Between Jimmy Carter and Allen Onyema – Their place in sports history

It was the summer of 1980.

The Olympics were about to take place in Moscow. The world was in crisis. The Games were threatened. The USA reacted, imposing sanctions on the USSR and boycotting the Games!

It was a model established during the previous Games in 1976 by African countries that deployed the power of sport to fight a global injustice.

In December of 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan and took over the Asian country.

The man that was President of the United States was Jimmy Carter.

Amongst other actions taken, Jimmy Carter stopped his country’s athletes from attending the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The 447 American athletes were made to pay the ultimate price in sport – giving up their dreams of becoming Olympians, and missing out on the benefits that often came with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become rich, powerful and famous. All of this for a cause ‘unconnected’ directly to sport.

It was a huge sacrifice by the ‘innocent’ USA athletes considering that there was an alternative. They could have done what British athletes did. The UK boycotted the Games but the athletes competed as individuals.

So, what did the American government do to ‘compensate’ the American athletes?

Two weeks ago, Jimmy Carter died.

Part of the tributes written in his honour during his burial was the recall of the aftermath of the 1980 Games that the USA boycotted for reasons outside of sports.

He invited the affected American athletes to the White House, feted them, recognised them officially in America as Olympians, and decorated each of them with the US Congressional Award, the highest civilian honour in the USA.

President Jimmy Carter once ran into one of the athletes at the airport several years after the boycott. He went to the athlete and