COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It was a decision that robbed hundreds of athletes of a once-in-a-lifetime Olympic opportunity, and for more than four decades, it weighed heavily on the man who made it. Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s Sunday brought out memories of his 1977-1981 presidency. The biggest foreign policy success (the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt) and the biggest failure (the Iran hostage crisis) is the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
It was Carter who called for that boycott—a Cold War power play intended to express America’s disdain for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter said the invasion “could pose the most serious threat to world peace since World War II.”
The boycott won the support of more than two-thirds of the 2,400 members of the difficult house of representatives of the US Olympic Committee, the governing body that made the official move to keep the athletes out of Moscow. Before long, the move was seen as an example of the dangers, confusion and low success rate of introducing politics into sports.
“They didn’t go for us for some not-so-obvious reason,” said Edwin Moses, who won 122 consecutive steeplechase races between 1977 and 1987, including Olympic gold medal contests in 1976 and 1984.
For decades, members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team—recognized as Olympians at home but not by the International Olympic Committee abroad—told stories of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams as a result of the trip to Moscow they never made. Of the 474 athletes who qualified for the team in 1980, 227 would have no other chance to participate in the Olympic Games.
Many athletes recounted stories of their encounters with Carter during a White House visit in the summer of 1980, which served as warm surrogates. In Washington, the athletes received the highest honor that civilians can receive from Congress: the Congressional Gold Medal. But those medals were only gilded bronze, not pure gold, and were not recorded in the Congressional record until a push was made nearly three decades later.
Swimmer Jesse Vassallo, a multi-event world champion at the time, told Swimming World Magazine about meeting Carter in the receiving line.
Carter “shaken my hand and said, ‘What would you do in Moscow?'” Vassallo recalled. “And I said, ‘I’d win two golds and a silver.’ And he gave me this (hurt) look. He didn’t give it to anyone else. ask that question.” According to an essay written by late USOC spokesman Mike Moran, wrestler Jeff Blatnick, the 1984 Olympic team champion, met Carter on a plane. Blatnick said, “He looks at me and says, ‘Were you on the 1980 hockey team?’ I say: ‘No sir, I’m a fighter, in the summer team’. He says, ‘Oh, it was a bad decision, sorry'”.
In his 2021 biography of the 39th president, Kai Bird writes that the boycott was decided by Carter against the Soviets at the urging of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been in a long fight. with the less black Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to influence Carter’s thinking. “History would prove Vance right; Brzezinski’s ‘Carter Doctrine’ was never more than a cover for wasting weapons,” Bird wrote.
And Carter’s boycott did nothing to deter the Soviets. They stayed in Afghanistan for another nine years, and four years later while the Olympic movement and America’s turn as Olympic host were interrupted. The Soviets and 13 other countries, mostly from the Eastern Bloc, boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 in retaliation for what the Americans had done to Moscow four years earlier.
44 years after Carter’s ill-fated decision, the Olympics remain as politicized and polarized as they were then. And in recent years, the world has come to grips with Russia’s place in international sports as a result of yet another invasion, this time into neighboring Ukraine.
How that war is resolved will help define Russia’s role when the Olympics return to Los Angeles in 2028.
