LOCATION: Lausanne, Switzerland
DATE: 16 July 2020
LANGUAGE: English
On the 40th anniversary of the Olympic Games Moscow 1980, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach reflected with sadness on the boycott of the Games that denied athletes the opportunity to achieve their Olympic dream.
A US-led boycott reduced the number of participating nations to 80, the lowest number since 1956, as part of a series of measures to protest against the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
President Bach, who won Olympic Gold in fencing for West Germany at the Olympic Games Montreal 1976, represented West German athletes in the public debate over whether the country should join the boycott. In the end, they were one of the National Olympic Committees (NOCs) to stay away from the Moscow Games, and it is something that still saddens President Bach.
He said: “The boycott of Moscow has achieved nothing at all. And this has been admitted also by all the major actors, at least in Germany, who were there at the time, who already a couple of months later in conversations told me, ‘We made a mistake. This was not the right thing to do.’ And even the then Chancellor, who was really pressing us at the time in favour of the boycott, took until 2008, but then he finally admitted that it was a mistake.”
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