Olympic Games

C

1970s and 1980s

The 1972 Winter Games were held in Sapporo, Japan. One of the top stars of the Games was Dutch speed skater Ard Schenk, who won three gold medals in the 1,500-meter, 5,000-meter, and 10,000-meter events. At the 1976 Games, again held in Innsbruck, American Dorothy Hamill won the women’s figure skating gold medal and John Curry became the first British man to win the men’s skating title.

American speed skater Eric Heiden dominated the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York, winning all five of the men’s speed-skating events (500-meter, 1,000-meter, 1,500-meter, 5,000-meter, and 10,000-meter). The most enduring highlight of the Games was most likely the performance of the United States ice hockey team, which pulled off a “miracle on ice” in defeating a heavily favored Soviet team in the semifinals. The Americans went on to win the gold medal, which the Soviets had captured in the four previous Winter Olympics.

At the 1984 Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, American Scott Hamilton won the men’s figure skating gold medal and East German Katarina Witt won the women’s event. Four years later in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Witt repeated her victory and American Brian Boitano won the men’s gold medal. Soviet figure skaters Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov won the pairs competition, while American speed skater Bonnie Blair won the 500-meter race, the first of her five gold medals in three Olympiads. Italian downhill skier Alberto Tomba won the men’s slalom and giant-slalom events.

D

1990s

At the 1992 Games in Albertville, France, American Kristi Yamaguchi won the women’s ice skating title, and Blair won gold medals in the 500-meter and 1,000-meter races. Tomba repeated his victory in the giant-slalom event. Because of the change in scheduling, the Winter Games occurred again two years later, in Lillehammer, Norway. There, Gordeeva and Grinkov won the pairs skating competition again and Ukrainian Oksana Baiul won the women’s skating title. Once again Blair won the 500-meter and 1,000-meter speed-skating races.

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At the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, Norwegian Nordic skier Bjorn Daehlie won three gold medals (10-kilometer, 50-kilometer, and 4 × 10-kilometer relay) and a silver (15-kilometer pursuit). After a major crash in the men’s downhill, Austrian skier Hermann Maier recovered and won gold medals in the giant slalom and super giant slalom. The Japanese ski-jumping team combined for four medals, including a gold in the team competition. American women dominated a number of events: Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan took gold and silver in the ice skating competition; Alpine skier Picabo Street won the super giant slalom; Nikki Stone won the freestyle skiing aerials; and the U.S. women’s ice hockey team went undefeated to capture the gold medal.

E

2000s

The 2002 Winter Olympics, held in Salt Lake City, were dogged by controversy both before and during competition. First came revelations that Utah organizing officials had given bribes to IOC members to help win the Olympic bid, a practice that was rumored to be common in previous Olympic bidding, as well. Reforms were subsequently enacted to try to eliminate such influences.

During the Games a scandal erupted over the judging of the pairs figure skating competition when the Russian team (Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze) was narrowly awarded the gold medal over a Canadian team (Jamie Sale and David Pelletier) that many observers felt had performed better. After a French judge admitted that she had voted for the Russians under enormous pressure, giving rise to allegations of vote trading among certain countries, Olympic officials decided to give the Canadians a gold medal as well—angering Russian officials. Like the bribery controversy, the incident was not seen as an isolated one, and reforms in the judging process were widely demanded.

Notable events and individuals in Salt Lake City included the women’s figure skating gold medal, won by 16-year-old American Sarah Hughes; Alexei Yagudin of Russia, who won the men’s skating competition; Janica Kostelić of Croatia, who became the first woman to win medals in four alpine skiing events (including three gold); the rising popularity of short-track speed skating, where American Apolo Anton Ohno won a gold and a silver medal; and ice hockey, where Canada won its first gold medal in women’s play and its first men’s gold since 1952, with the United States collecting both silver medals in the event. The Americans had by far their most successful Winter Olympics, collecting 34 total medals, just one behind overall leader Germany.

Compared to the turbulence of the 2002 Games, the 2006 Winter Olympics—held in Turin, Italy—were relatively uneventful. American Michelle Kwan, the dominant figure skater of her era, saw her chance at winning the ever-elusive gold medal erased by an injury. Kwan had to drop out with a groin injury just before the Olympics began. American downhill skier Bode Miller, a top medal contender, did compete, but he struggled just to finish his races and did not take home a prize.

Ohno was again one of the stars of the games with three medals, including an individual gold medal in the 500-meter race. The performance pushed his Olympic medal total to five, tying speed skater Eric Heiden for the record for most medals by an American man in the Winter Olympics. Biathlon competitor Michael Greis captured three gold medals to help lead Germany to another overall medal title with 29. The United States was second with 25, while Austria took third place with 23.

The Austrian team was at the center of the only major controversy of the Turin Games. After an Austrian coach involved in an earlier blood doping scandal was spotted in Turin and then fled from police, the rooms of a number of Austrian biathletes and cross-country skiers were raided. Incriminating equipment was uncovered, but the athletes involved later tested negative for banned substances. Olympic officials vowed to continue to investigate the matter, however. See also Performance-Enhancing Drugs.

IX

Political Turmoil

Although they were founded as part of a vision of world peace, once the modern Olympic Games became a truly important international event they also became a stage for political disputes. The most controversial Olympics were the Summer Games of 1936. The IOC had voted in 1931 to hold these Games in Berlin, Germany, before IOC members could have known the Nazi movement would soon control the country. Shortly after the vote the world learned that the Nazi government planned to bar Jewish athletes from the 1936 German team, a violation of the Olympic Charter.

Many countries, including the United States, demanded a boycott of the 1936 Games. The boycott movement ultimately failed because Avery Brundage, head of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) at the time, was convinced by German officials that Jewish athletes would be permitted to try out for Germany’s team. In fact, only two Jewish athletes were named to the 1936 German Olympic team, and both were of mixed religious backgrounds. Ironically, the Berlin Olympics turned out to be a triumph for those opposing the racist policies of the Nazis, as African American sprinter Jesse Owens captured four gold medals and became a hero.

A

Boycotts

There have been several boycotts of the Olympics by various countries. The first came in 1956, when the Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi teams boycotted the Melbourne Games to protest the invasion of Egypt earlier that year by the United Kingdom, France, and Israel. Major boycotts of the Olympics occurred again in 1976, 1980, and 1984 over various issues.

In 1976 many African nations demanded that New Zealand be excluded from the Montréal Games because its rugby team had played against South Africa, a country then under apartheid rule (an official policy of racial segregation in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s). When the IOC resisted the demands of the African countries with the argument that rugby was not an Olympic sport, athletes from 28 African nations were called home from the Games by their governments.

The issue that prompted the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games was the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. Although American president Jimmy Carter forced the USOC to stay home from the Moscow Games, many other NOCs defied their governments’ requests that they also boycott. Once Carter acted to spoil the Moscow Games (as a total of 62 nations finally refused to participate), it became clear that the USSR and its allies would retaliate with a boycott of the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Although Romania sent a team, 13 of the USSR’s other allies boycotted the Los Angeles Games.

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