Article July 8, 1996 Issue

In the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, there rests a bell...

In the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, there rests a bell with the inscription "I Summon the Youth of the World." Decades after the competition there, that same message is summoning people of all nations to Atlanta, Georgia. In the years between the 1936 Berlin Olympics and those in Atlanta, however, the face of athletics has changed greatly. For one thing, more and more athletes are "pushing the envelope"—are continuing to compete successfully at ages that in the past would have been retirement years.

One of the joys of this particular Olympic gathering is that unlike conditions in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984), there are no boycotts by individual countries. It is truly a time when all the nations of the world can gather in the pursuit of victory—not as the fruit of war, but as the outcome of peace.

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