XXV Olympiad: Barcelona 1992, Lillehammer 1994

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY

THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT

VOLUME 23

THE

XXV OLYMPIAD

BARCELONA 1992

LILLEHAMMER 1994

by George G. Constable

W

Warwick Press Inc.

Toronto

Copyright © 1996 WSRP

The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research & Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.

Published by:

Warwick Press Inc., Toronto

www.olympicbooks.com

1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison

Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley

Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman

Art Director: Christopher M. Register

Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons

Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske

Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin

Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez

Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee

Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin

Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat

Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto

Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany

Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg

Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O’Neil

Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters

Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)

Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).

International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)

International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Valéry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)

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ISBN 978-1-987944-24-2 (24 Volume Series)

ISBN 978-1-987944-22-8 (Volume 23)

CONTENTS

I

FAREWELL, COMRADE

II

SHADES AND SHADOWS

III

PRIDE AND PROMINECE

IV

SAINTS AND SINNERS

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PHOTO CREDITS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

CATALAN DANCE

Barcelona isn't the first city of Spain, but it is the capital of Catalonia, a region with a culture and language different from the rest of the country. The opening ceremony was a colorful and lively pageant that combined the flair of Catalonia with the romance of Spain, creating a celebration of Olympism that was a fitting finale to the last Games of the first Olympic century.

Spectators were greeted with a lively sardana, a traditional Catalan welcoming dance, and it was impossible to avoid seeing La Senyera, the Catalan flag, with its vertical red-and-yellow stripes, waving throughout the stadium, and hearing the playing of EI Segadors, or The Harvesters, the Catalan national anthem. The pageant of Barcelona history included a ship (right), representing Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.

The rest of Spain wasn't ignored. There were flamenco dancers, typifying the cultures of other regions of the country; and opera stars Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, and Montserrat Caballe, who sang a medley of 17 arias from Spanish-themed operas like The Barber of Seville and Carmen.

Heroism received its due when actors staged a play depicting the adventures of Hercules. The mythical demigod battled a series of wild beasts metaphorically defending humankind against its baser instincts, much as the athletes at the Olympic Games are meant to do.

The athletes arrived at the close of the musical numbers. A record 169 delegations took their places in the stadium infield. They were greeted by Barcelona mayor Pasqual Maragall, who made a plea for peace in war-torn Yugoslavia before asking King Juan Carlos to declare the Games open.

The ceremony neared its climax when Herminio Menendez, a canoeist and three-time Olympic medal winner for Spain, jogged into the stadium with the Olympic flame. He passed it to basketball player Juan San Epifanio Ruiz, who delivered it to Antonio Rebollo, a 1984 Paralympic bronze medal winning archer, waiting with a bow and arrow.

Rebollo lighted his arrow with the flame and fired it at a cauldron stationed at the top of the stadium. The flaming arrow found its mark, igniting the bowl for a dramatic finish to what was just the start of a Games soon filled with great moments.

FAREWELL, COMRADE

BARCELONA 1992

Ex-Soviet gymnasts was the locution journalists used to describe them. It was an awkward way to characterize these three brilliant performers-awkward but inevitable, and somehow very much in the spirit of the 1992 Olympic Games at Barcelona.

Twenty-year-old Vitaly Scherbo, 21- year-old Grigori Misiutin, and 22-yearold Valery Belenky were classic products of the Soviet sports machine. They had been spotted as prospects in childhood, enrolled in special sports schools, and given the best coaching that rubles could buy. Over the years, they shared a march to stardom-living and training together, and often winning together. In the first item on the men's gymnastics program in Barcelona, for example, they jointly earned a gold medal in the two day series of compulsory and optional exercises known as the team all-around event. The next contest, however, called for togetherness to take a backseat to self. They would be battling for the individual all-around tide, striving for the highest total score in a full spectrum of gymnastic tests-e-on the horizontal bar, parallel bars, horse vault, pommeled horse, rings, and the floor exercises. To finish first in this competition was to stand alone atop the sport's highest peak.

It was easy to picture any of these three young men there-a place where great Soviet gymnasts had often stood before. But no Soviet would win the event in Barcelona. Indeed, no Soviet could win. The reason was simple: Soviets no longer existed. The previous year, the political entity known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had come unglued and been replaced-in part-by a federation of 11 former Soviet republics, pointedly known as the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Those republics-including Georgia, which declined to join the Commonwealth-had retained their sporting ties for the moment, sending their athletes to the 1992 Olympic Games in a makeshift assemblage called the Unified Team. But the name in no way implied a shared homeland. Vitaly Scherbo, for example, proudly described himself as a Belorussian. Misiutin noted that he was Ukrainian. Belenky identified himself as an Azerbaijani.

Below: Grigori Misiutin performs a routine on the pommeled horse, his worst apparatus in the all-around competition. Misiutin had the best scores of all competitors in the high bar and horse vault. He had the second-best scores on the parallel bars, rings, and floor exercises. A seventh-place finish in the pommeled horse relegated him to the silver medal.

For Olympic officials, the political fissuring of the USSR had posed some tricky questions in regard to flags and anthems. After delicate discussions, it was decided that, in the opening-day ceremonies at the Barcelona Games, athletes from the former Soviet republics would march as a group but under their own national flags. In medal-awarding ceremonies, the choice of anthem and flag would depend on whether the medal was for an individual or a team: An individual winner on the Unified Team would be honored by the appropriate republican flag and anthem; a team medal, however, would be honored by the five-ring Olympic flag and Olympic anthem (the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Not everyone was comfortable with this compromise. When Vitaly Scherbo heard the generic anthem played after a Unified Team victory in a pre-Olympic meet sponsored by the International Gymnastics Federation, he said, I didn't like it. I didn't know who I was competing for-the gymnastics federation, Beethoven, or what. His conclusion: We are competing for ourselves.

That Scherbo, Misiutin, and Belenky would do well in the individual all-around event was a foregone conclusion. All except Scherbo had laid claim to the title of best all-around gymnast by winning past international competitions, and Scherbo hadn't missed by much: At the 'gymnastic world championships the previous year, he had finished second to Misiutin. Now all three ran true to form. As the finals of the event unfolded in Barcelona, they took turns holding the lead. The gold medal was still up for grabs when they reached their last exercises in the rotation. At that point, Scherbo was ahead of the other two by a narrow margin, but his lead looked far from secure.

Below: The Soviet Union may have been fractured, but its former gymnasts were able to celebrate together as the best all-around team. It included Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who would compete on separate teams at the 1996 Games.

Misiutin's last turn came on the horizontal bar, which usually brought out the best in him (he was the current world champion). On this occasion, with the most coveted of Olympic gymnastic titles at stake, he executed his routine well and released into a triple somersault and secure landing. The judges awarded him a score of9.90. Belenky's final routine was in the floor exercises; he earned 9.825-not good enough. Then came Scherbo. He had to perform on the rings, his least-favorite apparatus. Moreover, he needed a score of 9.80 to merely tie Misiutin, and no one had done that well on the rings all night.

But this night belonged to the Belorussian. He launched boldly into his routine of flips, handstands, and other acrobatics, holding the audience spellbound. The critical moment was the dismount, and he nailed it, perfectly balanced when he hit the mat. The judges gave him a 9.90. As of that moment, Vitaly Scherbo was the best all-around gymnast in the world.

He was by no means finished. During the remainder of the gymnastic program, the Belorussian anthem would play four more times as gold medals were hung about Scherbo's neck. His overall showing in Barcelona was the stuff of legend, the kind of athletic glory that the Soviet sports system had been designed for. But with that system and its communist underpinnings in disarray, Scherbo was thinking like a capitalist. After the Games, at a news conference with other members of the Unified Team, reporters asked him about his plans. He told them that he might move to Germany or the United States and that, no matter where he lived, he hoped to earn a good living from gymnastic exhibitions in the West. I will go for the most money, he declared. We all will.

Lenin would not have approved.

In many ways, the 1992 Games in Barcelona was a watershed for the Olympic movement. Vitaly Scherbo's frankness about money reflected one fundamental change-total acceptance of professionalism at the Olympic Games. Until the 1970s, leaders of the Olympic movement had fought to keep professionals out: Money corrupted sport, they argued; it undermined the fairness and purity of athletic competition. Since 1981, when the term amateur was finally stricken from the Olympic charter, the Olympic rule book, the Games had slowly and inexorably moved toward open competition where the best athletes, professional or otherwise, could compete and market their fame from being Olympians. Only a handful of sports, such as boxing, baseball, and hockey in the Winter Games, still demanded an amateur purity, and even those sports would loosen the professional restraints in later Olympiads.

The list of top professionals who took part in the 1992 Games included Carl Lewis in track, Steffi Graf in tennis, and Michael Jordan in basketball, all of whom made extremely good livings from sport. Not counting outside income from endorsements and other sources, members of the U.S. basketball team, dubbed the Dream Team by the American media, alone earned $33 million a year, far more than the total amount that London spent to put on the Olympic Games in 1948, and even Rome in 1960.

Below: Michael Jordan, a star of the American National Basketball Association (NBA), studies a defender before making a move. The inclusion of NBA stars like Jordan was the greatest indicator that the Games were now open to the best athletes in the world, amateur and professional alike.

The Barcelona Olympics not only reflected the realities of sport but also said much about the general state of the world, most of it positive. A record 169 national teams accepted invitations to these Games, sending about 10,000 athletes in all. For the first time since 1972, no country chose to boycott the Olympics to protest the behavior or policies of other nations-territorial, racial, or whatever. South Africa, kept out of the Olympics since 1964 and frequently cited as the reason for boycotts or boycott threats, was dismantling its apartheid system of racial separation and had been welcomed back into the Olympic fold. A neighboring country, Namibia, had been granted independence by South Africa and made its Olympic debut in Barcelona.

For the first time since 1948, the Cold War did not chill the proceedings. Cuba, North Korea, and several other staunchly communist countries that had absented themselves from the 1988 Games in Seoul were pleased to accept an invitation to Barcelona. The capitalist Yemen Arab Republic and the communist People's Democratic Republic of Yemen had merged and sent a single team. So did the formerly separate nations of East and West Germany. They were now one, with no wall between them.

Not all national relationships were evolving smoothly in the post-Soviet era, however. Czechoslovakian athletes marched under a single flag in Barcelona, but their country was about to split apart, as suggested by its current name: the Czech and Slovak Federated Republic. The former Yugoslavia was fraught with tensions. Some of its components-Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia-were allowed to participate under their own name; others-Serbia and Montenegro--were listed as as Independent Olympic Participant (lOP) and denied an anthem and flag. The Serbs regarded the move as biased against them, but the IOC stood on firm ground: These last two remnants of the former Yugoslavia did not yet have recognized national Olympic committees. The IOP listing meant athletes from these regions would not get punished because of political concerns.

Below: Flag bearers for the Unified Team, each carrying the standard of their former Soviet republic, march in the Parade of Nations in Barcelona's opening ceremony. There were a record 169 delegations taking part in the 1992 Games.

Yugoslavia's sporting problems were minor compared to the truly epochal changes underway in the territories where the hammer-and-sickle flag had long flown. The Soviet Empire had entered its death throes back in the mid-1980s. A moribund economy, a corrupt and incompetent government, and numerous other ills beset the vast corpus created by the Russian tsars and their communist successors over a period of six centuries. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, he attempted reforms, but his efforts did little to arrest the decay and instead whetted the public's appetite for more freedom. In early 1991, several of the Soviet Union's constituent republics moved to loosen their ties to the central government, and Gorbachev was helpless to stop them. Then Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania-three Baltic republics that Joseph Stalin had acquired in a cynical deal with Adolf Hitler in 1940-sought full independence from Moscow.

In August of that year, a group of reactionaries, alarmed by these events, attempted to depose Gorbachev and take power, but the coup was thwarted by the leader of the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin. In the days that followed, the Communist Party was shut down and its property turned over to the people. Gorbachev's power faded and Yeltsin's grew. The Baltic republics were set free. Most of the other republics remained affiliated in the Commonwealth of Independent States for the moment, but that grouping looked wobbly at best.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) adapted quickly to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. In mid-September of 1991, the IOC's Executive Board announced that the three Baltic republics were reintegrated into the Olympic movement with immediate effect. This, Olympic officials explained, was simply a restoration of their former status: Those republics had been independent countries before Stalin seized them, and they had also been full members of the Olympic movement. As for the other republics of the former USSR, the IOC, on March 9, 1992, granted them provisional recognition but asked that they compete together one last time. With the Barcelona Games just five months away, the complexities of a split were too great; the republics were not yet equipped to field their own teams. Said IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, This agreement means the athletes will not be punished. The most important thing [is] to stick to the principle that the best athletes from all the 12 republics should participate in Barcelona. But the so-called Unified Team was a one-time fix. In future Olympics, the republics would be on their own.

Below: Antonio Rebollo takes aim at the stadium cauldron 195 feet away at the top of Montjuic Olympic Stadium. Rebollo, a two-time Paralympic archery medalist, capped the opening ceremony by igniting the bowl by hitting it with his flaming arrow.

STRAIGHT ARROW

The Olympic flame in Barcelona wasn't touched off by a runner, it ceremony, Antonio Rebollo, a Paralympic medal-winning archer, ignited the stadium cauldron by shooting a flaming arrow into it from a distance of 195 feet. He only had one shot, but Rebollo made good on it, and the stadium erupted in cheers.

It was a new way to ignite the cauldron, but everything else about the Barcelona torch relay followed the tradition-laden routine. The Olympic flame was ignited at Olympia, Greece, on June 5, 1992. Greek runners took a day relaying the flame to Athens. It stayed overnight at the Acropolis, the ancient Greek hilltop shrine, before being carried to the Panhellenic Stadium for a brief ceremony.

The flame was then transported to the harbor of Piraeus, where it was transferred to the Catalunya, a Spanish frigate. The Catalunya took five days to sail to Emperies, an ancient Greek trading colony located in modern Spain. Rowers dispatched from the Catalunya brought the flame to Spanish soil.

The flame was carried throughout Spain in 42 unique stages over the next 12 days. The route covered nearly 3,700 miles, stopping at 38 cities, plus trips to the Balearic and Canary Islands. Runners carried the flame by foot, bicycle, and boat. Even IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, a Barcelona native, took part by running a segment of the relay in his mother's hometown of San Sadurni d'Anoia. Royalty also got involved. Spanish king Juan Carlos participated when the relay passed the royal palace in Madrid and, in the Balearic passage, when the flame was brought to Barcelona on board the Rosalind, a ship owned by the Count of Godo, an aristocrat from the island.

It was slow going when the flame reached Barcelona. Runners carried the chrome-plated aluminum torches (left) in roughly 800 foot stages through city streets that were clogged with spectators. It took three hours to go from the port of Barcelona to Montjuic Olympic Stadium, but it arrived just in time for Robollo, who waited patiently with his bow.

By the time the Unified Team was concocted, the old Soviet sports machine had already come to an ignominious end. In December 1991, the state sports agency, Gossport, closed down. With hyperinflation sapping the economy and the republics resisting monetary demands from Moscow, the central government could no longer afford to support 12,000 coaches, 40 sports schools, 50 sports colleges, and the various other elements of a spare-no expense system that had made the USSR the greatest sports power on earth-winner of 674 Olympic medals since 1972, versus 500 for the United States. Some of the training institutions were kept open by the republics, but many shut their doors. At the same time, the generous salaries that had always been paid to top athletes in the Soviet Union were drastically reduced or entirely cut off. To compound the difficulties, ethnic conflicts broke out in Georgia and Armenia, and many athletes who had lived and trained there were forced to seek facilities elsewhere-not easy to do in such turbulent times.

Below: Barcelona is one of two major Spanish harbor cities. Its chief claim to fame is its status as the starting point for Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World, an achievement memorialized by a monument (foreground) in the city's port.

Simply finding funds to get the Unified Team to Barcelona proved difficult. Finally, some capitalists came to the rescue: Smirnoff, the American vodka maker, agreed to be a sponsor of the Unified Team and supply the necessary travel money. Olympic officials were greatly relieved. Participation by the 648 members of the Unified Team ensured that, athletically, these would be Games of a high order. Then, too, there was a sense of symbolic rightness. The notion of 12 restive republics joining hands in sport was very much in tune with the philosophy of Olympism: The movement had been founded at the end of the 19th century as a way to promote international brotherhood. Indeed, this idea was implicit in the Ode to Joy anthem that would be played to celebrate a victory by the Unified Team. Beethoven had composed his music to accompany soaring words of amity: Joy ... thy magic power reunites all that custom had divided. All men become brothers under the sway of thy gentle wings.

For 16 days in the summer of 1992, that sentiment seemed very apt.

Apt too, was the choice of Barcelona for these Games. This was a city that knew about cravings for independence and political balancing acts. As the capital of Catalonia, a region stretching from the Pyrenees down the northeastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, Barcelona had long seen itself as unlike the rest of Spain. It had its own language, Catalan, which was markedly different from Castilian Spanish, the official language of the country. Whereas Castilian Spain was associated with a fondness for hierarchy and a kind of dreamy romanticism, Catalans tended to be commonsensical, earthy, and democratic. Their feeling of cultural separateness at times had fueled a fierce yearning for divorce from Spain (a feeling shared by many Basques, another Iberian people who possessed a distinctive language). But nationalistic urges abated after 1979, when Catalonia gained a considerable degree of self-rule as an autonomous region, one of 17 created in a fundamental restructuring of Spanish governance.

At the time of the 1992 Olympic Games, Catalans still held themselves apart from the rest of Spain, as any visitor to the city could easily detect. Thousands of red-and-yellow Catalonian flags hung from Barcelona balconies, but the Spanish flag was pointedly absent, except in the Olympic stadiums and arenas. (There, as evidenced in medal ceremonies, a Catalan was considered a Spaniard. However, local athletes were allowed to march under their own flag in the opening ceremonies and the Catalan language was used in all official announcements.)

Barcelona's pride had sturdy foundations. The host of the 1992 Games was a huge, prosperous metropolis-a great port and industrial center sprawled across the coastal plain, with a gleaming bay in front and a line of hills rising behind. About 1. 7 million people lived in the city proper and at least two million more were clustered around it.

Below: American souvenir pins for Barcelona 1992 included a discontinued USA Today pin (left), a corrected version (center), and an NBC pin.

Below: Sagrada Familia, the unfinished creation of Barcelona architect Antonio Gaudi, is the art nouveau master's attempt at creating a 20th-century cathedral in Gothic style. Gaudi guided construction of the building from 1883 to 1926, when he died after being hit by a car.

Along with its economic vigor, Barcelona could boast of being a center of the arts. Among its native sons were the cellist Pablo Casals and the painters Joan Mira and Salvador Dali. Pablo Picasso had spent some of his formative years here. And Barcelona had produced one of the great architects of the 20th century, Antonio Gaudi, known for a uniquely sinuous and theatrical style. One of his creations-the unfinished Sagrada Familia, a multi-spired temple dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family-came to be seen as a signature of the city, much like the Eiffel Tower for Paris.

Traces of a deep and eventful history were visible throughout Barcelona. The first settlers, arriving around 15 BC, were Romans; they chose the spot because it was adjacent to one of the few natural harbors along that section of the Iberian coast and had a handy water supply in the form of two small streams flowing into the sea. Over the next few centuries, the colony shipped wheat, wine, and other local produce to cities around the Mediterranean. On at least one occasion, it also exported Olympic talent: A chariot racer named Lucius Minicius Quadronius Verus traveled to Greece to compete in the Games of the 227th ancient Olympiad. He won.

The Roman settlers here were mostly former soldiers, and they spoke a version of Latin that was less formal and more freewheeling than the speech of Roman colonists elsewhere in Spain. Time widened the