1980 Summer Olympics

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1980 Summer Olympics opened on the 19th of July in Moscow, carrying a question that no Games had faced quite so directly: could an Olympic host city actually run a global sports competition when dozens of nations refused to show up? Sixty-six countries and regions, led by the United States, stayed home. The cause was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the message from Washington was clear after President Jimmy Carter issued his ultimatum on the 20th of January 1980: withdraw within a month or the US would not come. Soviet troops did not withdraw.

  With eighty nations present, Moscow hosted the smallest Games since 1956. The athletes who did compete broke records at a stunning rate. The athletes who did not compete left gaps that shaped every result. And behind the medal tallies lay a separate story about doping, officiating disputes, and the mechanics of state power applied to sport.

  What actually happened inside those sixteen days of competition? How did a boycott of that scale change the outcomes? And what did IOC Medical Commission member Manfred Donike discover when he ran his own private tests on the urine samples sitting in Soviet refrigerators?

• 2. The Boycott and Its Reach

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  Carter's ultimatum set a one-month deadline for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and when that deadline passed, the machinery of a diplomatic boycott rolled forward. The Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia drew many of the boycotting nations who still wanted to compete. Those nations had won 71 percent of all medals at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, which gives a rough measure of the competitive void left in Moscow.

  The reasons countries stayed home were not uniform. Iran, then under Ayatollah Khomeini and hostile to both superpowers, boycotted after the Islamic Conference condemned the Soviet invasion. Israel's decision was shaped largely by the USSR's anti-Zionist foreign policy and its support for Palestinian resistance groups. Neither the People's Republic of China nor Taiwan participated; China's absence stemmed from the Sino-Soviet split. Some Caribbean and Latin American nations cited economic reasons rather than explicit political alignment with the US position.

  Among the nations that did attend, the politics remained visible. Fifteen countries marched in the Opening Ceremony carrying the Olympic Flag rather than their national flags. New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain competed under their respective National Olympic Committee flags. Some teams that marched under alternative flags were then further depleted when individual athletes chose not to participate at all. Seven National Olympic Committees made their first-ever appearance at these Games: Angola, Botswana, Cyprus, Jordan, Laos, Mozambique, and Seychelles. None of those seven debut nations won a medal.

  The consequences for specific sports were direct. Basketball, swimming, track and field, boxing, diving, field hockey, and equestrian events lost significant competitive depth. Japan's absence removed a traditional judo powerhouse. The US archery team, which held every record and featured 1976 Olympic champion Darrell O. Pace, never had the chance to compete; Pace was averaging 100 points more than the score that eventually won gold in Moscow.

• 3. Records and the Doping Shadow

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  On paper, the 1980 Games were a record-setting exercise. There were 203 events, more than at any previous Olympics. Thirty-six world records, 39 European records, and 74 Olympic records were set. New Olympic records were set 241 times across the competitions, and world records were beaten 97 times. That volume exceeded what Montreal had produced.

  But Manfred Donike, a member of the IOC Medical Commission, ran a parallel set of tests that never became official. Using a new technique that measured the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in urine samples, he found that 20 percent of the specimens would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings if his test had been formally adopted. That group included samples from sixteen gold medalists. The results later convinced the IOC to add his method to their official testing protocols, though none of the Moscow athletes faced retrospective sanctions.

  British journalist Andrew Jennings reported that a KGB colonel had stated the agency's officers posed as anti-doping IOC officials in order to interfere with the official testing process, and that Soviet athletes were, in the colonel's words, "rescued with tremendous efforts." The KGB's role, if accurately described, would explain how a state-sponsored doping program avoided any official positive tests.

  The first documented case of blood doping in Olympic history also occurred at these Games. A runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres. East German women dominated the swimming program, winning nine of eleven individual titles and 26 of the 35 available medals; it was later confirmed that their results were aided by the East German state-sponsored doping system. Rica Reinisch, ranked 20th in the world in the 100 metres backstroke in 1979 and not in the top 100 for the 200 metres, won gold in both distances at the Olympics while breaking world records in each.

• 4. Contested Ground

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  Poland's Władysław Kozakiewicz won the pole vault with a jump of 5.78 metres, only the second time a pole vault world record had been set during an Olympics. The first was at the Antwerp Games in 1920. After his victory, Kozakiewicz directed an obscene bras d'honneur gesture in all four directions toward the jeering Soviet crowd, causing an international scandal and nearly costing him the medal.

  The athletics competition featured repeated accusations that Soviet officials were manipulating results. IAAF officials reportedly found it necessary to monitor officials directly to try to maintain fairness. In the triple jump final, Brazil's world record holder João Carlos de Oliveira and Australia's Ian Campbell both produced jumps that were ruled as fouls and not measured. Campbell's best jump was ruled a "scrape foul" on the grounds that his trailing leg had touched the track. Campbell disputed this, and it was alleged that officials intentionally discarded his and de Oliveira's best jumps to favor Soviet athletes, a pattern that observers connected to other events across the program.

  The springboard diving final produced its own dispute. As Aleksandr Portnov prepared for a 2.5 reverse somersault, cheering broke out in the adjacent pool when Vladimir Salnikov swam his world-record 1,500 metres. Portnov delayed. When he finally took his first steps along the board, the cheers grew louder as Salnikov touched the wall in under 15 minutes. Having started, Portnov could not legally stop. The Swedish referee G. Olander allowed him to repeat the dive, and FINA President Javier Ostas called the decision "correct." Protests by Mexico and East Germany against other re-dive allowances were turned down.

  In the equestrian show jumping final, Poland's Jan Kowalczyk and the USSR's Nikolai Korolkov finished with identical fault totals of 8, but Kowalczyk won gold because his horse completed the course in faster time. Poland thereby won the last of the 203 gold medals of the Games.

• 5. Athletics and Individual Records

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  Steve Ovett wrote in a British Sunday paper just before the Games that he had a 90 percent chance of winning the 1,500 metres. He had won 45 straight 1,500 metres races since May 1977. Sebastian Coe, his British rival and world record holder in the 800 metres, had competed in only eight 1,500 metres races between 1976 and 1980. Ovett won the 800 metres gold, beating Coe, then predicted he would win the 1,500 and beat the world record by as much as four seconds. Coe won the 1,500 metres, with Ovett finishing third.

  Allan Wells beat Cuba's Silvio Leonard to become the first Briton since 1924 to win the Olympic 100 metres. Ethiopian Miruts Yifter won the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres double, matching the feat Lasse Virén had achieved at both the 1972 and 1976 Games. Gerd Wessig, who had made the East German team only two weeks before the Games, won the high jump with a clearance of 2.36 metres, which was 9 centimetres higher than he had ever jumped before.

  In the long jump final, all eight male competitors beat 8 metres for the first time in Olympic history. Lutz Dombrowski of East Germany won the gold with the longest jump recorded at sea level, becoming only the second man ever to jump further than 28 feet. Soviet gymnast Alexander Dityatin won a medal in each of the eight gymnastics events, three of them gold, becoming the first athlete to win eight medals at a single Olympics. He also scored perfect 10s in men's gymnastics, the first since 1924.

  In the hammer throw, Yuriy Sedykh of the USSR threw six times; four of those throws broke the world record of 80 metres. No hammer thrower had ever achieved that before. In the weightlifting competition, Yurik Vardanyan became the first middleweight to total more than 400 kilograms. Vasily Alexeyev, the USSR's eight-time world champion who had set 80 world records over his career and won gold at Munich and Montreal, failed to medal.

• 6. Broadcasting and Finance

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  NBC had intended to be a major broadcaster of the 1980 Games but canceled that plan after the US boycott, dropping to a minor role with 56 accreditation cards, though it did air highlights and recaps regularly. ABC broadcast scenes of the Opening Ceremony on its Nightline program and promised nightly highlights, but later announced it could not air them because NBC still held exclusive US broadcast rights. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation nearly canceled coverage entirely after Canada joined the boycott and ended up represented by just nine cards.

  USSR State TV and Radio led coverage with 1,370 accreditation cards. Eurovision carried the Games to 31 countries with 818 cards, while Intervision reached 11 countries with 342 cards. The Games marked the first time North Korea watched: KCTV, Korea Central Television, broadcast it as its first satellite program. The television center for Moscow used 20 channels, compared to 16 for Montreal, 12 for Munich, and seven for Mexico City.

  The official financial picture showed total expenditures for staging and preparation at US $1,350,000,000, with total revenues of US $231,000,000. The Organizing Committee ran Olympic lotteries to generate additional funds, with lottery proceeds covering 25 percent of the cost of holding the competition. The Oxford Olympics Study later placed the total outturn cost at US $6.3 billion in 2015 dollars, which compares with US $4.6 billion projected for Rio 2016 and US $40-44 billion for Beijing 2008.

  The USSR released a series of commemorative coins between 1977 and 1980: five platinum, six gold, 28 silver, and six copper-nickel pieces. The sailing events were held at the Tallinn Olympic Yachting Centre in Tallinn, in what was then the Soviet-occupied Estonian SSR, and Soviet sailor Valentyn Mankin won gold in the Star class there, becoming the only sailor in Olympic history to win gold medals in three different sailing classes.

• 7. The Closing and Its Aftermath

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  The closing ceremony on the 3rd of August carried an unusual awkwardness. Because of the US boycott, the traditional handover elements connecting Moscow to the next host city, Los Angeles, were altered. The flag of the city of Los Angeles was raised rather than the United States flag. The Olympic Anthem replaced the national anthem of the United States. The Antwerp Ceremony, in which the ceremonial Olympic flag would have passed from the Mayor of Moscow to the Mayor of Los Angeles, did not happen. Moscow's city authorities kept the flag until 1984.

  Both ceremonies were later filmed and appear in Yuri Ozerov's 1981 film, Oh, Sport - You Are The World!

  The political symmetry that followed was notable. For the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, the Soviet Union announced that its participation "would be impossible," citing concerns about the safety of Soviet athletes under what it described as US anti-communist sentiment. Most Soviet-aligned socialist nations joined the campaign of non-participation. US foreign policy officials later described it as a retaliatory boycott against Carter's 1980 decision, though the International Olympic Committee found the Soviet claim to be "just and substantiated."

  At the 1988 Seoul Games, Vladimir Salnikov, the swimmer who had broken the 15-minute barrier in the 1,500 metres freestyle in Moscow, won gold again in that event, eight years after the boycott had denied him a 1984 defense of his title. Birgit Fischer, the East German kayaker who had won gold in Moscow at the 500 metres kayak singles in 1980, went on to win medals at every Games from 1980 to 2004, with the single exception of the boycotted 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.