International Olympic Committee : News

France adds Olympic gold to European title

8/11/1984 12:00:00 AM

The summer of 1984 proved to be a golden one for the France and its footballers.

Led by the inspirational Michel Platini, France claimed its first major football title when it won the European Championship on home soil with a 2-0 victory over neighbours Spain in the final.

The Olympic football competition started a couple of days after that memorable day in Paris, and France would again be triumphant.

The 1984 Olympic Games was the first to allow professional footballers the chance to play, the only exception being that players that had previously appeared at the World Cup would be barred.

Coached by the great Henri Michel, the French side made an inauspicious start, drawing their opening match 2-2 against the unheralded Qataris in Annapolis.

Francois Brisson struck a second-half winner against Norway in their second game while a 1-1 draw with Chile in their final group match was enough to see them through to the knockout stages as the group winners.

Elsewhere, Yugoslavia and the brilliant Brazilians, who included future World Cup-winning captain Dunga in their squad, won all of their group matches.

France cruised past Egypt in the quarter-finals before they played out an outstanding semi against the Yugoslavs. Two goals up after just 15 minutes, France were pegged back and forced into extra time.

Goals from Guy Lacombe and Daniel Xuereb saw them to a place in the gold medal match against favourites Brazil.

Over 100,000 fans crammed into Pasadena’s Rose Bowl to watch the two joust for gold and it was second-half goals from Brisson and Xuereb that saw the French to the title.

Under Michel’s tutelage, France would again beat Brazil in a classic World Cup quarter-final which ended in a penalty shootout in Guadalajara, Mexico two years later.

South Korea win gold, but Fairhill memories linger long

8/11/1984 12:00:00 AM

Fairhill was a promising young athlete when she was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident at the age of 22. She was paralysed from the waist down.

Like so many that have disability thrust upon them, Fairhall was determined not to let it affect the commitment she applied to her sporting career.

Six years after an accident that would have had many doubting they had any future in sport, Fairhill competed in the 1972 Paralympics in Heidelberg in track and field.

Prior to the 1980 Games in Arnhem she had decided to focus her attention on archery. She won the gold medal in the Netherlands and then achieved such a high standard that she was able to start competing against able-bodied athletes.

Perhaps her crowning achievement came at the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane when she took gold.

Asked if her static, wheelchair position gave her an advantage over her rivals, she calmly replied: ‘I don't know. I've never shot standing up.’

The history books will show that Fairhill finished a disappointing 35th at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, but they will also detail that she was the first wheelchair-bound athlete to compete against the able-bodied.

The tournament was won by Seo Hyang-soon, the first South Korean gold medallist in the event which would be dominated by the Asian country, which won all but one of the seven golds on offer since.

Although she didn’t figure in the higher echelons of Olympic competition, Fairhill was a pioneer for the Paralympic movement, bowing out of international competition after the 2000 Games in Sydney.

She died at the age of 61 in 2006 following complications related to her illness.

Graceful Aouita heralds new age of distance running

8/11/1984 12:00:00 AM

With Steve Ovett and Seb Coe in the twilight of their running careers, Aouita was the first of a barrage of north African runners who would dominate the Olympics over a range of distances in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Aouita was all grace; if Leonardo Da Vinci had conceived of the perfect running man the chances are he would have looked a lot like the little Moroccan in full flow.

Tempted out of a career in football by his coaches and mentors, Aouita opened a reign of dominance that would see him unbeaten over 5,000m for almost a decade.

His impact paved the way for the likes of Algeria’s Noureddine Morceli and another Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj to earn glory on the world’s biggest stages.

Aouita was 25 when the Olympic Games in Los Angeles came around, and he’d already secured the world title the previous year in Helsinki.

He was among the favourites and his heat time, a full ten seconds faster than the winner of the first qualifier, sent out a warning to his rivals.

He was renowned for a sprint finish but a series of broken world records in subsequent years showed he could live off an excruciatingly fast pace as well as using a decisive kick at the death if need be.

He ran the perfect tactical race in the final at the Memorial Coliseum. The pace was exchanged between Portuguese runner Antonio Leitao and the Swiss Markus Ryffel.

Aouita was poised on Leitao’s shoulder for what seemed like most of the race and when the bell sounded the Moroccan looked strong. He made a slight move with 300m to go and was matched only by Ryffel.

When Aouita saw the Swiss’ response he increased the pace and quickly built a five-metre lead. He cheekily kissed to the crowd with around 80m to go, knowing the gold was his.

He won in an Olympic record time and many north African runners were able to single out that moment as the inspiration for their own glittering running careers.

He won gold at the 1987 world championships also and dropped to the 800m for the Olympics in Seoul but finished third behind Kenya’s Paul Ereng.

Coe defies critics to claim unique double

8/11/1984 12:00:00 AM

Devastated at the loss in his favoured 800m days earlier by arch-rival and fellow Briton Steve Ovett, Coe claimed the ultimate salvation by winning gold in the blue riband 1,500m.

That iconic win in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium must have seemed a world away to Coe as the Los Angeles Games of 1984 neared. His form had taken a huge dip in the intervening years. He had been misdiagnosed with glandular fever when in fact he was suffering from potentially a much more dangerous infection, toxoplasmosis.

While Coe spent much of the time in hospital, Ovett, another Briton Steve Cram and the American Steve Scott vied for his mantle as the finest middle distance runner in the world.

Cram won the 1983 world championships in Helsinki in clinical style while the era of Moroccan runner Said Aouita was also in its formative months.

Never far from controversy, Coe was selected in Britain’s three-man 1,500m team for the Los Angeles Games despite a loss in the trials to the unlucky Yorkshireman Peter Elliott. It was a brave selection decision which was to reap fine reward.

The weather and schedule in Los Angeles made it a gruelling 10 days for the runners, and Ovett was among the hardest hit by the high temperatures and draining programme.

He won his heat but later complained of chest pains and after a strenuous 800m campaign was only just declared fit enough to start the race.

Coe was in the familiar position of looking for glory in the 1,500m after defeat in his favourite race, the 800m.

This time Brazilian Joaquim Cruz had denied him the two-lap gold and pressure was mounting on Coe, not least from the feverish British press, to again make amends in the 1,500m.

Scott took on the pace in the final in a bid to tire the likes of Coe with the big finishing kicks. Spaniard Jose-Manuel Abascal took up the pace in the final 400m.

When the loping Cram made his move on the outside with 250m to go, Coe’s response was emphatic.

He entered the straight with a yard or so lead and he pulled away from the helpless Cram, who completed a 1-2 for Great Britain.

Coe’s response after crossing the line in Olympic record time said it all. He stared at the press box with real venom as if to say: ’Who says I’m finished!’.

His steely gaze never dropped on his lap of honour, sternly illustrating with his finger who he thought was No 1.

He had become the first man to successfully defend the 1500m crown to cap one of the most remarkable Olympic careers of them all.

Meyfarth returns for record second gold

8/10/1984 12:00:00 AM

Just three months after her 16^th birthday, the leggy jumper from Frankfurt stunned her more experienced counterparts by improving her personal best by almost two inches and snatching the gold medal on countback.

It was a remarkable entry onto the international stage, not least because she had qualified as the third of Germany’s entries in the field.

A combination of poor form, injury and the boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow restricted her appearances on the grand stages of track and field, but a silver behind Tamara Bykova at the 1983 world championships announced her return to form.

From 1982 to the time of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Meyfarth and Bykova regularly exchanged the world record with the women’s landmark height surging past the two-metre mark.

With Soviet Bykova absent from the Games, it was left to a battle of the ‘veterans’ between Meyfarth and the elegant Italian jumper Sara Simeoni.

Simeoni sent the crowd at the Memorial Coliseum into raptures by becoming the first women to clear two metres in an Olympic event, only for Meyfarth to follow suit immediately after.

The failure of home favourite Joni Hartley to go clear at two metres did little to calm the crowd’s excitement and it was left to a shootout between the two Europeans, and it was Simeoni who blinked first.

Meyfarth completed a superb clearance, more convincing than her previous successful effort which had rattled the bar, at 2.02m to extend the Olympic record and make sure of the gold.

Simeoni was unable to follow suit and Meyfarth secured a quite remarkable record; the youngest ever track and field gold medallist at Munich had become the oldest ever female high jump champion.

She emulated the feat of Polish runner Irena Szewinska in winning golds 12 years apart, while just four years later her oldest high jump champion record was beaten by American Louise Ritter in Seoul.

Puica triumphs after iconic Decker-Budd clash

8/10/1984 12:00:00 AM

The record books will show that Romania’s Maricica Puica won the gold medal on a sunny evening at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, but that only tells a tiny fraction of the remarkable story.

For this was the race where the long-awaited, controversial clash between America’s darling Mary Decker and the barefoot, South African-born Zola Budd came to a dramatic head.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to believe that all the strands of this story came together in the way they did but the image of Decker falling to the ground in agony after clipping Budd’s leg is right up there with the most iconic moments in the history of the Games.

The year previously she had brilliantly completed a 1500m-3000m double at the world championships in Helsinki, and with the powerful Eastern Bloc absent it seemed like victory was hers for the taking.

However at a small meeting in South Africa in January 1984, the 17-year-old Budd smashed six seconds off Decker’s world 5000m record. It sent shockwaves through the sport.

Banned from the global sporting arena because of South Africa’s apartheid regime, Budd’s world record was not recognised by the governing bodies and she faced a career on the outside looking in at the rest of the world’s top athletes.

Yet news of her world-beating exploits reached the UK where a national newspaper funded Budd’s father and his bid to secure his daughter a British passport by virtue of his own father’s birthplace.

Helped by clearing bureaucratic hurdles that took others years to overcome, Budd was awarded a British passport in double quick time and the showdown everyone was talking about with Decker was on.

The tabloid press on both sides of the Atlantic had an absolute field day in the lead-up to the Games, the British newspapers working themselves into a frenzy like they had with Seb Cioe and Steve Ovett four years previously.

The race itself has become the stuff of legend.

Budd and fellow British runner Wendy Sly pulled clear of the pack with Decker and Puica. With just over four laps to go Budd and Decker had their first coming together but both recovered their stride.

But a few paces further and Decker was brought crashing to the ground when Budd cut to the inside with the American too close behind her.

Decker tried to get back on her feet but she had done serious damage to her left hip and she was left in tears on the inside of the track.

She was inconsolable. Her husband and medical staff came to her assistance but she was in floods of tears, and the crowd vented their spleen on Budd.

She was booed at every turn even though the incident had left her with a bloody foot from Decker’s spikes.

Puica and Sly pulled clear of the clearly toiling Budd and the Romanian pounced in the final 200m to clinch the first ever gold medal at the distance. Budd finished seventh.

Budd was initially disqualified for her movement to the inside of the track but on appeal the ban was rescinded, and after the bitter acrimony that followed the race had died, it was generally accepted that it was a normal racing incident, no-one was specifically to blame.

Charismatic Thompson wins second decathlon gold

8/9/1984 12:00:00 AM

A supremely gifted, and outspoken, athlete who turned decathlete after initially targeting a sprinting career, Thompson eventually went on to win two Olympic gold medals.

The Briton celebrated his 18th birthday the day he finished 18th in the Montreal Games of 1976, but it was clear even then the teenager from Notting Hill was destined for greater things.

He crushed the opposition four years later in Moscow and showed the first signs of his impish cockiness by humming God Save the Queen while the Olympic anthem was played in the medal ceremony at the Lenin Stadium.

Britain’s athletes had gone without the backing of the Margaret Thatcher government and the Olympic anthem replaced the British national anthem at all medal ceremonies.

As he walked off the track, Thompson theatrically clicked his heels to the delight of the Moscow crowd, who had given him a standing ovation as he completed his victory at the end of the final event, the 1500m.

The man who must have been most frustrated by Thompson’s immense talent, commitment and cheek was West Germany’s Jürgen Hingsen.

The German was the world record holder going into the inaugural world championships at Helsinki in 1983, but Thompson again prevailed on the big stage setting the scene for another major showdown in Los Angeles.

Thompson enjoyed a scintillating opening day under the sun at the Memorial Coliseum. He recorded personal bests in the 100m, long jump and shot putt to put himself 151 points clear of Hingsen.

However the giant German, who measured two metres tall, gradually gnawed into Thompson’s lead at the start of day two, and when the Briton recorded two awful throws in the discus his hopes truly hung in the balance.

Thompson would later say he felt he was ‘looking over the cliff’ as he walked to the throwing circle for his third and final effort.

He threw 46.56m, a personal best, and it completely knocked the stuffing out of the German. Hingsen fluffed the pole vault and Thompson extended his lead and he could run a relaxed 1500m to ensure his second win.

He became the first athlete to successfully defend the Olympic decathlon title since American Bob Mathias at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Thompson courted more controversy with comments and a cheeky T-shirt in his press conference, when reflecting on what turned out to be the high point of his career.

Coutts’ meteoric rise starts in Los Angeles

8/8/1984 12:00:00 AM

When Coutts arrived as an inexperienced 22-year-old at the 1984 Olympic regatta at Long Beach, California, he was not expected to vie for the title against the cream of the world’s Finn class sailors.

He had a youth world title under his belt from three years earlier, but his performance over seven races in the California sunshine were to propel him towards one of the greatest sailing careers of them all.

Coutts would later become a four-time winner of the America’s Cup, the most prestigious event in the sport’s team calendar, and it was the tenacity that marked his 1984 gold medal in Los Angeles that singled him out as a great of the future.

The waters off Long Beach offered perfect, warm conditions for sailing and from the very opening race of the series it was clear Coutts’ main rival for the top step of the podium would be American sailor John Bertrand.

The race opened in controversial circumstances. In the first race Bertrand was adjudged to have clipped Coutts’ bow and he was disqualified.

The worst finishing position of a sailor’s series can be cancelled out but it meant the pressure was on Bertrand for the rest of the competition, any mistakes could have proved fatal to his chances.

However the American showed a steel resolve to claw back the deficit on Coutts, who was racing in pain due to boils on his bottom caused by the friction, salt and heat inherent in top-flight competition.

Bertrand won two of the next four races and the pressure was right back on Coutts in the closing two showdowns.

But the New Zealander held his nerve and crossed the line in the final race with a 3.7 point advantage over the home favourite.

The drama did not end there however.

When Coutts attended the post-race weigh-in it was discovered his clothing and outfit were marginally over the 20kg limit and disqualification was a very real threat.

On the third time of weighing, after his clothes had dried and he arranged them more beneficially, he was finally confirmed the winner, and his one and only Games ended in a golden shimmer.

El Moutawakel breaks down barriers with hurdles gold

8/8/1984 12:00:00 AM

Women had never competed in the 400m hurdles at the Olympic Games prior to Los Angeles in 1984, and in becoming the inaugural winner El Moutawakel’s win was as impressive as it was unexpected.

The absence of the world-leading Eastern Bloc countries meant the field for the event was wide open, and the best times in the qualifying rounds were set by American Judi Brown and Ann-Louise Skoglund.

El Moutawakel, who had failed to qualify for the semi-finals at the world championships in Helsinki the previous year, won her heat easily enough but was some way behind the best in terms of time.

The African champion was in by far the fastest of the semi-finals and her third place behind Skoglund was comfortable enough but it looked like she had a lot of class to make up on the leading candidates.

It was a beautiful day in the Memorial Coliseum for the final and from the moment the starter’s pistol sounded there looked like only one winner.

She chased down her rivals on the back straight and only a slight stutter on the hurdle at the last bend looked like unsettling her run to the gold medal.

With millions watching back in her home town of Casablanca, she thrust her arms into the air as she crossed the line a good five metres ahead of Brown in second place.

As she milked the crowd’s applause, scenes of wild jubilation broke out in Morocco as she became her country’s first ever female gold medallist at an Olympics as well as being the first Muslim woman to triumph.

She has gone on to have a stellar career once she hung up her running spikes, becoming a council member at the IAAF and a senior member of the International Olympic Committee.

Fast-finishing Cova seals gold

8/6/1984 12:00:00 AM

Only Ethiopia of the continent’s powerhouses was missing because of the boycott at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles yet only six Africans made it to the final at the Memorial Coliseum. Compare that to 12 years later when the first eight in Atlanta hailed from Africa.

The lack of focused African pace-making meant the race would inevitably boil down to who had the fastest finish, and within the qualifiers for the final there was an absolute master of the 11^th hour kick for the line.

Italian Alberto Cova burst onto the international scene when he beat East Germany’s Werner Schildhauer by half a yard after a trademark late dash for the line at the 1982 European Championships in Athens.

He repeated the trick to become the inaugural world champion at the distance the following year in Helsinki, Schildhauer again the unlucky man to see the flying Italian surge past in the dying moments.

With East German Schildhauer absent, there was no clear rival to Cova who just sat back as a race of modest pace played out in Los Angeles.

Rangey Finn Martti Vainio tried to break Cova’s kick by going for home over 3500m out but as Cova kept the Scandinavian in his sights there was only going to be one winner.

Cova cut him down in the final 200m and thrust his arms towards the sky as he became the first Italian to win the event in the history of the modern Games.

He won a silver at the Europeans in Stuttgart two years later and retired from international competition soon after he failed to qualify for the final of the Seoul Games of 1988.