USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/2005-04-13-brennan_x.htm



USA Today:


"President Jimmy Carter ordered the boycott after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Viewed through the prism of international history, you tend to forget that there were people hurt by this decision, hundreds of young athletes, torn between supporting their president in an international crisis even as they wondered how their lifetime dream had been shattered by an invasion on the other side of the world."


"Some U.S. athletes sued the USOC over the decision but lost. There was nothing more they could do. The Games went on without the Americans and athletes from 64 other countries that joined the U.S.-led boycott."


""People forget what happened in 1980," said Craig Beardsley, a New Jersey kid who set the world record in the 200-meter butterfly 10 days after his Olympic race went off without him. "You meet people, and once they find out you were a swimmer, they usually ask, 'Did you go to the Olympics?' It's never an easy answer, and there's always a footnote. When they ask, 'Oh, did you get a medal?' it's kind of hard to tell them that I was not there because then you have to go into the whole story, and the last thing I'm looking for is sympathy. I just try to avoid the question and change the subject. Kind of like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. ... What do you think of Michael Phelps?'"


"He didn't go to the Olympics, never won the gold medal that certainly could have been his, never reaped the benefits that could have been coming to a U.S. swimmer winning a big race behind the Iron Curtain. He says there is no way to know if he would have won an Olympic gold medal in Moscow on July 20, 1980, the day his race was held, but we do know that on July 30, 1980, he set the world record at the U.S. nationals, swimming a second and a half faster than Sergei Fesenko of the Soviet Union, who won the Olympic gold medal in Moscow.

Beardsley kept training, graduated from the University of Florida, waited four years for another chance at the Olympics. Then, at 23, he missed making the 1984 Olympic team by .36 of a second. "I was devastated," he said. "I felt I owed it to so many people who had stuck with me.""


"The Soviets and East Germans returned the favor in 1984, boycotting L.A. and lessening the competition at the 1984 Games. In a 1991 interview, Russian swimming legend Vladimir Salnikov said he still lamented not facing the Americans in Moscow in 1980, and again in L.A. in 1984. The matching boycotts robbed an entire generation of athletes on both sides of the Iron Curtain of their greatest competition on the world's grandest stage."