AN ALMIGHTY FALL BEFORE BILLY’S BOYS STEAL SHOW
PART 2: 40-31 THE COLD SHOULDER
IT is mildly amusing when the IOC blather about political neutrality, as if their organisation is above such issues.
The prospect of political gestures or statements terrifies them, yet the Olympic movement has often been the stage for decisive moments and the issuing of important messages.
Few have carried the weight of what played out in 1980, at a time when the Cold War was ongoing and the relationship between East and West was much more fraught than it is today.
The key point in what became the boycott of the Moscow Olympics came in 1979 when Soviet forces entered Afghanistan and bedlam ensued.
Critically, US president Jimmy Carter issued an ultimatum that they would boycott the Games if the Soviets did not pull out, but the Soviets held firm and the US, joined by 65 other nations, did not turn up for the Olympics.
Ireland did take part, and while Margaret Thatcher backed the boycott, British athletes ultimately competed.
Four years later, the Soviets and their allies boycotted the Los Angeles Games of 1984.
PADDY BARNES JUDGES THE JUDGES
PADDY BARNES became the first Irish boxer to win medals at successive Olympics when he took bronze in London.
It was the same colour he got in Beijing – and on both occasions he lost to the outstanding light flyweight in the world, Zou Shiming of China.
His defeat in Beijing left Barnes devastated. He was 21 at the time, and while comprehensively beaten, he was disgusted that the bout was scored 15-0.
It was, along with the loss of Ken Egan (see No 31 below), one of a number of cases of suspect judging – a common complaint about Olympic boxing.
What was notable 12 years ago was the blazing reaction of Barnes.
‘I got beaten fair and square, but the judging was terrible, so it was,’ he said.
‘There was no way I lost 15-0. I surely scored about five shots.
‘You know the drug-testing here? It should be the judges getting drug-tested. It’s just a disgrace.’
His sentiments got a good deal coarser, before he finished up with a verdict on his medal that time has surely softened.
‘I don’t care about an Olympic medal. They can keep it for all I care. A bronze medal is for losers.’
‘YOU DIE FOR THE OLYMPICS’
THE U.S. discus thrower Al Oerter was one of the greater winners of any sport and also the speaker of one of the most memorable lines in Olympic lore.
It came in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo when he was pursuing his third gold medal. But he had arrived in Japan with a cervical disc injury that forced him to wear a neck brace, as well as a torn rib muscle suffered in training a week before the competition.
The advice from his doctors was to leave it, that he needed a minimum of six weeks’ rest and risked internal bleeding if he did otherwise. The warning went unheeded.
In obvious pain, he sat third after four rounds before yanking off the neck brace and uttering the words: ‘These are the Olympics. You die for them.’ He threw an Olympic record to take gold and was then helped from the field in agony.
He later recalled: ‘Everyone knew I was injured. My family would not disown me. My dog would not run away. My kids would continue to love me.
‘There was no one on earth who would have been affected by my walking away except me. But if I had, I would have cheated myself. You just get back in there and crank it out.’
He won a fourth straight gold in 1968.
THE RIVALRY
SEBASTIAN COE and Steve Ovett were the best middle-distance runners of their time. They came together at the Moscow Games of 1980 for one of the most compelling narratives the Olympics has ever known.
What helped make it special was that while they took turns to break each other’s world records, they were so rarely set loose on one another – only six times across their careers.
Two of those meetings came in Moscow. After botching his tactics in his stronger 800m, Coe had to settle for silver behind Ovett and was told by Peter Coe, his father and coach: ‘You ran like a **** ’. Coe is known to share the assessment.
Six days later, in the final of the 1500m — at which Ovett was unbeaten for three years and 45 races — Coe claimed gold and revenge. His great rival took bronze.
Athletics has spent much of the subsequent 40 years waiting for a similar storyline.
A BIG BANG
IT ALL went right for Greg Louganis when he won both the springboard and 10m diving golds at the 1984 Olympics. It all went wrong as he launched his bid for a double-double at Seoul 1988.
Taking to the springboard for the preliminary, he attempted a complicated routine called a twoand-a-half reverse pike and smacked the back of his head against the board on his way down.
He was concussed and needed five stitches, but he was back in the water within 35 minutes. A day later, he won by a record 25 points and then went on to win the 10m as well.
THE DOPED HORSE
THIRTY-FIVE horses qualified for the final of the individual show jumping competition at the 2012 Olympics.
Cian O’Connor and his horse, Blue Loyd, were 36th. On the offchance that one of the qualified horses might not be fit for the final, O’Connor prepared himself and his mount. Then the final horse to be presented pulled out lame, O’Connor and Blue Loyd were in, and by tea-time he had an Olympic bronze medal.
It was consolation for a man who, eight years previously, thought he had won gold in Athens.
O’Connor’s performance on Waterford Crystal brought Ireland a surprise gold in an Olympics that was one of the most miserable for the country in recent times.
Equestrians are not well known, even in the often specialised enclaves that constitute the Olympic world. Nonetheless, here was a medal and the country was happy to hail it.
That was until six weeks later, when it emerged the horse had failed a doping test. It was announced the horse had suffered an injury in July and part of its treatment included a sedative that accounted for the drugs that caused the test failure.
Even though the drugs were banned, their use was permitted once they had cleared the horse’s system by the time of the Olym
pics. They hadn’t and so the test was failed and the medal forfeited.
But that was only the half of it. There followed a bizarre sequence of events that included the loss of the B sample, and the revelation that it had in fact been signed for by someone who then disappeared.
Then the offices of the Irish Equestrian Federation in Kildare were burgled, and a file revealing another of O’Connor’s horses had failed a drugs test was stolen and leaked to RTÉ.
It was a staggering story but the upshot was no medal for O’Connor – until his redemption in London.
DON’T SHOOT!
STEVE REDGRAVE had famously followed his fourth Olympic gold medal in 1996 with the invitation to the public to shoot him if he went near a boat again. With no threat to his life forthcoming, he broke his word and then new ground by winning a fifth Olympic title at Sydney 2000.
His remarkable run stretched two full decades from 1980 and the last in the coxless four was the most impressive of the bunch because Redgrave won while battling colitis, diabetes, back pain and serious fatigue.
He is undoubtedly one of the great Olympians.
PERFECT 10
‘A GOOD routine’ was how Nadia Comaneci instinctively felt when she dismounted the uneven bars on the second day of the Montreal 1976 Olympics.
The 4ft 11in Romanian may have sold herself a little short with that analysis. What the 14-year-old gymnast had delivered in the team event was a moment so great that even the scoreboard was unable to process it.
What it displayed was 1.00 on the basis it didn’t have enough digits to show a 10, given perfection had never before been achieved.
Over the next five days, Comaneci would go on to produce six perfect routines — three on the uneven bars and three on the beam.
She left Montreal with three gold medals and won two more at Moscow 1980.
THE COLLISION
THIS was the fall to beat them all. It was 1984, in Los Angeles, when a diminutive teenager altered her course ever so slightly at the front of the 3,000m final, and so set in motion an extraordinary saga.
Zola Budd was the South African who switched to Britain during the apartheid boycott and a year earlier, had set an unratified 5,000m world record.
The home favourite who collided with her heel and fell off the track was Mary Decker, the world champion. At one point in the ensuing laps to the finish, with Decker in tears and staying on the ground, the booing for Budd became so intense that the stadium announcer pleaded: ‘These people are our guests.’
Budd, whose switch of nationality had caused mass attention, was so affected by the anger of the crowd that she wilted to seventh place.
She later recalled: ‘When the crowd started booing, that’s when I gave up. Everything leading up to it, all the politics, all the hype, and then for Mary to fall, it was like a soap opera. It couldn’t be real. I slowed down deliberately. I didn’t want to be on the medal podium.’
In a 2016 documentary about the incident, Budd admitted she still thought about the race 32 years on.
31BILLYWALSH’S TEARS
BOXING was the story of Ireland’s 2008 Olympics. Ken Egan won a silver medal, with bronzes for Paddy Barnes and the late Darren Sutherland. But the star of the Irish boxers was their head coach. Billy Walsh (below) was the man who, along with Gary Keegan, put in place a high performance unit that was thriving by 2008. The success of the system was evidenced by three medals but also by the consistent competitiveness of Irish fighters, as they competed as equals against the boxing superpowers of the US, Russia and Cuba. This was all achieved oftentimes in spite of the politics of Irish amateur boxing, with Keegan on the periphery in Beijing despite helping to mastermind one of the finest success stories in modern Irish sport. In the end, gold eluded all the fighters, with Egan going closest by reaching a final. There, he was up against a Chinese fighter called Xiaoping Zhang. As noted above in the case of Barnes (No 39), the judging of Olympic boxing is a consistently contentious issue, and there were sound reasons to think Egan had not been justly served by the officials in the final. He was distraught but defiant afterwards, but it was the reaction of Walsh that remains seared in the memory. He and Egan were the soul of that Irish team, and Walsh had consoled his captain by telling him, ‘I love you to bits’. Walsh spoke to a small huddle of reporters shortly after the final had finished, when one asked how he was feeling.