A Look Back at the 1980 Summer Olympic Games Part IV

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

In the Fall of 2021, Afghanistan loomed large. Whether you agree or not with the war waged there by the USA and its coalition forces over a period of twenty years, there is little doubt that for one country Afghanistan has cast a significant shadow over the history of the world. What is little realized is that it has done so for a lot longer than the last 20 years, during which the coalition forces kept the Taliban at bay. The country has its own troubled history, which goes a lot deeper than this century or even the previous one. Here though it is Afghanistan’s, although oblique, relevance to sport, which serves as a background to the greatest tragedy to have ever affected a US amateur boxing team; it is one which should never be forgotten. I have been trying to take you back to 1980. By doing so I hope to explain how an appalling plane crash in Poland gave the US their greatest sporting tragedy; How it fitted within a worldwide context of the time; And how the US President of the time by leading a boycott of the Olympic Games of that self-same year, denied many athletes, some of whom were lost on that plane, of an opportunity to win an ultimate prize – an Olympic Gold Medal. It is also an opportunity to reflect on the promise lost in that crash, of the legacies left behind by the people who lost their lives and of the politics that saw Afghanistan dominate world politics, long before it hid the Taliban. Finally, it’s all about who missed the fateful flight and what happened after the accident.

And now we move onto when the world was waiting with bated breath, unaware that the disaster that was to unfold was not going to be in the harsh plains of the Afghani hinterlands but in the east of Europe, near a capital city, just before a much anticipated sporting event.

“It was then that I got something caught in my mind, saying don’t go! Don’t go! It was not a good time for me to go and compete. Maybe God got something into my mind.” Alex Ramos, a boxer who never travelled to Poland for the meets.

WHAT CAME NEXT…

But the background to the Games, the politics of the time and the anger of many athletes who were denied their opportunity to compete for their country because of politics, pale into insignificance to the events of the 14th of March 1980 in Warsaw. Taking their first trip out of the United States, traveling with six coaches and an aide to attend televised matches in Katowice, Poland, were the US boxing team who were preparing for the upcoming Olympic trials. It was the best day to be flying. The sun was shining as the hopes, dreams and fears of this generation of American boxers were held inside a Soviet-built Ilyushin-62 jetliner. There were fourteen American boxers, their accompanying team of eight people, alongside sixty-five other passengers and crew members. They were approaching Warsaw`s Okecie Airport, when the cream of the best who would have gone to the Olympics were to be denied that opportunity, not by politics, but by tragedy.

In sport in the UK, we have faced our own tragedies, both on our own soil and abroad and names that conjure up that tragedy include Ibrox, Hillsborough, Heysel, Bradford and of course, the Munich Air Disaster. It was the time that during take-off an airliner, taking the cream of English football, the Manchester United team, heading back to England to compete in a league game, crashed and killed twenty-three people, though here twenty-one on that fateful plane survived. Their testimony brought home to all of us in the UK the tragedy. From facing your own mortality to the reality of what it feels like to save your life when others around you are losing theirs is heart breaking, truly heart breaking.

What happened in 1980, in Warsaw, hangs over the Olympic movement, American sport and American boxing. Ironically it happened in a Communist country, in a communist built aircraft with a communist led investigation.

Seventy-seven people lost their lives in the worst accident in Polish history since the Second World War. Twenty-three of them were from the US Boxing Team, fourteen boxers and all ten of the crew and flight attendants lost their lives too.

Slated to attend two amateur boxing events, dual meets were to be held in Cracow and Katowice, Poland, the team were excited that international competition was at least allowed, as they awaited news of whether the boycott would happen or not. They flew on an aircraft named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, but the stars were not in alignment that day. Everyone on board lost their lives when, one of the turbine discs fractured and the engine failed.

The investigation in Poland swiftly secured the scene but another fault found was that the recorder equipment, vital in any investigation into an air crash stopped recording twenty-six seconds before the crash. Given that this was a Soviet built aircraft, the Poles expected to have information forthcoming from their ally over the fitness of such an aircraft and also if the faults they found were common and furthermore, if light could be shed on the accident by the manufacturers. The Polish investigators could find little to explain why a plane with one engine who should have been able to land, had been unable to so do.

The Russians were less than helpful.

It is believed that the Russian engineers held a petty grudge over how the Poles bought their planes but then replaced the navigation equipment with more modern equipment – dare we say superior – which happened to be American equipment. When the Polish government’s Special Disaster Commission sent its report to Moscow, the Russians dismissed it. The Poles said it was due to the inferior equipment, the Russians countered saying it was due to engine failure.

No matter what was to blame, too many lives were lost.

In Warsaw there were no survivors, nobody to talk over what happened, how it all occurred, how people felt before the event or what it was like being rescued. There was no rescue for anyone.
Within the context of the proposed boycott, the USA had given the Soviets the opportunity to withdraw from Afghanistan by the 20th of February. The Warsaw crash occurred on the 14th of March. Seven days later, on the 21st of March 1980 President Carter had formally announced the boycott so that this was all happening in the midst of that global argument.

As they entered the plane for their final fateful flight there could have been little or no inclination as to what was to transpire during the flight. How could there be? If you had any idea that you were going to perish during a journey, would you take it?

Ironically, it was not the only air accident to make the American news that day. An American C130 Hercules was to come down in Turkey, also killing all on board, and it led the CBS broadcast at the time.

But the effect and the enormity of the US boxer’s loss of life was felt throughout America.

A country, proud of its sporting heritage and proud of its amateur boxing history, was in mourning. The Winter Olympics were now a faded memory and the boycott of the Olympic Games a reality; the American people could simply not unpick, politics, tragedy and sport. They all now were part of a tapestry that was to be hung over the head of the Carter Administration as well as the nation which put him in power.

In the midst of this was a President who was still trying to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis and he now had the tragedy of the next to consider; the story of boxing misery, alongside the carnage in Afghanistan, was making headlines throughout the world. Carter clearly had to rescue some form of leadership amongst it all.

We were still to see the ignominy of Operation Eagle Claw and how the Americans could not rescue their own against the might of their military in Iran, so there was still some way to go before complete humiliation was to be delivered.

AND NEXT TIME…

The beginning of a simple roll call of those who lost their lives from the USA. We see who would have been the contenders and who were there to support them as they fell to the earth, crashing their hopes and dreams while US boxing took a massive blow.

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