The Front Runner

no harm for Sive . . . Dellinger is disqualified . . . Billy Sive is now on the 10,000 meter team with Martinson and Stella .. ."
    Billy was so drained from the race, and from all the tension of that week, that he didn't dance for joy. He simply sat down on a bench, with his sweat jacket over his shoulders. He put his head down on his knees and cried helplessly.
    The great Roman circus was over. The stands and the parking lots emptied for the last time. The area was littered with programs and paper cups. Media crews were checking out of hotels. Athletes were driving home with broken dreams. We took a plane back to New York.
    We had begun to feel—we thought—a subtle shift in people's sympathies. Stella made a blunt statement to the press, and said: "I've gotten a little sick of watching Sive being harassed and laughed at. How much does an athlete have to do before he is respected and let alone? Since when is an athlete's private life any of their business? Who are these people, anyway, who are playing god and setting themselves up as the moral guardians of track? I think this whole thing is setting a very dangerous precedent."
    The bellwether of opinion, Mike focused the issue for many other athletes. Several other activists made noises at the USOC that enough was enough.
    The sports press was more sympathetic too, now. They had been moved by the sight of Billy running blind, shoeless, bleeding and balls-out in the 10,000. The Los Angeles Times trackwriter wrote: "This is a pansy? I don't know what Billy Sive is. But he ain't no flower."
    But many other Americans were very unhappy at the fact that the U.S. was going to be represented in
    Montreal by an admitted homosexual. There were still six weeks before the Games, and a lot of trouble could be made.
    The brand-new Olympic team possibly was anticipating this trouble when they got together for some important business, shortly after the Trials. They looked thoughtfully at Billy, and pondered his struggle to get where he had. And then by a majority (though not unanimous) vote, they exercised their USOC-granted democratic right to elect the flagbearer who would carry the Stars and Stripes in the opening ceremonies in Montreal.
    The new flagbearer was Billy Sive.
    The AAU and the USOC were furious, and demanded they elect another.
    The athletes said no.
    SIXTEEN
    "ME, the flagbearer," Billy chortled softly.
    We were lying in bed in the cheap motel room that I had taken a few miles from the Olympic training camp in Alamosa, Colorado. John and Vince were sharing a room in the same motel. The mountain air was cool, so we were not sprawling around nude—we had the blanket over us. The afternoon sun had no way of coming through the small dingy window at the back of the room. All you could see was a patch of blue sky and the tops of some tall spruce trees.
    I had sworn that Billy and I would never make love in this kind of place, and here we were.
    The antiquated black-and-white TV was shut off. The room smelled of cigarette mustiness no matter how much I kept the windows open. The thin chenille bedspread had seen better days, and the sheets had been darned with machine stitching. On the wall by the bathroom hung a calendar from the previous year with a Frederick Remington painting of Indians on it. Our clothes were flung over the only chair in the room. My suitcase lay open on the floor.
    This was already the third motel that I'd been in. Two others had thrown me out when they realized who I was. "Corrupting that innocent boy," said one elderly lady owner. "I don't want your tainted money." Western puritanism seemed to differ little from Eastern, except that out here they called us "sheepherders."
    Billy stretched luxuriously beside me. I ran my hand along him. He was as thin as he had ever been, even while overtraining, and I hoped he wouldn't get much thinner. Now he was suffering sometimes from the liver cramps that afflict thin distance runners, brought on by the glycogen deficiency that comes toward the
    end of a long, hard run. But he was bursting with energy and glowing with health. He moved restlessly, plea-surefully under my stroking hand, hard and smooth as living, stainless steel, trying to kiss me. I remembered my despair that first day watching him work out back at Prescott, wanting to run my hand along his smooth, young, sun-speckled skin as I was doing now, and being sure I would never do it.
    "Are you going to dip the flag?" I asked.
    At every Olympic