1980 Summer Olympics


The 1980 Summer Olympics, officially branded as Moscow 1980, were an international multi-sport event held from 19 July to 3 August 1980 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, in present-day Russia. The games were the first to be staged in an Eastern Bloc country, as well as the first Olympic Games and only Summer Olympics to be held in a Slavic language-speaking country. They were also the only Summer Olympic Games to be held in a self-proclaimed communist country until the 2008 Summer Olympics held in China. These were the final Olympic Games under the IOC Presidency of Michael Morris, 3rd Baron Killanin before he was succeeded by Juan Antonio Samaranch shortly afterward.
Eighty nations were represented at the Moscow Games, the smallest number since 1956. Led by the United States, 66 countries boycotted the games entirely, because of the Soviet–Afghan War. Several alternative events were held outside of the Soviet Union. Some athletes from some of the boycotting countries participated in the games under the Olympic Flag. The Soviet Union later boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union won the most gold and overall medals, with the USSR and East Germany winning 127 out of 203 available golds.

Host city selection

The only two cities to bid for the 1980 Summer Olympics were Moscow and Los Angeles. The choice between them was made at the 75th IOC Session in Vienna, Austria on 23 October 1974. Los Angeles would eventually host the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Participation and boycott

Eighty nations were represented at the Moscow Olympics, the smallest number since 1956. Of the eighty participating nations, seven National Olympic Committees made their first appearance at these Games: Angola, Botswana, Cyprus, Jordan, Laos, Mozambique and Seychelles. It was also the first time Vietnam participated after the end of the Vietnam War and the Reunification of Vietnam. None of these nations won a medal.
29 countries boycotted the previous 1976 Summer Olympics in protest against the IOC for not expelling New Zealand, which had sanctioned a rugby tour of apartheid South Africa. The 1980 Summer Olympics were disrupted by another, even larger, boycott led by the United States in protest of the 1979 Soviet–Afghan War. The Soviet invasion spurred President Jimmy Carter to issue an ultimatum on 20 January 1980, which stated that the U.S. would boycott the Moscow Olympics if Soviet troops did not withdraw from Afghanistan within one month. 66 countries and regions invited did not participate in the 1980 Olympics. Many of these followed the United States' boycott initiative, while others cited economic reasons for not participating. Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini hostile to both superpowers, boycotted when the Islamic Conference condemned the invasion. Neither the People's Republic of China nor Taiwan participated in the games, the former as a consequence of the Sino-Soviet split.
Many of the boycotting nations participated instead in the Liberty Bell Classic, also known as the "Olympic Boycott Games", in Philadelphia. Those that competed had won 71 percent of all medals and gold medals at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. This was in part due to state-run doping programs that had been developed in the Eastern Bloc countries. As a form of protest against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, fifteen countries marched in the Opening Ceremony with the Olympic Flag instead of their national flags, and the Olympic Flag and Olympic Hymn were used at medal ceremonies when athletes from these countries won medals. Competitors from New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain competed under the flags of their respective National Olympic Committees. Some of these teams that marched under flags other than their national flags were depleted by boycotts by individual athletes, while some athletes did not participate in the march.
The boycott impacted the competitiveness of swimming, track and field, boxing, basketball, diving, field hockey and equestrian sports. Whilst competitors from 36 countries became Olympic medalists, the great majority of the medals were taken by the Soviet Union and East Germany in what was the most skewed medal tally since 1904.

Events, records and drug tests

There were 203 events – more than at any previous Olympics. 36 world records, 39 European records and 74 Olympic records were set at the games. In total, this was more records than were set at Montreal. New Olympic records were set 241 times over the course of the competitions and world records were beaten 97 times.
Though no athletes were caught doping at the 1980 Summer Olympics, it has been revealed that athletes had begun using testosterone and other drugs for which tests had not been yet developed. According to British journalist Andrew Jennings, a KGB colonel stated that the agency's officers had posed as anti-doping authorities from the International Olympic Committee to undermine doping tests and that Soviet athletes were "rescued with tremendous efforts". A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".
A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics as a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.

Media and broadcasting

Major broadcasters of the 1980 Games were USSR State TV and Radio, Eurovision and Intervision. TV Asahi with 68 cards provided coverage for Japan, while OTI, representing Latin America, received 59 cards, and the Seven Network provided coverage for Australia. NBC, which had intended to be another major broadcaster, canceled its coverage in response to the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Games, and became a minor broadcaster with 56 accreditation cards, although they did air highlights and recaps of the Games on a regular basis. ABC aired scenes of the opening ceremony during its Nightline program, and promised highlights each night, but later announced that they could not air any highlights as NBC still had exclusive broadcast rights in the US. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation almost canceled their plans for coverage after Canada took part in the boycott, and was represented by nine cards. The television center used 20 television channels, compared to 16 for the Montreal Games, 12 for the Munich Games, and seven for the Mexico City Games. This was also the first time North Korea was watching, as KCTV broadcast it as their first satellite program.

Commemoration

A series of commemorative coins was released in the USSR in 1977–1980 to commemorate the event. It consisted of five platinum coins, six gold coins, 28 silver coins and six copper-nickel coins.

Budget

According to the Official Report, submitted to the IOC by the NOC of the USSR, total expenditures for the preparations for and staging of the 1980 Games were US$1,350,000,000, total revenues being US$231,000,000. To obtain additional funds for the competition, the Organizing Committee organized Olympic lotteries. The proceeds from the lotteries covered 25% of the cost of holding the competition.

Cost

The Oxford Olympics Study established the outturn cost of the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics at US$6.3 billion in 2015 dollars. This includes sports-related costs only, that is, operational costs incurred by the organizing committee for the purpose of staging the Games, e.g., expenditures for technology, transportation, workforce, administration, security, catering, ceremonies, and medical services, and direct capital costs incurred by the host city and country or private investors to build, e.g., the competition venues, the Olympic village, international broadcast center, and media and press center, which are required to host the Games. Indirect capital costs are not included, such as for road, rail, or airport infrastructure, or for hotel upgrades or other business investment incurred in preparation for the Games but not directly related to staging the Games. The cost for Moscow 1980 compares with costs of US$4.6 billion for Rio 2016, US$40–44 billion for Beijing 2008 and US$51 billion for Sochi 2014, the most expensive Olympics in history. Average cost for the Summer Games since 1960 is US$5.2 billion.

Opening ceremony

Event highlights

Archery

  • Tomi Poikolainen of Finland, who had not finished any of the previous three days' shooting higher than fourth, came from fourth on the last day to win the men's archery competition, scoring 2455 points. He won gold just three points ahead of a Soviet athlete.
  • The women's archery gold was won by Ketevan Losaberidze, who was also the European, Soviet and world champion.
  • The women's archery silver was won by Natalia Butuzova, who had set nine national records and three world records in 1979.
  • The U.S. archery team was one of the strongest ever fielded, but due to the boycott, the team never had a chance to prove itself. This team held every record and featured 1976 Olympic champion Darrell O. Pace, who was averaging 100 points more than the winning score in Moscow at the time.

    Athletics

  • Ethiopian Miruts Yifter won the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres athletics double, emulating Lasse Virén's 1972 and 1976 performances.
  • "I have a 90% chance of winning the 1,500 metres," wrote Steve Ovett in an article for one of Britain's Sunday papers just before the start of the Olympics. After he won the 800 metres Olympic gold, beating world-record holder Sebastian Coe, Ovett stated he would not only win the 1,500 metres race, but would beat the world record by as much as four seconds. Ovett had won 45 straight 1,500 metres races since May 1977. In contrast, Coe had competed in only eight 1,500 metres races between 1976 and 1980. Coe won the race, holding off Ovett in the final lap, who finished third.
  • Aided by the absence of American opposition, Allan Wells beat Cuban Silvio Leonard to become the first Briton since 1924 to win the Olympic 100 metres race.
  • Gerd Wessig, who had made the East German team only two weeks before the Games, easily won the gold medal with a high jump. This was 9 cm higher than he had ever jumped before.
  • In the 1980 Olympic women's long jump competition, Soviet jumper Tatiana Kolpakova bested her compatriots and other competitors by setting a new Olympic record of.
  • Poland's Władysław Kozakiewicz won the pole vault with a jump of – only the second pole vaulting world record to be established during an Olympics. The previous time had been at the Antwerp Olympics 1920.
  • In the long jump competition, three women beat for the first time ever in one competition.
  • Waldemar Cierpinski of the German Democratic Republic won his second consecutive marathon gold.
  • Bärbel Wöckel, also of the GDR, winner of the 200 metres in Montreal, became the first woman to retain the title.
  • Tatiana Kazankina retained the 1,500m title that she had won in Montreal.
  • In the women's pentathlon, Nadiya Tkachenko scored 5,083 points to become the first athlete to exceed 5,000 points in the event during Olympic competition, winning gold.
  • For the first time in Olympic history, all eight male participants in the long jump final beat the mark of.
  • Lutz Dombrowski won the long jump gold. His was the longest jump recorded at sea level and he became only the second ever to jump further than.
  • In the triple jump final, Viktor Saneyev, who won gold at Mexico, Munich and Montreal, won silver behind Jaak Uudmäe and ahead of Brazil's world record holder João Carlos de Oliveira. Both de Oliveira and Australia's Ian Campbell produced long jumps, but they were declared fouls by the officials and not measured; in Campbell's case, his longest jump was ruled a "scrape foul", with his trailing leg touching the track during the jump. Campbell insisted that he had not scraped, and it was alleged the officials intentionally threw out his and de Oliveira's best jumps to favor the Soviets, similarly to a number of other events.
  • Yuriy Sedykh won gold in the hammer throw event. Four of his six throws broke the world record of 80m. No hammer thrower in the world had ever achieved this before. As in Montreal, the USSR won gold, silver and bronze in this event.
  • Evelin Jahl, the 1976 Olympic champion, won discus gold again. She won with a new Olympic record – – having been undefeated since Montreal.
  • Cuba's María Caridad Colón won the women's javelin, setting a new Olympic record.
  • Sara Simeoni of Italy won the women's high jump, setting a new Olympic record. She had won a silver in the 1976 Games and would go on to win a silver in the 1984 Games.
  • In track-and-field, six world records, eighteen Olympic records and nine best results of the year were registered.
  • In women's track and field events, either a world or Olympic record was broken in almost every event.
  • Daley Thompson of Great Britain won the gold in the Decathlon. He won gold again at the Los Angeles Olympics.
  • Soviet Dainis Kula won gold in the men's javelin. He also had the best sum total of throws, showing his consistency. He finished ahead of his teammate Alexander Makarov.
  • Polish gold medallist pole vaulter Władysław Kozakiewicz showed an obscene bras d'honneur gesture in all four directions to the jeering Soviet public, causing an international scandal and almost losing his medal as a result. There were numerous incidents and accusations of Soviet officials using their authority to negate marks by opponents to the point that IAAF officials found the need to look over the officials' shoulders to try to keep the events fair. There were also accusations of opening stadium gates to give Soviet athletes advantage, and causing other disturbances to opposing athletes.