Casualty of '80 Games fends off ghosts
U.S. athletes address controversy
Protests disrupting the torch relay have stirred mixed feelings for Kimberly Carlisle, a swimmer on the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that was denied a chance to compete when the United States boycotted the Games held in Moscow.
Under the cloak of darkness and heavy security, Kimberly Carlisle made her way onto the tarmac at the San Francisco International Airport last week. The bomb-sniffing dogs served as a reminder that the Olympic torch, at that moment in the hands of Chinese officials as they disembarked from a plane, had become a target for protestors.
For Carlisle, it was a reminder of mixed emotions that had shaped her life.
In January 1980, she was a 19-year-old swimmer headed for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Then a freshman at Stanford, she found herself at odds with some fellow students.
President Jimmy Carter had issued an ultimatum: If the Soviet Union failed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in a month, he would call for a boycott of the Olympic Games scheduled to be held that summer in Moscow.
“It was a very interesting experience to defend your position over dinner,” Carlisle, now 47, said during a phone interview this week.
In the end, it didn’t matter. The Soviets refused to withdraw. The deadline passed. Carter prohibited U.S. athletes to compete in Moscow.
Later that year, Carlisle found herself among dozens of American athletes at the White House, and they bowed their heads as Carter draped ceremonial medals around their necks. She said she remembers how drained the man looked, and thinking she would never want his job, and feeling conflicted about a boycott that had dashed her dreams but was meant to protect Afghanistan from Soviet invasion.
Though she could see both sides of the issues, she could not bring herself to watch the Olympics. Not in 1980. Not in 1984. Not in 1988. Her career as a backstroke specialist had peaked before the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and the pain of realizing she’d lost out on her only chance to compete in the Olympics festered. And then, in 1989, something strange happened.
A Soviet armored vehicle leads a convoy on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, in January 1989. The Soviet withdrawal from the country was scheduled to be completed by February 15, 1989, under the terms of the Geneva agreement.
Following a business trip in New York, she was in the back of a cab headed for John F. Kennedy Airport and trying to figure out why the cab driver was growing excited. He was listening to a radio report in a language she didn’t recognize.
The cab driver told her he was Afghani, that he had been a banker in his native country before he and his family fled the country when the Soviets had invaded. On the radio, a report in English followed.
The Soviets had announced the withdrawal of their troops.
Carlisle wept.
A year later, on a business trip in Moscow, she found herself seeking closure. She wanted to swim in the Olympic pool where she had been destined to compete in 1980. So she called every contact she could think of, including one of Russia’s top swimmers. No one could help. Undaunted, she grabbed her bathing suit and caught a ride to the site of the Olympic pool.
She walked up the steps and looked down at the padlocked doors. Peering through the dust-caked windows, she felt as if she were at a gravesite.
The pool was empty.
“That was the closure to my journey,” she said. “There were tears then, too.”
It felt like a death, Carlisle thought, but the grieving began to subside. She’d gotten involved in a group for former Olympians in northern California and took charge of the newsletter. They gather every four years for a “Welcome Home, Olympians” dinner, and whether the international stage was Barcelona in 1992 or Atlanta in 1996 or Sydney in 2000, the group of about 400 athletes bonded.
Two years later, Carlisle carried the torch on its way to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The moment filled her with pride, and she thought she had made peace with everything associated with the 1980 boycott.
Kim Carlisle, bottom left, with her Stanford 1980 Olympic teammates.But then came the recent Chinese crackdown in Tibet, and the demonstrations that have followed the torch, which arrived in the wee hours of Tuesday morning when Carlisle was among 10 former members of U.S. Olympic teams to greet the Chinese officials.
Wednesday, Carlisle was doing commentary for a local TV station during the torch relay in San Francisco. She likes to think she has put the pain from 1980 behind, but something punctured her sense of equanimity.
Only 10 minutes earlier, Carlisle said that unlike most other athletes from the 1980 Olympic team, she said has made peace with the past. “It’s kind of a ball and chain around their foot,” she said of those who remain bitter.
Carlisle is the mother of two teenagers and a successful businesswoman who owns her own marketing and communications company on the outskirts of San Francisco. She said she doesn’t want to be portrayed as a victim because she considered the 1980 boycott not just a personal loss, but a loss for the entire world.
Looking back on her career, Carlisle cited competing at the 1979 Pan American Games, helping Stanford win the national championship in 1983 and earning a place on 10 U.S. national teams as highlights. But when talk turns to the mounting protests over the torch, her pride gives way to something else.
“I’m beginning to feel angry,” she said. “I’m trying to find my compassion and understanding for people who want to voice their displeasure or feel that we should stop the relay or destroy it.
“If we snuff it out, it’s over. We all go home. That was the feeling in 1980. It’s a myopic view to say, ‘Poor me, I missed out on my chance to win a medal.’ It’s the world that missed out on a chance to come together again.”
