Carter reflected on 1980 Olympic boycott: 'A bad decision'

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It was a decision that robbed hundreds of athletes of their once-in-a-lifetime chance at Olympic glory, and for more than four decades, it weighed heavily on the man who made it — Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s passing Sunday has unearthed memories from his 1977-1981 presidency. Somewhere between his greatest foreign-policy success (the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt) and his greatest failure (the Iran hostage crisis) sits the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

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 the second World War.”

The boycott garnered more than two-thirds support from the 2,400 members of the unwieldy U.S. Olympic Committee house of delegates, the governing body that made the official move to keep the athletes out of Moscow. In short time, that move came to be seen as the textbook example of the risks, confusion and low success rate of injecting politics into sports.

“We were not allowed to go for a not-so-clear reason,” said Edwin Moses, the hurdling great who won 122 straight races between 1977 and 1987, which included the 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 about opportunities missed and dreams unfulfilled because of the trip to Moscow they never took. Of the 474 athletes who had qualified for the team in 1980, 227 would not get another chance to compete in the Olympic Games.

Many athletes told stories of meeting Carter at a White House visit in the summer of 1980 that served as a tepid substitute. In Washington, the athletes received the highest honor civilians can receive from Congress: the Congressional gold medal. But those medals were only gold-plated bronze, not pure gold, and they weren’t recorded in the Congressional record until a push was made nearly three decades later.

Swimmer Jesse Vassallo, a reigning world champion in multiple events at the time, told Swimming World Magazine about meeting Carter in the reception line.

Carter “reached out to shake my hand and he said ‘How would you have done in Moscow?’” Vassallo recalled. “And I said, ‘I would have won two golds and a silver.’ And he just gave me this (pained) look. He didn’t ask anybody else that question.” Wrestler Jeff Blatnick, a champion on the 1984 Olympic team, met Carter on an airplane years later. According to an essay written by the late USOC spokesman Mike Moran, Blatnick said: “He looks at me and says, ‘Were you on the 1980 hockey team?’ I say, ‘No sir, I’m a wrestler, on the summer team.’ He says, ‘Oh, that was a bad decision, I’m sorry.’”

In his 2021 biography on the 39th President, Kai Bird writes that the boycott was a byproduct of a hard line Carter decided to take against the Soviets at the urging of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been in a long-running struggle with the less-hawkish Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to influence Carter’s thinking. "History would prove Vance correct; Brzezinski’s ‘Carter Doctrine’ never amounted to much more than a cover for wasteful arms exports,” Bird wrote.

And Carter’s boycott did nothing to deter the Soviets. They stayed in Afghanistan for another nine years, while further disrupting the Olympic movement and America’s own turn as an Olympic host four years later. 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.

Forty-four years after Carter’s fateful decision, the Olympics remain every bit as politicized and polarized as they were back then. And for the past several years, the world has grappled with Russia’s place in international sports in the wake of another invasion — this time, into neighboring Ukraine.

How that war is resolved will help define Russia's role when the Olympics come back to Los Angeles in 2028.