The Summer Games of 1992 - sport.

The Summer Games of 1992 - sport. In the summer of 1992, when Olympic athletes gathered in Barcelona, Spain, a newly reunited Germany competed as one nation and athletes from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) heard the long-muffled national anthems of their various republics. Along with political changes there was drama: the agony of British runner Derek Redmond, his hamstring torn mid-race, as his father helped him across the finish line and an unprecedented gold medal sweep in men's gymnastics. In this article from Collier's Year Book, writer Chris Wood captures some of the more electrifying--and poignant--moments of those games. . The Summer Games By Chris Wood Forget Barnum and Bailey's three rings, forget soccer's World Cup and baseball's World Series, forget even the Super Bowl. Only one event truly fulfills the grandiose claim of being 'The Greatest Show on Earth': the Olympic Games--more specifically, the Summer Olympics. For two weeks every four years, they briefly bring together the world's best athletes in more than two dozen sports, from the classic sprint and long jump to such modern oddities as synchronized swimming. For one dazzling fortnight, across a canvas that extends from the track-and-field oval to the invisible boundaries of the yacht racing course, hundreds of men, women, and, yes, children (what else can you call a 13-year-old diver?) pursue the elusive grail of human excellence before an audience that includes not only the thousands of judges, journalists, and spectators looking on from the sidelines, but an impressive chunk of the rest of humanity as well, watching or listening in via television and radio. On display is more than mere athletic ability, although that is gripping enough. In the heat of the Olympic arena human emotions are laid bare, from the abject disappointment of defeat to the euphoria of victory. And there is evidence of politics, profiteering, and pettiness that even the most transcendent of athletic performances cannot entirely escape when they carry the burden of vast corporate investments, limitless national pride, and years of personal sacrifice. An Athletic Drama On July 25, 1992, Spain's King Juan Carlos I rose from his burgundy-colored armchair in the royal box overlooking the playing field of Barcelona's Montjuic Stadium to declare open the games of the XXV Olympiad. His announcement gratified many Spaniards, for whom Barcelona's selection as the Olympic host city conveyed a welcome recognition of Spain's growing international prominence. But the monarch's use of the local regional dialect of Catalan, banned under Spain's former fascist regime, for his opening remarks underscored more than Spain's new maturity. It was just one of many political ironies of the first Olympics to take place since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But there was also a touchingly personal dimension to Juan Carlos's declaration. Both the Spanish king and his wife, Queen Sofía, are former Olympic sailors. What is more, just minutes before the king's address, his son, Crown Prince Felipe, also a sailor, had proudly borne the Spanish flag into Montjuic Stadium at the head of his country's Olympic team. Felipe's story ended in disappointment: his crew finished in sixth place in the Soling class yachting event. By contrast, others among the 16,244 competitors at the games sailed almost effortlessly to glory. Byelarussian gymnast Vitali Shcherbo went home with no fewer than six gold medals. The U.S. men's basketball team--dubbed the Dream Team by fawning American journalists--never once faced a serious challenge. Cuba's baseballers, Canada's women rowers, and Kenya's long-distance runners all dominated their events. Elsewhere, there were photo finishes--and bitterly disputed judgments. For example, Moroccan Khalid Skah first won, then lost, and then won the men's 10,000meter race after a series of controversial rulings about the role played by a teammate in assisting him to a first-place finish at the wire. Controversy surrounded decisions in boxing, wrestling, volleyball, and synchronized swimming as well. Four contestants (two of them American) were expelled from the games after tests indicated that they had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. A Nation on Display Sensitive to the long-standing perception elsewhere, particularly in Europe, that Spain is largely poor, rural, and underdeveloped, the Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee, as well as the local and national governments, seized the opportunity presented by an anticipated 1 million Olympic visitors and worldwide media attention to showcase the country's accomplishments, investing a total of $8 billion in various public works. Barcelona's subway system, already extensive, was expanded, as was its highway network. The airport was overhauled and renovated. Montjuic Stadium, originally constructed for an international exhibition in 1929, was refurbished and enlarged. A particularly embarrassing civic shortcoming was remedied when Barcelona, Spain's chief port, acquired its first yacht basin and marina. In the most ambitious undertaking of all, a stretch of rundown warehouses and abandoned factories beside the long-neglected Mediterranean waterfront was transformed into a sparkling new district of apartments, shopping areas, and palmetto-lined promenades. During the games, the area served as the Olympic athletes' village, where, for the first time at any games, organizers offered accommodations to competitors and their coaches free of charge. After the games the apartments were to be sold to help house some of Barcelona's 1.7 million people. The Olympic building spree added to an already impressive list of architectural assets, topped by the whimsically surrealistic towers of the incomplete Church of the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family), designed at the turn of the century by Antonio Gaudí. The most stunning addition was a serenely proportioned terraced promenade of cylindrical lights, illuminated fountains, and waterfalls, descending from Montjuic Stadium past the soft dome of the Palau de Sport Sant Jordi (designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki), toward the elegantly futuristic white form of a new telecommunications tower. Pageantry and Politics The Olympic opening ceremonies were viewed by 65,000 stadium spectators and another 3.5 billion estimated television viewers. The main story line, drawing loosely from the legend of Hercules, portrayed humankind's struggle against the chaotic forces of nature. The program also included operatic arias performed by tenors Plácido Domingo and Alfredo Kraus. An archer, who ignited the stadium's Olympic flame in a single shot using a specially designed gas-fired burning arrow, added an audaciously dramatic note. In many respects the games seemed to belong not so much to Spain as to Catalonia, the region of 6 million people whose present autonomous status within Spain is the hard-won result of decades of resistance against repression and neglect under the former Franco regime. On the balconies that line Barcelona's leafy avenues, flags and banners bearing the multiple red and yellow stripes of Catalonia vastly outnumbered the red-yellow-red of Spain. Politics were as much in evidence at the first post-cold war games as at any previous edition. The record number of 172 nations whose athletes attended the games (the first since 1972 not to be the object of any boycotts) was as potent a political statement as any. The 172 included South Africa, cleansed of the worst excesses of apartheid, participating for the first time since 1960; Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia for the first time since before World War II; Slovenia and Croatia for the first time ever. Germany arrived under a single flag for the first time in over five decades. The independent republics of the former Soviet Union (minus the Baltic states, although two Latvian basketball players chose to remain with their former Soviet comrades) also sent a so-called Unified Team, which marched into Montjuic Stadium behind the Olympic flag. But unity quickly dissolved when team members competed as individual athletes: gold medalists were honored with their own republic's anthem, as the flag of Ukraine, Russia, or Byelarus lifted into the Spanish breeze. The republics of Serbia and Montenegro, which constituted what was left of old Yugoslavia, were under United Nations sanctions by the summer of 1992 for what was deemed their support of Serbs fighting in the ongoing civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Athletes from these regions, however, as well as Macedonia, were allowed to compete as 'Independent Olympic Participants.' Commercialism also placed its stamp on the 1992 games. The face of American track star Carl Lewis beamed down, it seemed, from every fifth billboard in Barcelona, promoting Japanese electronics; Nike, the shoe company, erected enormous posters of such celebrated Olympians as Sergei Bubka and Michael Jordan. Somewhere in between were the efforts of many athletes and coaches from formerly Communist countries to find Western sponsors. Athletes at Their Peak Some of the athletes set new standards for the limits of human achievement. The astonishing Shcherbo was one such. Approaching each piece of gymnastic equipment with an insouciance that belied an almost superhuman mastery of space, time, and the geometry of physical exertion, the 20-year-old Byelarussian first led the Unified Team gymnasts to a gold in the team event. Then, as if to leave no doubt whatsoever about who owned the floor of the Palau Sant Jordi, Shcherbo proceeded to nail down personal golds on the pommel horse, the parallel bars, the vault, and the rings, securing for himself the individual all-around gold as well, and an unprecedented total harvest of six gymnastic gold medals. Meanwhile, the women's all-around gymnastics competition went to a 15-year-old Ukrainian, Tatyana Gutsu, also competing for the Unified Team. To the surprise of almost no one, the U.S. Dream Team, composed, with one exception, of established National Basketball Association stars, demonstrated much the same unchallenged superiority that Shcherbo did in its appearances at the Palau d'Esports de Badalona. The U.S. team disposed of its challengers by lopsided margins of as much as 68 points (in the case of Angola), leaving Croatia to take the silver and Lithuania to settle for the bronze. The uneven competitions, however, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm that many on the losing sides showed for being photographed alongside such idols of the sport as Earvin ('Magic') Johnson, Charles Barkley, and Michael Jordan. There was no shortage of suspense on the 100-meter track, however, after women sprinters from the United States, Jamaica, and Russia appeared to cross the wire in a virtual dead heat. It took a close examination of the videotape to determine that American Gail Devers, 25, had tilted across the finish line in 10.82 seconds, a barely perceptible hundredth of a second ahead of Jamaica's Juliet Cuthbert, who in turn led Russian Irina Privalova by the same hair's breadth margin. For Devers the victory was especially sweet. Only slightly more than a year earlier, locked in a battle with her malfunctioning thyroid gland, she had come within days of losing her swollen, bleeding feet to amputation. A belated change in the therapy she was receiving for Graves' disease reversed Devers's prognosis, and her victory in the dash at the Olympics set a golden seal on her recovery. Still, she did not entirely escape disappointment in Barcelona, as she stumbled at the last barrier in the 100meter hurdles and finished fifth in an event in which she had won the world championship in 1991. Devers was not the only Olympian who fought back from a potentially crippling setback. Just ten weeks before the games, Canadian world champion single sculler Silken Laumann was warming up for a rowing regatta in Germany when another boat rammed her fragile craft--shredding the muscles of her right leg. Ignoring doctors' predictions that she might never row again, Laumann forced herself back onto the water, her damaged leg wrapped in layers of elastic bandage. Her courage and determination were rewarded at the Olympic rowing venue at Banyoles, north of Barcelona, where Laumann fought off a last-minute challenge from American Anne Marden to take the bronze. Her performance plainly inspired the rest of Canada's women rowers, who stroked to golds in three other events. Other nations also had their heroes--and heroines. For Great Britain, Linford Christie and Sally Gunnel led the list--he with a 9.96-second gold-medal dash in the men's 100 meters, she with a first-place finish in the women's 400-meter hurdles. China's astonishing 13-year-old diving prodigy Fu Mingxia led that country to fourth place in the medal rankings with a gold in platform diving. For the Cubans, it was their boxers and baseball players: the former, led by rangy heavyweight Felix Savón, took 7 of a possible 12 gold medals, while the latter took the first official Olympic gold medal ever awarded in the American national pastime--leaving the U.S. team out of the medals entirely. Israel celebrated its first-ever appearances on an Olympic medal stand with a silver and a bronze in judo. Kenya confirmed its dominance of the middle-distance and long-distance track events with a clean sweep of the medals in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. At 31, Carl Lewis added a seventh and eighth Olympic gold medal to his collection, edging world record holder Mike Powell in the long jump and anchoring the U.S. 4 x 100-meter relay squad to a sizzling new world record of 37.40 seconds. Lewis's astonishing clocking of 8.8 in the anchor leg quite possibly was the fastest sprint of any kind in history and thus, after his poor showing in the U.S. trials due to a virus, vindicated his reputation as one of the greatest of all Olympians. Meanwhile, American Jackie Joyner-Kersee established herself as perhaps the world's greatest athlete with a second consecutive gold medal in the heptathlon. Joyner-Kersee, who had won a silver in the event in 1984, said that she planned to be back to try for a third gold in 1996. For another top athlete, the 1992 games would bring acute disappointment. Sergei Bubka, the former star pole-vaulter of successive Soviet Olympic teams and current world record-holder in his event, failed twice to clear his first height of 5.7 meters, then was forced out of the competition when he could not clear 5.75 meters in three tries. The women swimmers from China did surprisingly well, bringing home four golds and five silvers. The medal harvest prompted eyebrow raising among some skeptics, who noted that the Chinese had imported coaches from the former East Germany and wondered whether the new mentors had brought along the practice of using performance-enhancing drugs, which were known to have been used by some East German athletes. In any case the star of women's swimming was not Chinese but Hungarian--Kristina Egerszegi, who won the 400-meter individual medley as well as both the 100-meter and the 200-meter backstroke. On the men's side, Russian swimmers dominated the freestyle sprints. Aleksandr Popov of the Unified Team captured both the 50 and the 100 meters; his teammate Yvgeni Sadovy won the 200 and 400 meters. The 1,500-meter freestyle, however, was won by Kieren Perkins of Australia, who knocked almost 5 seconds off his own world record. An especially impressive world mark was set by the U.S. men's 4 x 400-meter relay team, which shattered the oldest record in track and field by taking the gold in 2 minutes 55.74 seconds. The previous record of 2:56.16 had been set in 1968 and equaled in the 1988 Olympics. Another venerable record fell to U.S. hurdler Kevin Young, who won the 400-meter hurdles in 46.78 seconds, bettering Edwin Moses's 1983 record and becoming the first person to break 47 seconds in the event. No records were set in the two marathons, as heat and humidity slowed the pace. The women's event saw the closest finish of any marathon--men's or women's--in Olympic history with Valentina Yegorova of the Unified Team out-dueling Japan's Yuko Arimori by 8 seconds. Hwang Young Cho of South Korea won the men's marathon; the only previous Korean to win the men's marathon was Sohn Kee Chung in 1936, but since Korea was then under Japanese occupation, he was forced to compete under the Japanese flag and under a Japanese name. Sohn, now 80, was present at Hwang's victory; ironically, the 1992 second-place finisher was Japanese. Algeria's Hassiba Boulmerka took the women's 1,500-meter race, pulling away with a powerful kick in the last 200 meters. Her victory was especially hard-won, for in her country Islamic fundamentalists strenuously disapproved of women athletes--especially when they ran in shorts before crowds of men--and she had done some of her training in Italy to escape the derision. Before the games, speculation about the decathlon centered largely around Dan O'Brien and Dave Johnson of the United States, who were relentlessly hyped by their sponsor, Reebok, which launched a $25 million ad campaign asking who was better, 'Dan or Dave?' It turned out to be 'Robert,' as Robert Zmelik of Czechoslovakia took the gold. Johnson, hobbled by a stress fracture in his right ankle, settled for bronze, and O'Brien watched from the stands, having failed, in the U.S. trials, to qualify for the Olympic squad. One of the Olympics' most poignant moments occurred in a semifinal heat of the men's 400 meters, when Britain's Derek Redmond tore a hamstring halfway around the track. Determined to finish despite the terrible pain, Redmond limped on. He was aided by his father, who climbed down from the stands, eluded the security guards, and half-carried his weeping son to the finish line as the crowd roared. One of the games' oddest moments involved a weight lifter from the Unified Team, light-heavyweight Ibragim Samadov. Angered after finishing third on a technicality (although he lifted as much as the top two finishers, he weighed slightly more, which, according to the rules, gave him an advantage), he flung his medal to the ground and stormed off the platform at the awards ceremony. He was subsequently banished indefinitely from the Olympics. German riders shone in the equestrian events, sweeping the individual dressage and winning 7 of the 18 available medals. Australia's Matthew Ryan won the individual three-day event and then led his compatriots to the gold in the team three-day event. And, although he experienced a fall and did not capture a medal, 52year-old Michael Plumb set a record for U.S. athletes by competing in his seventh Olympics. Disputed Decisions Controversy dogged decisions in several sports. Members of the U.S. men's volleyball team shaved their heads to register a silent protest after what seemed to be a victory over Japan was reversed. A jury concluded that an American player, after disputing a line call, had been assessed a second yellow card; this should have meant an automatic penalty point for Japan--which would have given it the match. The use of a previously untried computerized scoring system in boxing, meanwhile, produced results that often seemed to describe entirely different bouts than the ones watched by spectators. Perhaps the clearest example was a 6-5 loss by American Eric Griffin to Rafael Lozano of Spain. A postfight printout of the number of blows recorded by the judges showed Griffin an overwhelming winner, but the new scoring system, which demanded agreement among the judges, put his opponent ahead. A U.S. protest was rejected by officials. A dispute over the marks awarded a Canadian synchronized swimmer produced what was probably the most poignant disappointment. By pushing the wrong button, a Brazilian judge recorded what she later said was an unintentionally low mark for a compulsory figure executed by reigning world champion Sylvie Fréchette. When officials rejected both the Brazilian's attempt to correct the error and a later Canadian protest, Fréchette slipped behind American rival Kristen Babb-Sprague and had to settle for the silver. The result was especially disheartening for Fréchette, who had shaken off the shock of her longtime companion's suicide just ten days before the start of the games in order to pursue her dream of a career-capping Olympic gold. Medals and Memories When the games officially ended on August 9, the Unified Team brought to a close an era of Olympic dominance by the former Soviet bloc, as it led the final medal standings with 112 in all. The United States was second with 108, followed by Germany (82) and China (54). Australia won 27 medals, Canada 18, and New Zealand 10. In their first appearance at the Olympics since being liberated from the Soviet Union, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia took home respectively three, two, and one of the coveted beribboned discs. And, in a particularly humorless irony, three athletes who competed as Independent Olympic Participants from the remnants of war-torn Yugoslavia also went home with medals--all in shooting. Away from the pools, tracks, and playing fields, other participants in the two-week orgy of competition and spectating took away indelible memories, if not medals. Many were of the mile-long block party that seemed to take over Las Ramblas, the tree-shaded main shopping and gawking thoroughfare of Barcelona, each evening as the oppressive afternoon heat loosened its grip on the city. There, tourists of any year can take in such permanent attractions as the stalls that sell a kaleidoscopic array of flowers and a veritable aviary of songbirds and parakeets. Only during the Olympics, however, did the sights also include wandering bands of Australians, faces gaudily painted in the national colors of green and yellow, serenading the crowd to celebrate their country's latest victory at the pool or on the rowing course; contingents of uniformed teenagers handing out bags of M&Ms on behalf of one of the games' most visible sponsors; or Dream Teamer Charles Barkley undoing his reputation as the least diplomatic of Americans by patiently signing autographs between sips of Estrella beer at a bar just off the Ramblas in the picturesque Gothic Quarter some time after midnight. It is in such moments that the Olympic Games manage to transcend not only the tightly focused arena of individual competition but even the most cynical excesses of politics and profiteering that attach themselves like pickpockets to the world's preeminent event of sport. As athletes and spectators from every corner of the globe stumble over phrases from each other's dictionaries or smile and wave in the universal language of gesture, the Olympics, according to no particular schedule and far from any officially sanctioned site, achieve their loftiest goal. Briefly, the Greatest Show on Earth becomes as well the World's Greatest Festival. No gold, surely, is worth more than that. About the author: Chris Wood, now Dallas bureau chief for McLean's, covered the 1992 Summer Olympics for the magazine. Source: 1993 Collier's Year Book. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.