Two weeks after Claudia Losch of West Germany won a 1984 Olympic gold medal with a shot put of 67 ft. 2 1/4 in., Natalia Lisovskaya took that event at the Soviet bloc’s boycott-inspired Friendship Games with a throw almost 5 ft. longer. Barred by politics in 1984 from a chance at world sport’s most enduring honor, Lisovskaya began training at Moscow’s Brothers Znamensky Sports School for Seoul in 1988. In 1980, when Greg Louganis was favored to become the first man in more than 50 years to win two gold medals in diving at the same Olympics, he instead sat home with the U.S. boycott team and watched the victories go to a Soviet and an East German whom Louganis had outscored at Montreal four years before. Louganis achieved his double at Los Angeles in 1984 and hinted at retirement. But next week he too will be competing in Seoul, perhaps in part because he is one of just a handful of U.S. and Soviet athletes with a personal memory of a real Olympics — one that transcends diplomatic chills and thaws and brings together the world’s best in the 23 official sports of the Summer Games. Four years is a long time in an athlete’s career, and eight years at a world-class level of competition is almost an eternity. Yet it is a dozen years since U.S. and Soviet teams met at a Summer Olympics. Historians will long debate President Carter’s 1980 decision following the invasion of Afghanistan to snub the only Olympics ever held in the Soviet Union. They will debate as well whether the Soviets avoided Los Angeles four years later out of fear about security, as claimed, or as retaliatory tit for tat. To most athletes, the underlying stratagems do not matter: to them, the very definition of an Olympics is that every Olympian talent must be there. For nationalistic fans, boycotts brought joy. Without the U.S. and 61 other countries on hand, the Soviet gold-medal tally jumped from 49 in Montreal to 80 in Moscow, while the U.S., unhindered by the Soviets and the equally formidable East Germans, vaulted from 34 gold in Montreal to 83 gold in Los Angeles. With the sporting world reunited, Seoul may be a rude awakening for flag wavers on both sides. But the shock will likely be worse for U.S. viewers: the memory of Los Angeles is more recent, and more unrealistic. At the 1984 Friendship Games, East bloc athletes outperformed Olympic winners in 20 of 41 track-and-field events and eleven of 29 swimming events.
