GOLD CRUSHED
Butler regrets Olympic boycott for Broken Bow's sake
James Butler still thinks about the summer of 1980. Still thinks about the Olympic Games for which he qualified but wasn't allowed to attend. Still thinks about that 200-meter gold medal he might have won.
But Butler's biggest regret might surprise you.
Butler wishes he had been in Moscow not so much for himself, but for his hometown of Broken Bow and the people of McCurtain County.
The Tokyo Olympics would be in full swing now, if not for the coronavirus pandemic. Opening ceremonies would have been Friday, competition would have begun Saturday. The Games have been postponed until 2021, when hopefully the world can convene again, but who knows? Thousands of athletes have had their dreams delayed.
Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter dashed Butler's dreams. The 19-year-old OSU sprinter won the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 200 meters, but Carter
ordered a boycott of the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
And Butler never made it back to another Olympics.
“The Olympics meant a lot of things to a lot of people,” Butler said the other day from his home in Riverview, Florida, just outside Tampa. “It meant a lot of things to me, being from the small area I was from.”
That area is the beautiful but remote southeast corner of Oklahoma. Broken Bow begat Butler, a sprinter extraordinaire and one of the fastest Oklahomans of all time.
“The amount of support I had for all the things I was doing with track and field…” Butler said. “I certainly know they would have loved to see (the) outcome of a person that they had grew up with. Mother, father, friend, anything, you name it. They were all behind that push for me to be on that Olympic team, from very early on.”
Butler says as young as 7 or 8, he realized the community support he got from the people of Broken Bow. An Olympic desire burned not only in him, but in them.
“To not be able to let them realize my dream as well as their dream is very very very disappointing,” Butler said.
Butler was a 1978 Broken Bow graduate and immediately became an OSU phenom. Butler won the
200 meters at the 1979 Texas Relays, running 19.86. Forty-one years later, that time remains the school record.
Butler had become of America's best sprinters. In June 1980, he won the U.S. Olympic Trials' 200 meters. But by then, Carter had ordered the boycott.
“I thought then, still think now, that was a tragic
mistake,” Butler said.
His advice for the 2020 potential Olympians, who still might be in Tokyo in 2021 but might not be?
“Keep your chin up,” Butler said. “What's happening now has nothing to do with you, it has nothing to do with the president, really. It has something to do with saving your life, and your life is more important than a medal to hang around your neck. Without your neck, where do you hang your medal?
“I think it's unfortunate that we have to go through this, but we're here. It's nothing like being part of a political statement. They're not part of a political statement. They're part of a pandemic. Keep going, keep the motion going, keep trying, keep putting forth more effort into the next time and move on with your life at this point and don't feel bad about what's happened.”
Butler didn't let the boycott end his dream. He was injured much of 1981 but returned in 1982 to win the NCAA Championships' 200 and ascend to No. 1 in the world. But a hamstring injury plagued Butler in 1983 and ruined his '84 Olympic hopes. Butler kept running and tried for the '88 Games, but his time had passed.
“Those things are just like that,” Butler said. “It can be taken from you, and it's nobody's fault. It just happens. That just goes with the territory. Am I ready now?
Is it my time? My time was in '80. And I know it was. I was ready for that, and I was prepared for it. Anything after, just extra gravy … twice, three times, didn't matter. But the first one is the one that matters the most.”
The first one never came. Butler settled in Florida, got into computers and has been working for a software company since 2001.
But Moscow is never far from Butler's mind. And it's not the lack of a gold medal that bothers him. It's the lack of a platform the Olympics would have provided.
“Even if I didn't get a gold medal, the fact of being on the stage is almost as satisfying,” Butler said. “Maybe not even medaling at all, but the fact that you worked hard enough to be there. You had the support enough of people who wanted you to be there.
“The representation of a small community, you get to wrap that across your shoulders and say, `I'm from a small town, and this is what a small town can do.' The value of that is a generational thing. It can be passed down to any kind of motivation.”
Butler, a soft-spoken personality, got more and more passionate as he talked about what was lost with Carter's boycott. He sounds like he's been practicing the message, for 40 years, that never was delivered.
“If you do this, if you work hard, you can become this,” Butler said. “It doesn't matter how big you are, what size you are. It's the amount of fight you have in your heart to do it.”
Butler kept talking, but his theme changed from what could have been to what is.
“I can't make that speech now,” said Butler, who for 40 years has lived with the memory of an Olympics with a closed door.