-Next year, thousands of young athletes from all over the world
will be leaving their homes to follow that great dream,
the Olympic dream.
-It was a dream that would never come to be.
Hundreds of American athletes
caught in the middle of the Cold War.
-There are conflicting reports out of Afghanistan.
-The Soviet takeover was meticulously planned
and skillfully executed.
-The Soviet Union must pay a concrete price.
-Yesterday, Vice President Mondale
said the Summer Olympics should be moved from Moscow.
-I would not support the sending
of an American team to the Olympics.
-This was no idle threat.
-How can they put us in the middle of this conflict?
-I don't think anything was really solved
from us boycotting the game.
-But, basically, he crushed my dreams.
It felt like he had crushed my life.
At the time, I felt like he had crushed my life.
-These actions will require some sacrifice
on the part of all Americans,
but there is absolutely no doubt that these actions
are in the interest of world peace and in the interest of.
-Right?
So let's say he underhooks me and I come in here
and I go like this and he goes like this.
Enh!
Warning stolen and if it's the second time,
it's gonna be a point.
So if we're here. -Forty years have passed
since a group of American athletes
were forced to skip the Summer Olympics.
For most of them, becoming an Olympian
was a once-in-a-lifetime dream.
But for all, the memories of that summer in 1980
are still fresh.
-My goal was I wanted to set a world record.
I wanted to go to the Olympics and pin my way through it.
I wanted to be the most dominant wrestler that,
you know, ever went to an Olympic Games.
When I was training, I was never training to win.
I was training to beat them to oblivion before I pinned them.
We get partners, go!
-By that time, I was Big Ten champion,
you know, all four years while I was at Ohio State.
And, at that time, in the world,
I had the fastest time going in as a world leader that year.
So, in the back of my brain, that's the automatic, you know,
I should medal when I get to Moscow.
-And 1976 was the first year that women were
going to actually field a team in the Olympics in Montreal.
So, you know, I worked hard and had a great year in college
and went out to Missouri
and went to the tryouts with Team USA and wasn't on the list.
And, the next go-around, I'm not gonna give anybody
an excuse to cut me from the team.
-When I was young, I just loved to do somersaults
and I'd try it in my yard, off the house,
you know, in the playground.
I think it was my junior year or so that my coaches started
telling me that I had a chance to go far
and potentially make the Olympic team.
-By July of 1978, I had broken my first world record.
I had made the World Championship team
and that was when I was kind of figuring that,
you know, maybe, gosh, in two years,
I'd actually have a chance to make the Olympic team.
-I was in Philadelphia
and worked at the Juvenile Law Center,
who were very kind and allowed me to do my other crazy things.
So, in the fall of '79, I had decided I would have no regrets.
I would do whatever I needed to do
to make the team and win that gold medal.
-But in 1979, with the US and Soviet Union
still at the height of the Cold War,
an international crisis
ensured they would never get that chance.
-The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
was a game-changer for Jimmy Carter and Carter
felt that it was the greatest threat to world peace
since the end of World War II.
-The president and his administration
scrambled to come up with a diplomatic
and economic plan against the superpower.
-We knew that, in the summer of 1980,
there would be a Moscow Olympics,
hosted by the Soviet Union.
And, naturally, this was one of the things we put on the table.
-The Soviet Union must realize that its continued
aggressive actions
will endanger both the participation of athletes
and the travel to Moscow by spectators
who would normally wish to attend the Olympic Games.
-And I said to him, "Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
These Games are not gonna occur until August".
And the president sharply retorted,
"If they are in Afghanistan, we cannot go".
-We started hearing some rumblings about the government
and some possibilities of some interference and something,
but we didn't take it very seriously.
-I do not want to inject politics into the Olympics
and I would personally favor the establishment
of a permanent Olympic site
for both the Summer and the Winter Games.
-But when the IOC rejected that idea,
Carter began pushing more and more for a boycott.
-And I have notified the Olympic Committee that,
with Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan,
neither the American people nor I
will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.
-Then the question was, how do we make this happen?
-The administration sent representatives to Lake Placid,
New York, where the Winter Games were set to begin.
-The US government didn't have full control
over whether we participated, as a US team, in the Olympics.
That was, ultimately, up to the US Olympic Committee.
-They were in our face all the time.
We had to try to keep them away from the athletes,
even though these athletes weren't gonna go to Moscow.
But they were looking for any bit of support
they could possibly get.
-Back then, obviously, we didn't have the kind of
news cycle we have now
and I think, when we first started hearing about it,
it was sort of a natural emotion,
I think, where the kids felt today,
and that's complete denial, like,
"There's no way this is going to happen".
-I believe that I refused every interview
with anybody that wanted to talk
about the potential boycott of the Olympic Games
because I didn't wanna take it away from my focus
and my strategy on trying to make the team.
-And even if there was even a whisper about it,
we just assumed they'll work it out,
but there's no way they're not
going to send the US to an Olympic Games.
They're just not gonna do it.
-Then, in late March, Carter invited more than
100 Olympic hopefuls to the White House.
-The emotions were very raw.
They were obviously young people.
They were respectful of the president.
But they were sorely disappointed.
-Anita DeFrantz, she was very vocal about it back then
and she actually had a meeting with all of us,
I think it was before we went to the White House,
about how angry she was and how she was gonna speak up.
-We knew that most countries were gonna be in Moscow
and they would be competing under the Olympic flag
and I wanted to propose
that to the president of the United States.
I was about to ask the question and, at that very moment,
the president of the United States entered the room.
-I can't say, at this moment, what other nations will not go
to the Summer Olympics in Moscow.
Ours will not go.
-I finally asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
"Can you tell me that one, one, human life will be saved
if we don't go to Moscow"?
He said, "No".
And that was the bottom line for me.
If we can't save one person, why are we doing this?
-It finally came to a head in April,
when the USOC scheduled a vote
at their headquarters in Colorado Springs.
-We had a lobby packed with writers
and reporters and broadcasters.
The vice president spoke, at length.
-For what is at stake is no less
than the future security of the civilized world.
-And then came the somber vote
and it was 2-1 in favor of honoring the boycott.
-The United States Olympic Committee
has decided not to send a team
to the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow.
-One thing that I've always been told is the Olympic Games
were an opportunity to separate politics
and to bring the world together.
-That summer, right around the time the Games
were beginning in Moscow, the US Olympic Committee
took the entire team to Washington, DC.
-There would be the presentation of special medals
on the steps of the Capitol
with the president of the United States
addressing the entire team on a very hot afternoon.
We were all decked out in our Levi Strauss jeans
and red shirts and bandannas
and Stetson hats that we would've gone to Moscow with,
but it was an ugly day.
-Those close to Carter said he never regretted his decision
to boycott the 1980 Games.
-Jimmy Carter had a very odd view of politics.
He did what he had to do to win elections,
but then, when he got into the White House,
he parked politics at the Oval Office door
and did what he considered the "right thing".
-There were more than 460 athletes on the 1980
US Summer Olympic team.
Some, like DeFrantz, had competed in 1976.
And others, like Gaines, went on to compete in 1984.
But, for nearly 220 of them, 1980 was their only chance.
-Being, you know, a Black athlete in a sport
that you don't see a lot of Blacks, then, competing in,
to be on the world stage and potentially win a medal,
I believe it could've opened up so many doors for me.
-No one knows how hard it is.
No one knows what we're doing every day
and what the challenges are.
So we were invisible, basically, except portrayed as children
who wouldn't do what the president wanted to have done.
Well, it's our lives, not his.
-I made the team. I achieved my goal.
I'll always be an Olympian.
Whether we competed or whether we didn't compete
doesn't make me not a member of an Olympic team.
I'm part of that very special group.
-You know, I worked my butt off to earn Olympic gold
and I didn't get the opportunity to do it, so.
And I just wish I had the opportunity to show the world,
at the time, that I was ready.
That was my time.