MEMBERS of the International Olympic Committee and those of the local organising body, ACOG, yesterday embarked on a salvage mission following the bomb blast which shook the Olympic city in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Mr Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spanish aristocrat who still heads the IOC in his 78th year, said it was a dastardly act which would not deflect the organisation in its charter of uniting the world.

And Mr Billy Paine, the former professional footballer who heads the ACOG, urged people to continue to take children and grandchildren to the games as a demonstration to terrorists that evil cannot and will not prevail".

The lines, I recall were much the same as we watched and agonised in the wake of the Black September massacre which left It Israeli athletes and their coaches dead in Munich in 1972.

Some 24 years and several outrages later, the IOC acknowledges that the threat of terrorism is now an unavoidable hazard in a movement which straddles the globe. In ancient times, wars were suspended to allow young men to compete in the Games.

Attracted by the presence of the world's media, terrorists now see in the oldest of sporting festivals an unrivalled opportunity to make their point to an audience of billions. And the greatest of all sporting festivals continues to suffer.

If the Games lost their innocence in Munich, it was two Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who despoiled the Olympic concept in the first instance by clenching their fists in a show of black power on the presentation podium in Mexico City in 1968.

By 1976, it was the professional politicians who had hijacked the Games with several African countries refusing to send teams to Montreal as a protest against New Zealand's decision to play a rugby international against South Africa.

Four years later, US president Jimmy Carter, ironically a guest here during the opening ceremony, was responsible for orchestrating a boycott by the US and its allies of the Moscow games following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

With the predictability of night following day, the Soviets declined to take part at Los Angeles in 1984 on the pretext that they were unhappy about security arrangements there and in 1988, it was the turn of China and North Korea to score political points by absenting themselves from Seoul.

Ironically, for the first time since 1972 all 197 countries affiliated to the IOC are represented here and that makes Saturday's deaths in Centennial Park an even bigger affront to the movement.

While the Munich massacre was aimed specifically at Israelis, this was construed as an attack on the entire Olympic family, involving ordinary people who were not directly involved in the programme.

Elsewhere, however, the parallels between Munich and Atlanta are uncanny. Then we were summoned to a 2 a.m. press conference to be informed by the German Minister of the Interior of the atrocities in the Olympic village and later on the tarmac of the city's airport.

The world's press is never entirely dormant and on Saturday morning, it was 5.15 a.m. when Mr Francis Carrard, the director general of the IOC, rose to declare that the games went on regardless.

Unfortunately, we are living in a society where violence and violent acts are not absent," he said. This could happen in any city, at any time.

Even before the bomb exploded, the law enforcement agencies in Atlanta had taken some criticism over the level of security arrangements.

Now, in the realisation of their worst fears, the criticism is even more trenchant.

Critics wanted to know why the park had not been cleared some 24 minutes after a telephoned warning had been received.

They also wanted to know how some of the people at a rock concert, performed by a group known as Johnny Mack and The Heart Attack, were allowed to stand as close as 50 ft to the suspect package after it had been detected.

That was the initial show of indignation over innocent lives lost.

Gradually, however, it was replaced by sadness and a general closing of ranks with shocked officials in a country where in spite of isolated outrages, the dangers of terrorism are still, apparently, not fully appreciated.

Over the last two weeks, we have watched and marvelled as planes, forming necklaces of light in the night sky, arrived every 45 seconds to bring some two million visitors to the Olympic city.

To secure them safely was always going to be a difficult task. Now, as we discovered in the early hours of Saturday morning, we know it was an impossible one.