Sports, Socialist Style

Ever since their last-second victory over the U.S. in last year's Olympics, the Soviet basketball team has enjoyed a special status in Russia. Feted at home and privileged with frequent tours abroad, the Soviet players have lived pampered lives. Then they started losing games. Suddenly last week they found themselves the objects of a scathing critique on the pitfalls of stardom.

The immediate cause was an ignominious defeat at the hands of Spain in the European basketball championships four weeks ago, an event that had been won by the Soviet Union for 18 years straight. But, said the Communist youth newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the real roots of the problem lay in the fact that the players had lost their proletarian humility. Since their stunning gold-medal win in Munich, it wrote, the players had turned into overconfident performers whose once brilliant strategies had become "unimaginative and stereotyped." Soviet Basketball Federation officials, the paper charged, "created a climate of total permissiveness" for the team's star players, who began to think of themselves as "irreplaceable." Hence the team's poor performances in its most recent tours abroad, including four losses in six games with the U.S.'s national basketball team.

The paper applauded the fact that some of the players risk court action for trying to smuggle in Western luxuries from their foreign travels, a privilege that Soviet athletes had long come to take for granted. "The national team returned home burdened not with a heap of victories," complained Komsomolskaya Pravda, "but with a heap of unprecedented customs violations."

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