...after heavy pressure from President Carter.

Forty years ago I thought this was one of Jimmy Carter's many bad decisions. I still think that way.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...athletes/2964840001/

Opinion: For 1980 athletes, Olympic postponement brings bittersweet memories of boycott

Christine Brennan
USA TODAY
Updated April 8, 2020

They once were elite athletes, some of the very best in the world, though you’ve never heard of most of them. They are now in their 50s and 60s, the age when people should be celebrating anniversaries, if only there were something to celebrate.

Forty years ago this week, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s House of Delegates, facing withering pressure from President Jimmy Carter and his aides, voted not to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.

A total of 466 American athletes who had trained for much of their lives to compete at those Games were told they could not go. Some sued the USOC over the decision, but lost. There was nothing more they could do. They, and athletes from 64 other countries that joined the United States, became the collateral damage of the 1980 Olympic boycott.

“Nobody knows us,” said International Olympic Committee vice president Anita DeFrantz, a U.S. bronze-medal-winning rower at the 1976 Olympics who had hoped to win a “medal of a different color” in 1980. She led the athletes’ legal fight against the boycott.

“We were invisible,” she said during a recent phone interview. “We still are invisible. We are the team with no results.”

"We were just pawns in a political game,” said Craig Beardsley, who set the world record in the 200-meter butterfly 10 days after his Olympic race went off without him in Moscow, swimming a second and a half faster than the Soviet swimmer who won the 1980 Olympic gold medal.

For the next four years, Beardsley kept training, hoping his Olympic opportunity would come in 1984 in Los Angeles.

It didn’t. At the Olympic trials, Beardsley, then 23, missed making the U.S. team by .36 of a second.

“I was devastated,” he said. “I looked at the scoreboard and I was kind of stunned. I felt deflated. I was emotionless. At that point, I was done.”

During the L.A. Olympics, when so many in the nation tuned in, Beardsley and his family went on vacation in Hawaii and didn’t turn on the TV at all.

Sue Walsh lived a similar story. A backstroke specialist, she was 18 when she made the U.S. team in 1980, so she knew she had time for another go at the Games four years later. But at the 1984 trials, she missed making the L.A. Olympics in the 100-meter backstroke by an excruciating .12 of a second.

“You ask yourself, ‘What if,’” she said, “but you eventually have to come to a place where you tell yourself, no, I did everything I could and it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Mike Burley was a modern pentathlete who felt he and his two teammates were on the verge of greatness as 1980 approached. They had finished fifth at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and were a team on the rise, having won the 1979 world championship, a first for an American team.

“That was a big time for us, and we made the 1980 Olympic team and all three of us were ranked in the top 10 in the world,” he said. “There was no doubt we were favorites. Does that mean we would have won? Maybe, maybe not.”

Then he heard the news that the U.S. was boycotting the Games.

“I remember going for a long 10- or 15-mile run and trying to console myself. It was really devastating, but I said okay, there’s these next four years and I can hang around until 1984, which I did, but I didn’t make it.”

These athletes were not alone. More than 200 of the 466 members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team did not make the 1984 team, according to Mike Moran, who was the USOC spokesman during those years.

Gymnast Bart Conner was one who did. Just 18 at the 1976 Olympics, where the U.S. men’s team finished seventh and he felt “overwhelmed,” Conner was already planning to try for two more Olympics in 1980 and 1984.

“Prior to us knowing that we were boycotting ‘80, we were aware that ‘84 was going to be in Los Angeles and that took the edge off the disappointment a fair amount, the fact that the next Olympics were going to be in our home country,” he said. “It’s a very rare opportunity that an athlete gets to compete in the Olympics at home, and I thought, ‘Oh, I want to be a part of that. I like what could happen there.’”

Conner said he was "in his prime” in 1980 but battled injuries and was “barely hanging on” by 1984. Nonetheless, magic struck at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, the Olympic gymnastics venue, when he and his U.S. teammates upset reigning world champion China to win the men’s team gold medal. A few days later, Conner won an individual gold on the parallel bars.

“I’m extremely fortunate that it played out the way it did because, for many, it didn’t,” he said.

Interestingly, the themes of the careers of those athletes who were deprived of their chance to compete in 1980 are being echoed during these extraordinary times in 2020. Watching the sports world shut down in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it was natural to think first of all the Olympic hopefuls who were planning on 2020 and now must wait until 2021. Some will make it. Others won’t.

But then there were all the cancellations, including the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments and the college and high school spring sports seasons.

“It hit home,” Walsh said. “Of course people’s lives are at stake in the midst of a global health crisis, so everyone understands, but it’s still heartbreaking for those athletes. I actually was kind of surprised I was feeling that way. I mean, it has been 40 years. But I think I reacted the way I did because I know what that feels like. You eventually learn from those moments and realize that what happened is part of who you are, but it isn’t all of who you are.”

Said Beardsley: “What’s going on with the virus is a much bigger deal than the Olympics, but as an athlete, you expect results, you expect things to happen, when you’re close or getting close, that’s what drives you. They had a plan, they had a schedule. A year might not seem like a lot, but it’s a long time to an athlete, especially a veteran athlete going for their last shot and a new face all of a sudden pops up next year, you never know. To have that scooped out from underneath you, even though you are fully aware of the problem, and understand it, to have that taken away from you, there’s a huge vacuum.”

But that’s where any similarity between 1980 and 2020 ends.

“Not one life was saved by the 1980 boycott,” DeFrantz said. “But we know lives will be saved by the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Games.”

DeFrantz did not pursue another Olympics in 1984, but she ended up at the L.A. Games anyway. A then-31-year-old lawyer who had become an advocate for athletes’ rights, she ran the Olympic athletes’ village at USC, and two years later, was elected an IOC member – ironically enough, because of the 1980 boycott.

“The boycott absolutely changed my life,” she said. “I don’t know how the seventh seat in a bronze-medal-winning eight gets elected 10 years later to the IOC without it.”

It is because of the experience of 1980 that the IOC, led by President Thomas Bach, himself a victim of the Moscow boycott as a West German fencer, never considered canceling the 2020 Olympics.

Said Moran: “This group of athletes preparing for the Tokyo Olympics gets to come back. They have the opportunity that the 1980 Olympians never had.”

Jimmy Carter- 1) The fall of Afghanistan which led to the rise of Al Quieda. 2) The fall of Iran which led to 40 years of state sponsored terrorism. 3) 1 China which has haunted us to this day.

3 festering problems that influence our lives to this moment.

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
Jimmy Carter- 1) The fall of Afghanistan which led to the rise of Al Quieda. 2) The fall of Iran which led to 40 years of state sponsored terrorism. 3) 1 China which has haunted us to this day.

3 festering problems that influence our lives to this moment.

And still he didn't make it to the top of the "worst US Presidents" list, what a freakin loser.

Anyone remember when carter was attacked by the rabbit while fishing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...rter_rabbit_incident

No love for the Soviets, but one way to piss off mookers, is to teacher girls to read. Fuck Afghanistan.

His toothless gesture with the Olympics which were supposed to be above politics hurt friends of mine who had worked their whole lives for those moments.

Watch Montreal and pre 1980 Olympic Gold medal ceremonies. You will see a lot of 3 Stars and Stripes awards. That ended with the 1980 boycott, because the communist countries didn't want to see that any more. That's why you see 2 contestants max in each event from the same country - so the pain keeps giving.

But, as said above, not the worst President in US history.