All the Comforts of Home

The Olympic Village sprouts incongruously from a sparsely populated, 270-acre tract in southwest Moscow. Eighteen apartment slabs, each 16 stories high and sheathed in multicolored squares, will be clustered around three small parks. TIME'S Peter Ainslie toured the construction site last week and came away impressed: "Without a doubt, it's the most elaborate facility ever built to house, feed and entertain Olympic athletes."

Some 12,000 competitors and coaches will live two to a room in 3,540 two-and three-bedroom suites. The apartment interiors are strikingly modern in design, and sport natural-wood surfaces, tasteful wallpaper and extra-long beds. Each suite has its own kitchen, balcony and bath. Compared with Montreal, where as many as eleven athletes were crammed into a single apartment, the Moscow facility should be a paradigm of comfort. Security measures should be less obtrusive too. There will be two circles of fencing, and gates will be closely monitored, but armed soldiers will not be perched on balconies as they were in 1976.

The village will contain ample training facilities: three gymnasiums, three swimming pools, a soccer field, volleyball and basketball courts, and a full-scale track-and-field compound. The food center includes four 1,000-seat halls and a self-service cafeteria with at least 360 items to choose from daily. A sports medicine clinic will provide on-the-spot treatment of athletic injuries.

Also under construction is an ambitious cultural center that will contain a 10,000-volume library, a concert hall for 1,200, two 250-seat movie theaters and even a discotheque. Already scheduled are performances by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companies and by the Beryozhka folk dancers. One bit of bad news for devotees of the high life: there will be no beer halls like the popular one in Montreal.

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