Negotiating the Detours

For these American Olympic-bound athletes, the pandemic stuck a fork in the pathway to Tokyo, an experience their coach knows full well

What if you got to the top of the mountain, and it wasn’t there?

John Bertrand lived that nightmare 40 years ago, when the United States boycotted the Olympic Games. A 25-year-old world champion in Lasers and Finns, Bertrand was as close as a sailor can ever be to a sure bet for an Olympic medal—but. All these years later, Bertrand has helped coach Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shea to a place on the 2020 Olympic team. They were supposed to represent in the 49erFX this past summer in Tokyo—but. The stories are the same—but.

They’re not the same. Bertrand’s 1980 chances went from bright to lights out. Roble and Shea are still training for what they hope will be the Games of 2021, and they’re hanging on to the good-news side of a good-news/badnews equation. When I toss to Roble the “what if” question about 2021—What if it doesn’t happen?—she shoots right back: “We can’t think about that. We have to focus on things we can control. We have to get up every morning and go sailing.”

Shea reflected, “It was an emotional ordeal when we thought 2020 might be canceled instead of postponed, and we were so grateful when US Sailing declared that our qualification would hold.”

When I asked Bertrand what it was like, absorbing the blow of the 1980 boycott, he cited “a lot of amnesia around that.”

And I probably have readers who are hazy as to why the United States would boycott 1980. The short course is that Moscow had the Games, and the boycott was intended to punish the Soviets for invading