My Olympic rankings: Moscow No. 4
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BEIJING -- I’m still not sure about the reasons I was allowed to go to Moscow in 1980. Once the U.S. government decided not to send a team, most U.S. journalists who applied for visas through the Soviet embassy were denied.
I was glad to go. I had done a lot of preparation for the Chicago Sun-Times, including attending the Soviet Union’s national sports festival, Spartakiade, in the summer of 1979 and it would have been a waste of money and energy not to be in Moscow for the Olympics.
Some things about those two trips run together. I believe it was in ’79 that I met an English teacher named Serge Sergeyev (that’s like being named Sam Smith in the United States), who spoke a lot about growing up in fear of the United States. The government was constantly telling the people there that they had to be on alert around the clock in case we attacked them.
One year, he somehow came across a copy of Life magazine. There was a photo in the back of an American family sitting around a Christmas tree, holding up a sign that, as he recalled, said, ‘Dear God, please don’t let the Russians attack us this year.’’
He asked himself why the Americans feared the Russians when it was so clear that it was the Russians who should fear the Americans.
That, he said, made him think. Maybe both governments were exaggerating the threat about the other for their own military-industrial ambitions and that perhaps no one really had anything to worry about from either country. In any case, he said the photo changed his life and he was never as fearful of Americans again.
No matter how repressive the Soviet government was, and it was very repressive, I found the Russian people to be friendly and thoughtful and extremely interested in talking to Americans. I remember being approached by young people at Red Square who didn’t know many words in English but used all of them they know in trying to talk to me. ‘What time is it?’’ they asked several times, even though there was a huge clock towering above the square.
I don’t remember all that much about the sports. British middle-distance runners Seb Coe and Steve Ovett faced off in two great races; the Polish pole vaulter, Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz, overcame and taunts of a jeering crowd to win the gold medal and then made an obscene gesture toward the stands as Polish fans sang, ‘Poland Will Not Be Beaten’’; Russian Vladimir Salnikov won three gold medals and thanked U.S. coaches for sharing training secrets; Cuba’s Teofilo Stevenson won his third super heavyweight gold medal; Yugloslavia won the men’s basketball gold medal and its coach came to the press room afterward to type the story because he also worked as a sportswriter; the Soviets dominated women’s gymnastics as Romanian coach Bela Karolyi complained bitterly about the judging.
Some things never change.
Next: Los Angeles, 1984
-- Randy Harvey
His past Olympic rankings: Athens, Seoul, Montreal, Atlanta