Why we are well rid of Russian 'sportsmen'

FOUR YEARS ago you printed a letter from me saying why the Moscow Olympic Games should not be supported. I also remember standing in the rain with banners outside the Intourist Offices and Aeroflot, the Soviet airline offices, in London with banners demanding "Human Rights Before Sports" and I still think it was worth it.
Now the question of the USSR and the Olympic Games 'has been raised again. And, as before, surely the fundamental question is whether or not the Soviet Union should be allowed to participate at all.
Recently I came across some relevant thoughts on this subject by Sir Arnold Lunn. One of the pioneers of skiing as a sport, he believed that the Communist approach to sport was fundamentally incompatible with the ideas behind the Olympics.
Writing in 1964, he quoted Lord Exeter, then vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, as saying that "Fundamental Principle 1 states that the Olympic Movement is completely opposed to any discrimination, political, racial, or religious." Sir Arnold went on: "A splendid principle.
Have the IOC made attempt to enforce this 'Fundamental Principle' in Soviet Russia?" He said that the IOC could sort the matter out by convincing us: "that they have made every effort to discover how far the 'Fundamental Principle' of the IOC is respected in Russia; [and] that they are in a position to prove that a practising Christian (a member of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia or a Catholic in Poland and
Hungary) or an anti-Marxist receives the same encouragement and training when a young athlete has the same chance of representing Russia in the Olympics as a member of the Communist party."
Having failed to do this, he points out, the IOC has been made to look ridiculous, especially as the Committee has banned athletes from other countries from participating in the Games.
We should be glad that the Soviet Union, which shows no interest in the notion of sport as a free, open, competitive matter between individual sportsmen, and which practices political, racial and religious discrimination routinely (the Soviet criminal law has recently been tightened up precisely to make life harder for Christians
who have been in contact with the West or who belong to `unregistered' demoninations), is not participating in this year's Olympic Games.
I have spent the last year living a short walk away from the mammoth Olympic Stadium built in Berlin in 1936 for Hitler's Nazi Olympics. The International Olympic Committee paid Hitler the greatest compliment in their power by choosing his Berlin site for the Games. They are now pandering to Soviet Russia by begging them to join in this year's Games. But I think Sir Arnold Lunn was right, and that proper international sport is only possibly between genuine athletes, freely chosen and operating in a spirit of open, unafraid competition.
West Berlin Joanna Bogle