A SPRAY OF OTHER EVENTS

In the Groove Out on the Ocean

They went down to the sea off Long Beach expecting rough going against the able yachtsmen from Western Europe and Down Under. But for the U.S. fleet, winning turned out to be a breeze. In the seven classes of boats, U.S. skippers took three gold medals and four silvers, followed by the Canadians and the New Zealanders, who sailed away with three medals each. The men at the helms of these swift, finicky craft needed the cunning of a chess player, the agility of a gymnast. And experience counted too. The most weathered sailor was Denmark's Paul Elvstrom, 59, career winner of four Olympic gold medals, whose daughter Trine served as crew. With Trine flying on the boat-stabilizing trapeze, the gray-bearded Elvstrom raced to a fourth-place finish in the Tornado catamaran class. The U.S. had its own old salt, William Buchan, 49, who finished first in the Star class.

Coming to Grips In a Convention Hall

On their way to winning big in freestyle wrestling, the U.S. athletes grappled as much with controversy as they did with rival matmen. The 180-lb. contender Mark Schultz lost an early match because he used an illegal armlock that broke a Turkish opponent's elbow. Capping it all, a letter from a top U.S. wrestling official was sent to Coach Dan Gable asking him to resign once the Olympics are over. Reason: Gable, a gold medalist in the 1972 Games, had taken sides with one of two wrestlers in a court dispute over which athlete had legally made the team. Yet, aided by the absence of Soviet, East German and Bulgarian wrestlers, the U.S. shrugged off its setbacks and earned seven gold medals in ten weight categories. The sellout audiences at the Anaheim Convention Center took particular delight in the superheavyweight bouts, which featured bruisers like Canada's Bob Molle and Japan's Koichi Ishimori, in action here. Molle stayed on top and went on to the finals, where he got the silver medal. America's Bruce Baumgartner beat him for the gold.

It wasn't New Year's But the Bowl Was Full

For 61 years Pasadena's Rose Bowl stadium has attracted huge crowds for New Year's Day gridiron clashes between the likes of Ohio State and Southern Cal. But in the eyes of most of the world, real football came to the Rose Bowl last week, when Olympic soccer teams took the field. A throng of more than 100,000, the largest audience ever for a soccer game in the U.S., gathered to watch France defeat Brazil 2-0 in the final match last Saturday. The confrontation was the climax of a cross-country tournament that drew cheering crowds in Cambridge, Mass., Annapolis, Md., and Palo Alto, Calif., and had as competitors teams from such unlikely lands as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Cameroon. Both finalists survived tense overtime tests to reach the championship contest: France beat Yugoslavia 4-2, while Brazil nipped Italy 2-1. Some of the action was almost tough enough to warrant shoulder pads and helmets; in the semifinal, France's Didier Senac fractured his skull in an on-field collision, and two Yugoslavs were ejected for excessive roughness.

Riding High with a Touch of Class at Santa Anita

Horse and rider become a single, and singular, Olympic animal. As if he were speaking of a fellow athlete, high-soaring Conrad Homfeld of the U.S., here clearing a jump, said his favorite stallion, Abdullah, was "obviously very talented." And quite a draw to boot. Capacity crowds packed the Fair banks Ranch Country Club, transformed into a picture-book endurance course, and the venerable Santa Anita race track's show jumping and dressage ring. With precise rounds in the individual three-day event, Mark Todd, an Auckland dairy farmer, galloped to New Zealand's first equestrian gold medal (the U.S.'s Karen Stives and Britain's Virginia Holgate took silver and bronze). Team dressage, which tests a horse's memory and manners, went to West Germany, followed by Switzerland and Sweden. Touch of Class led a disciplined U.S. squad to its first ever gold in team show jumping. Joe Fargis, who shares a Virginia farm with Homfeld, was aboard. He compared the little mare to Runner Zola Budd: "She's quite small too, but she runs very fast for her size."

A Lot Takes Place Below the Surface

There are unseen fouls below the surface, elbows and shoulders are nearly lethal, and the pace is exhausting. Anguish seemed to be the prevalent expression at Malibu's Pepperdine University pool. But in the beginning the look of the powerful U.S. team was one big smile. The speedy squad mounted unnerving counterattacks to overcome Greece, Brazil, Spain, Holland and Australia. West Germany, however, was more formidable. With the game tied at 7-7, West German Goalie Peter Roehle was ejected on a penalty, and Doug Burke of the U.S. scored with only 26 sec. left. The rough-and-ready Yugoslavs squelched U.S. hopes in the final game when they tied the Americans 5-5 but won the championship because they had outscored their opponents by a wider margin. The U.S. silver was only the country's third medal since a pre-Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller led a U.S. team to a bronze in 1924. Said a disappointed Coach Monte Nitzkowski, who had been working with the team for seven years: "Those kids didn't have silver in their eyes. It was gold."

"I Did My Best. I'm Pretty Happy"

At once grand and grotesque, the straining faces of weight lifters tell what it means to compete all out. While Britain's Stephan Pinsent finished only eleventh in the 165-lb. class, no one who saw the strain etched on his face would question his Olympian effort. The audience at the Loyola Marymount University arena was a reverent one, quieting to a hush as the athletes approached a barbell, then exploding into tumult following an extraordinary feat. After Rumanian Nicu Vlad, 20, broke an Olympic record in the 198-lb. class with a 485-lb. clean and jerk, the crowd called him back from the dressing room for a bow. Rumania and China took most of the medals, 14 of 30 at stake. The U.S. gathered two, a bronze by Guy Carlton, 30, in the 242-lb. class and a silver by Mario Martinez, 27, in the superheavyweight category. Martinez, a car-rental-agency worker, was bested by Dean Lukin, a millionaire tuna fisherman from Australia. Lukin lifted a total of 909 1/4 Ibs., topping Martinez by 5 1/2 Ibs. Said the silver medalist: "I did my best. I'm pretty happy."

Rousing Regattas On a Remote Reservoir

Lake Casitas, a reservoir some 80 miles north of Los Angeles that is normally the domain of fishermen, was the scene of a rowing competition that sparkled with seesaw battles and split-second finishes. In the men's eights, Canada held off a furious charge by the favored U.S. crew to triumph by a fraction of a stroke, .4 sec. to be exact. Viewed from a helicopter above, the well-matched boats with their synchronized oars looked like a row of centipedes scrambling swiftly across dark water. In the 2,000-meter single-scull race, Pertti Karppinen, a 31-year-old Finnish fireman, pulled from behind in the last 250 meters to edge West Germany's Peter-Michael Kolbe by 2 sec. and win that event for the third consecutive Olympics. The Rumanian women stroked to five gold medals in six races, confirming their position as a major power in the sport. Meanwhile, on the lake shore, some of their cash-short countrymen engaged in a bit of small-time capitalism: they peddled Rumanian T shirts for $15 and balsa-wood model boats for $30.

Bows and Bull's-Eyes For Sure Shooters

Not all archers look like athletes. Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Rohla has a potbelly of substance. Bespectacled Rick McKinney of the U.S., who is 5 ft. 7 in. and weighs 120 Ibs., might have been perfect in the new movie Revenge of the Nerds. New Zealand's Neroli Fairhall, a paraplegic, shoots from her wheelchair. But looks are deceptive. In the Olympics, each archer competes for a total of 20 hours in four days, with targets up to 90 meters away. When drawing the bow, archers need steel nerves and steady hands, as demonstrated by Finland's Ulla Rantala, above, who lost last week to the new women's Olympic champion, Seo Hyang Soon of South Korea.

The men's contest featured McKinney, 30, and Darrell Pace, 27, two U.S. rivals who for years have battled with a fierceness worthy of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Pace won the 1976 Olympic gold and has held six U.S. championships. McKinney, who has also won six U.S. titles, captured the 1983 world crown. Last week Pace took the lead with the first flights of the arrows and never faltered.

The Desperate Battle For Kudos in Judo

It can be over in less than a minute on the thin, gray mat. A judo match blends a subtle combination of philosophy, ethics and athletics in a painful moment of applied physics: an Ippon, usually pinning an opponent for 30 sec., is a mental, moral and martial victory. Judo is a dance of balance in which attack can spell defeat; sometimes exhaustion and total collapse, as evidenced in the 172-lb. class by Japan's Hiromitsu Takano and Rumanian Mircea Fratica, a bronze medalist, come more from concentration than from exertion. At the Eagles' Nest Arena on Cal State's Los Angeles campus, 4,300 enthusiastic fans watched some surprising results. Frank Wieneke, 22, a West German student, defeated Britain's star, Neil Adams, 25, a popular male model, to take the gold medal. Austria's European champion, Peter Seisenbacher, placed first in the 189-lb. division, defeating Robert Berland, 22, of the U.S. Said America's first silver medalist in the sport: "It's hard to enjoy a silver medal because you go out losing... but I took a silver medal and made history for the Americans."