Lidia Skoblikova, 24- year-old Soviet gym instructor, who stunned the & < World at the recent Winter Olympics by winning an unprecedented total of four gold medals. —L. McDonald A word on Olympics Mnsbruck, site of the 9th ~ Winter Olympics, must have Na little sad on Sunday as Bees came to their end, ae found friends already i € their last ‘‘adieux’’ be- ore heading homeward. ee otlela must have hung heavy ela the athletes of the 36 ; ee represented, the once in aa ime chance for many, the a of years of rigorous, dedi- €d, lonely training. Stites Theresa Strasse must a een bustling with the er 8S of spectators, drawa athe. Many countries as the it they came to watch. ona have started their : inte Journey on Sunday as igh ympic flame was exting- = and the crowds began to Ss i the downhill ski course tudes - 8rooved by the multi- of Austrian youths, each Pretendin Merman. to be an Egon Zim- And SPectato Youth- in G €ach and everyone— rs, athletes and Austrian ae ce privately to be Shoo, e in 1968 for the 10th ympiad. I wonder what Our sho : in oa will-be in Grenoble D Soe loubtléss Some a there is going to be 1 searching of a serious a with lots of room for is ae between the ‘send Ss pentreal Canadiens’’ school pull Ught and those who advocate ae Out altogether, as has 24points compared thanks a 1960, with 10 of them which | 0 the bobsledders, a feat as. S akin to Hawaii winning Serta: qeckey championship, ere a Tuns th Awe re no bobsled e laurete Russians added further Our es to their crown. We doff 6 ae to them, and especially Of the : Who must rank as one world, Nest sportswomen in the hature, But can, “hat of our own? What We and Re do for Nancy Greene mee Ody Hebron and Father ~READING he Peo 1 eon, ee ‘i byss, by Jack ave sy ans of Jack London who Teaq oe had an opportunity to his best wor will find him at Visa: = unequalled and itis ad- If yoy aS Tead the first page only book © time to read the whole wil] S putter that is what you the Story, do once you get in to David Bauer, between now and Grenoble? There can’t be any- one in Canada, the home of ice hockey, who doesn’t feel a deep down pang of sadness at the show- ing of our Olympic hockey team. Where do we place the blame? Where do we start to build up for ’68? In the case of the Alpine skiers, they can’t start anything until they’ve paid for ’64! Ludi- crous, isn’t it? The cream of the country’s athletes having to scrounge here, there and every- where to enable them to repre- sent their country on the world arena. * * * In fact, some of them didn’t. The cross country skiers, for example, only sent half.a team because they couldn’t raise enough money for the others. And where do you think they did their training? In Sweden—of all places — as the guests of the Swedish Sports Federation. All we have to do now, I suppose, is to persuade some other countries to take in our ski jumpers, figure skaters, hockey players, et al, and the problem is solved. I think we all know what the real solution is though, and I think we have to be more serious in our endeavours to achieve it. More serious about the way we demand that the federal govern- ment assume the responsibility for an overall sports develop- ment plan; about the creation of a portfolio for a Minister of Sport; about raising the parti- cipation of our youth in sports— one of the most important items of cultural development. * * * We should put some funds into the Fitness Council, preferably from the arms budget. ( prefer the battles they wage on the ice; I notice they always shake hands at the end!) The original amount set aside for the Canada Fitness Council was $5 million, if you recall. After the Tory government had finished slashing it, $1 million was all that remained and I guess the Beagles (amateur sport officials) soon polished that off.. There is no room for cynicism or defeatism in our attitude to- wards sports, and the provincial government has got to be forced to live up to its obligation in this regard. Public development of Gari- baldi Park would be a good, concrete start, as would badly ' needed aid: to municipal govern- ments to enable them to build public recreation centres, SO that we can go to Grenoble in 68 and be more than proud of our. showing. —L. McDONALD. | 1961detectivenovelbasedon Kennedy assassination theme ‘ Gideon’s March,” by J. J. Mar- ric. Available at People’s Co-op Book Store in either paperback or cloth binding. : detective novel written in 1961, ‘*Gideon’s March’’ dealt with plans to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and French President Charles de Gaulle. Marric’s detective tale has, as its chief protagonist, George Gideon, commander ofthe Crimi- nal Investigation Department. The assassination of President Kennedy has been planned by an American who has come to London to carry out the slaying. The man who plans to assassi- nate President Kennedy is known to be in London. Two Americans are sent there to participate in the security preparations for the conference. They are a Lieu- tenant Webron of the FBI, and Donnelly, a U.S. Secret Service Agent. Marric describes Webron as ‘¢short, swarthy, probably Jew- ish.’? It appears hardly likely that the FBI, notoriously anti- semitic, would have sent a Jewish FBI agent as its repre- sentative. Marric’s understanding of the situation differs in one other critical respect from that of the FBI. The would - be assassin, O’Hara, is described as follows: ‘¢. | . emotionally he was aman of tremendous power and con- ~~. viction, and was convinced, with- in the narrow limits of his religious bigotry, that Roman Catholicism was an evil thing. During the election campaign he had preached this gospel, fight- ing desperately against the more liberal minded, and when the President had been elected on a desperately narrow margin, bitterness had turned to hatred.”’ * * * Further, ‘‘deeply - rooted in him was the belief that men of dark skin were far inferior to men of white skin. He had no doubts about this in his own mind, just as he had none about the wrong- ness of Roman Catholicism.”’ ‘Then the new president had acted—as well as preached—to give full rights to Negroes. O’Hara, already posed on the delicate balance between religious fervor and religious mania, began to pray and plan for the death of the President. — ‘tHe knew what would happen to him if he succeeded, and he did not care. He believed that he had been privileged by the Almighty to strike the fateful blow.” co * The dossier which had been sent to London from Washington said that O’Hara had been sus- pected of plotting against the President, and was known to be a religious bigot — an anti- Catholic. He had made threats against the President soon after the elec- tion, and the FBI had discovered that he was an expert in fire- arms, especially small weapons. The assassination is frustrated through the alertness of a London policeman who recognizes the suspect, and through the bravery of Gideon, Webron and Donnelly. Marric personifies inO’Hara the peril that he saw in the racist, anti-Catholic ultra-Right, a peril that would erupt into an attempted assassination. * * * This was not, however, the view of the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, before or since 1961. He never warned that there was a deadly peril implicit in the accusations of treason against Chief Justice Earl Warren or Adlai Stevenson, or in the anti- Catholic sentiment that was aroused during the electioncam- paign. : The forces which he com- manded did not find the slayers of the six Birmingham children, of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Moore, of Emmet Till, or Medgar Evers, nor did he alert the nation to the fact that the only difference, to the racist killers, between a Medgar Evers and a President Kennedy, was that John Fitz- gerald Kennedy was the greater evil because he was President. Instead, J. Edgar Hoover has spent the last 40 years using his secret police powers to indict the Left, among whom he includes both Communists and liberals, as the threat to the security of the nation. - s . What a monstrous abortion this can give rise to was evident in his speech to the seventh national convention of Catholic Youth Or- ganization in New York on No- vember 16. In an address to this captive audience, J. Edgar Hoover had only one sentence referring to the ultra-Right. He denounced them as ‘thatemongers’’ who *