a Coke?” Or, “Say, Greta, how’s about we go shopping for a pair of designer jeans together?”

When they got the answer, “Sure!” they knew the Berlin Wall was coming down. Followed shortly by the Iron Curtain. They knew it when the athletes from the socialist strand of countries started to act like people instead of robots. They didn’t need coded messages, dead-letter drops from agents in place. All they needed was a smile--and a rock record.

You know, when the Soviet Union first rejoined the Olympic movement in 1952, they really didn’t. They were an island in the middle of the Olympic ideal. Their athletes were sealed off in their own dormitories. They were escorted everywhere by KGB heavies. Their quarters were off-limits to western athletes, journalists, even officials. They were never part of the camaraderie. Even in their home country, in the Moscow Olympics, soldiers with submachine guns stood guard over their facilities. They were in the Olympics but not of it.

So, Atkinson, who is one of our better milers, comes off like 007 James Bond in a track suit. “It was in Tokyo, we began to notice it. The Eastern athletes were, all of a sudden, all over the hotels. We went bowling with them, had Cokes with them. You exchanged rings, swapped clothes. And without reprisals. They tell me that in past years when swapping went on, their officers made them return all the clothing and then kept them under guard the rest of the trips.

“We knew something was up when they began to mingle.”

Jeff should have wired his government’s embassy in East Berlin: “Take a look out the window, our intelligence indicates guys will soon be on it with jackhammers.” He could have predicted Hungary was going western by the attitude of the female hurdlers.

When it happened over there, it was like the spring breakup on the Yukon. But Jeff--and the rest of our traveling troupe of athletes--were less surprised than the State Department.

For Atkinson and the rest of America’s Olympians, the news is all good for another non-political reason. The fall of the state dictatorships may mean a significant decrease in the cheating going on--a decline in the use of performance-enhancing drugs, blood doping and other win-at-all-costs tactics. The state will feel it has less of a vested interest in victory and turn the Games back into sports and not political skirmishes.

“To me,” Atkinson said, “it was like putting on roller skates. Not a part of the purpose of sport, at all. It was taking an extraordinary risk for a very small reward. I like to think it will disappear with the Wall.”

Jeff Atkinson was something of an international surprise himself. A one-time cross-country runner from Stanford with only so-so credentials, he startled the world of track and field in 1988 when he not only made the Olympic team in the 1,500 meters but won the trial. “I was a slow, shuffling 10K-type of runner,” he said. “My average 10,000 was 30 minutes, then I found I was running two miles in 9:06. I thought, whoa, I might be concentrating on the wrong event. Besides, as a miler, I could make the traveling squad. As a long-distance runner, I couldn’t.”

He found he liked being what he called a “mid-foot” runner--”All the great long-distance runners like Frank Shorter are toe runners.” He also liked being able to utilize a kick, or a late-race sprint, at which he found out he excelled.

All his years of long-distance running, he put to good use. Fifteen-hundred meters was like a day in the park after years of 20,000. His progress was steady but not spectacular, hampered by kneecap tears, but he set a program for himself that called for: “The (Olympic) Trials in ‘84, the team in ‘88, the medal in ’92.”

So far, he is right on schedule. He made the trials in Los Angeles but rapped out in the heats. He not only made the trials in Indianapolis in ‘88, he won. He made the finals at Seoul, and his 10th place was not so bad as it seemed. He was second in a heat to the eventual winner, Peter Rono. He was fifth in the semifinal, and his finish was due to a rash but understandable piece of strategy. “I could have finished fifth if I had run conservatively but I moved up to take on Rono because, in an Olympics, if you don’t medal, it doesn’t matter where you finish.”

America’s performance in the Olympic metric mile has been a sorry one. We have not won this race since 1908. We have sent world record-holders to the Games, we have sent world-class milers by the dozen, but we have managed only three second places in 80 years--Abel Kiviat, Glenn Cunningham and Jim Ryun.

Atkinson will be 29 in the Barcelona Olympics. It is an age at which, in the old days, Olympic-class runners in this country would have long since given up their skivvies for a three-piece suit and a briefcase and a seat on the 8:02 commuter. But our athletes no longer have to quit just as they’re coming into their own.

Atkinson’s campaign for the ’92 Olympics will kick off in the 31st annual Sunkist Invitational meet at the Sports Arena on Jan. 19, when he will not only be meeting one of his chief rivals for the gold in Barcelona, Abdi Bile of Somalia, but will be taking a shot at a special $100,000 prize posted by sponsors for anyone breaking the world indoor record in the mile.

Atkinson is impatient to get going. “I’m right on track,” he insists. “I wasn’t supposed to make the trials in ‘84, I wasn’t supposed to make the team in ’88 and I’m not supposed to medal in ’92.”

The State Department better hope he does. Who knows? He might be able to come home and tell them what the Chinese are going to do next.