Pointless to Some

Brian Roney is 45, married with two kids, a park manager for the Lake Casitas Recreation Area. Twenty-five years have passed, yet “I just haven’t been able to get rid of that bitterness,” he said. “And it’s probably gotten worse.”

On the wall in John Azevedo’s office at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a photo of him and the rest of 1980 U.S. wrestling team, decked out in Olympic gear they never got to wear in Moscow. He has another photo taken that summer, showing him meeting President Carter at the White House. “That’s in a box somewhere,” Azevedo said.

For Luci Cummings, a full-time mom to two little girls, the pang of disappointment is still vivid when she sees the Olympics on television. “I feel like we sacrificed that one moment in our lives for the government,” she said. “And for what?”

Twenty-five years ago today, the 1980 Olympic Games opened in Moscow. The U.S. team boycotted those Games in a protest orchestrated by the U.S. government over the Soviet Union’s invasion the year before of Afghanistan.

Cummings said her El Segundo neighbors don’t know she was a gymnast on the 1980 squad, one of 466 athletes kept home by the boycott.

It is the Olympic team the U.S. does not know.

Some, such as rower Anita DeFrantz, had competed in prior Games; DeFrantz had won bronze in Montreal in 1976. Some made it later; swimmer Rowdy Gaines and gymnast Bart Conner each won gold in Los Angeles in 1984.

But of those 466, 219 didn’t qualify for any other Olympics.

“Boycotts don’t work. They only hurt athletes. That’s their only value -- if people want to call that value. That’s been proven time and time again,” said Peter Ueberroth, the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee. In 1984 he organized the Los Angeles Games, which were boycotted by the Soviets and others in retaliation for the Moscow action.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, agreed: “People have realized that boycotts are not helpful. To the contrary -- people who call for a boycott are shooting their own foot.”

Added Bob Coffman, a Houston businessman who was the world’s top-ranked decathlete a quarter-century ago: “Look at Afghanistan now. The Russians aren’t there. We are.”

*

Jeff Blatnick, a Greco-Roman wrestler on the 1980 team who hung on to win gold at the 1984 Olympics, was on a flight from Bismarck, N.D., to Minneapolis a few years ago. Another first-class passenger was President Carter.

“As soon as the plane gets up in the air and levels off, he gets up and starts saying, ‘Hi,’ to everybody,” Blatnick said in a recent interview. “I say to the person next to me, ‘I wonder how this is going to be.’

“He gets to me. I go, ‘President Carter, I have met you before. I am an Olympian.’

“He looks at me and says, ‘Were you on the [1980] hockey team?’

“I say, ‘No sir, I’m a wrestler, on that summer team.’

“He says, ‘Oh, that was a bad decision. I’m sorry.’ ”

Blatnick paused and added, “I’m sitting there flabbergasted that this guy apologized to me in a public forum, on an airplane. In my mind, at that point, I have to forgive him. He apologized. What more can the guy do?

“At the same time, there was a part of my mind saying, can’t you do that to the 400-500 other athletes waiting for you -- to hear that? I wish he could have said it to them.”

Carter’s spokeswoman declined to comment on Blatnick’s account, referring inquiries to a statement Carter issued in 1996 in which he called the boycott decision “a very difficult one for me and for other political and sports leaders in America and in many other countries.”

Derick L. Hulme, a professor at Alma College in Michigan and author of a book about the boycott, said that assuming Blatnick’s version of events is accurate, it marks a significant turn in assessing “one of the defining moments and policies of the Carter presidency.”

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 27, 1979.

A few days later, Carter condemned what he called a “callous” violation of international law.

“Carter looked at the boycott, and I don’t think he was wrong here. I think he in fact was correct,” Hulme said. “This was a low-risk, potentially very high reward kind of approach to take with the Soviets.

“Clearly, if the boycott could have been pulled off successfully, in the way Carter had hoped, it would have dealt a significant symbolic blow to the Soviets -- with very little cost,” Hulme added. “The cost to the United States was to those athletes who had trained their entire lives, and wouldn’t get to go.”

*

On Jan. 20, 1980, Carter sent the USOC a letter urging it to propose to the IOC that unless the Soviets withdrew within a month, the Games be postponed, canceled or moved, perhaps to Greece, site of the ancient Olympics and the first modern Games.

By the end of the month, both houses of Congress had passed resolutions of support for the president’s position. In February, then-IOC president Lord Killanin of Ireland said all 73 IOC members had voted unanimously to affirm that the Games “must be held in Moscow as planned.”

Two days later, the USOC announced it would accept whatever decision President Carter made.

Vitaly Smirnov of Moscow, an IOC member since 1971 and a key organizer of the 1980 Olympics, said he would fly to New York for meetings with “friends from American companies,” being led to meetings along back hallways and through hotel service elevators to avoid being seen.

“We had such things in my country,” he said with a laugh. “I could not imagine this was going on in the United States. People were really scared -- there was terrible political pressure on everybody.”

Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, issued a plea for the U.S. team to go to Moscow.

After Coffman said on local television in Houston that he opposed a boycott, several people drove by his house, “shouting and screaming at me that I was un-American,” he recalled. He was barred from working out at the University of Houston on the grounds he “was not an American and didn’t support the president,” he added.

In March, Carter invited a group of would-be Olympic athletes to the White House, telling them that while he wasn’t yet sure what other nations’ Olympic teams might do, “Ours will not go.”

Conner, the 1979 world champion in the parallel bars, recalled feeling stunned: “We thought we were just going to talk it over. That was it. Game over.”

*

In pushing to widen the boycott, Hulme said, the Carter administration failed to understand that in many countries, the Olympic committee, not the government, make the decisions about sport.

The British government supported the boycott. But the British Olympic Assn. voted to go -- leading to a 1,500-meter victory by Britain’s Sebastian Coe over teammate Steve Ovett. Just days before, Ovett had beaten Coe in the 800 meters.

In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser backed the boycott, but the Australian Olympic Committee voted to go. The team went, but a number of athletes and coaches stayed home.

West Germany and Canada opted out of the Games. France and Italy were in.

Rogge, a Belgian sailor who had competed in three Olympics, recalled “an agonizing choice.”

“We were sensitive to the fact that we had been liberated twice by the Americans, in 1917 and 1944,” Rogge said. “We had great gratitude for what America did for our country and here was the president of the United States calling for a boycott.

“Part of our country was sensitive to that. Part said, ‘Listen, this is the wrong measure.’ ”

Rogge recalled it as a difficult time, with shots being fired through a window of the Belgian Olympic headquarters and hate mail coming in. “But ultimately we decided to go,” he said.

In the opening ceremony, the Belgians entered behind the Olympic flag, not the national colors. And Rogge, the team leader, did not march. Other nations took a similar tack.

“Carter could claim that the NATO governments supported him, but the independent national Olympic committees didn’t,” Hulme said. “That simply didn’t play. ... It’s not a distinction that mattered to the world.”

Having the British and French on hand meant a victory for the Soviets, he said.

“There really was a tremendous amount of ineptness in the execution of the boycott,” Hulme said. “It reflected both an ignorance of the international sporting structure, the way international sport works and very poor political analysis and judgment by the Carter administration.”

When the Games opened to an opening ceremony that featured elaborate card stunts in the stands, performed by a block of 5,000 Red Army gymnasts, 65 nations stayed away. But 81 sent at least partial teams. NBC did not televise the ceremony.

*

In April 1980, Vice President Walter Mondale told the USOC: “I am convinced that this year’s Olympic team will be honored by Americans with as much pride and enthusiasm and love as any past medal winners received.”

Time has proven that assessment wrong, team members say.

Decathlete Coffman, having watched Bruce Jenner become a marketing star by winning the 1976 decathlon in Montreal, said the boycott cost him an endorsement deal with a milk company.

“I couldn’t believe that I -- I guess that’s being very selfish -- had worked so very hard, and [now] I had everything taken away. Why did it happen to me? Why didn’t it happen to Bruce Jenner?” he said. “Why didn’t it happen to someone else?”

Roney, the swimmer, said his entire goal was to walk in the opening ceremony. “I didn’t care if I got hit by a truck the next day,” he said. “I had just seen too many opening ceremonies on TV and had had friends who had gone to other Olympics and told me of the experience.”

Instead, while the Games were going on in Moscow, the White House played host to a party for the U.S. team on the White House lawn, part of a five-day recognition celebration that also included medals commissioned by Congress and a show at the Kennedy Center.

Afterward, “We didn’t exist,” said DeFrantz, who played a key role in litigation that unsuccessfully challenged the boycott and is now the senior IOC member in the United States. “Once we got our uniforms and they paid the cost of the picnic on the White House lawn, we ceased to exist.”

For horseman Wash Bishop, the boycott “went against the Olympic creed of what I had grown up believing -- hopefully through sportsmanship, the Games would bring some nations closer together.”

Said sailor Ron Anderson: “I still get stuff in the mail about the Olympics, team stuff. I discard it. I don’t read it. What for? Some politician who doesn’t know anything is just going to make a decision to ruin everything you work hard for.”

Though the USOC has done little over the 25 years to recognize the team, spokesman Darryl Seibel said its members have earned the right to “stand proudly” among U.S. Olympians and that the USOC will “look for opportunities to celebrate their accomplishments and honor their excellence.”

The question of whether athletes who boycott deserve to be called “Olympian” has stirred debate at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

For his part, Wolf Lyberg -- a Swedish researcher who has compiled a list of all 89,000 Olympians since 1896 -- says no.

“They are not Olympians as they did not participate,” he said. “An Olympian must have started in the Games.”

Conner, the gymnast, got his turn in the sun four years later. He said he still aches for his friends from 1980.

“I meet a lot of people who are movie stars or wealthy people. They like to meet Olympians,” he said. “One thing that separates Olympians ... is that you can be rich by accident, you can be famous by accident -- but you can’t be an Olympic champion by accident.”

Thinking of those who might have been Olympic champions, he said of the 1980 action: “I haven’t seen anybody come forward and say, ‘The good thing about the boycott was ... ‘

“Nobody has ever finished that sentence.”