The Front Runner

Games, the burning question was whether the U.S. flag would dip like all the others, or whether it would stay loftily, conspicuously high. So far it had never been dipped.
    Billy was nuzzling in my chest hair. "No," he said. "I'm going to keep the flag up, as a symbol of gay erection."
    I put my hands over my eyes and laughed. "No political gestures at all? No upraised fists or shuffling around on the victory stand?"
    "Mr. Brown, I am a walking political gesture. I don't have to do anything, just be there." Billy sat up. "Anyway, you'd say that dipping the flag was an irrelevant provocation."
    "Right," I said.
    Billy reached over me and looked at my watch, which was lying on the bedside table. He sighed. "Well, this has been great, darling. But I better get back to the camp before the housemother comes looking for me."
    The "housemother" was head Olympic track coach Gus Lindquist, whose status as Oregon track coach had dictated that he be assigned to Montreal. Lindquist lived in a state of perpetual unhappiness these days because he had one of the Sodom and Gomorrah three back on his "skvad." He was also a little piqued that the stone he had rejected had been made by me into the cornerstone of such an impressive building.
    Reacting to criticisms in 1972 that the Munich men's and women's track teams had been lax in discipline, the USOC was trying to clamp down this time. They had set up celibate men's and women's training camps with military-type dormitories, visiting hours and early
    curfews. Husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and I were being forced to room outside the camp, in hotels, motels, apartments, campgrounds or wherever we could find room. Every day, athletes made a mass exodus from the camps for purposes of sex and companionship.
    The athletes were furious at this girls' finishing-school treatment. They were breaking rules right and left, and making life as miserable for Lindquist and the USOC as possible. When Lindquist suspended two rebellious trackmen from the team for violating the curfew, about thirty other athletes violated the curfew just out of sheer spite. It then dawned on Lindquist and the USOC that if they kept suspending people, they weren't going to have a team. After a week's squabbling and politicking, the two men were reinstated.
    Billy, following our rule of "no irrelevant provocations," was being more obedient than most. Nevertheless, Lindquist was livid every afternoon when Billy left the men's camp to visit me. But since the other athletes were being allowed to visit their sex-mates outside, and since there was nothing about sex in the obedience agreement the athletes had to sign, there really wasn't much he could do about it. Lindquist took his revenge cheaply by denying me entry to the camp, so that I couldn't see Billy work out on the track. This deprivation was mostly emotional, because Billy was carrying out his program meticulously and was coming up fine, so he didn't really need me hanging over him. But I did get to see him during his longer runs—he had to do them out on the road, and John, Vince, and I met him at the gate and went with him in the car to protect Mm.
    Lindquist derided me as a camp-follower. That didn't bother me—by now I'd been called worse names than that.
    Outside the motel, we could hear gravel crunching on tires as a car pulled up before our unit. The horn tooted. "Break it up in there, you horny bastards," said Mike's voice. "Time to get back to the convent."
    Billy got out of bed and went to the window, pulling
    back the faded curtain a little. Mike Stella and Sue Macintosh were sitting out there in Sue's convertible. Windblown, grinning, they had been somewhere and had some fun of their own. They were quite open about living together, and no one knew when or if they ever intended to get married.
    "You're early," said Billy. "Go have a beer with Dad and Vince. I'll be right out."
    "Okay," said Mike, and shut off the engine. We heard them getting out of the car.
    Billy went into the bathroom. Standing in front of the washbasin, he assiduously soaped his genitals. I got up too, and followed him in. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was starting a beard, and looked poignantly like the busted overtrained youth who had landed on the Prescott campus that winter day a year and a half ago. I put my arms around him and stood pressed behind him, feeling how hard his buttocks were.
    "I feel like I'm turning into two people," he said. "One Billy Sive is