Wanda Wakefield. What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition

Transcription

1 Wanda Wakefield What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition Wanda Wakefield SUNY College at Brockport, USA While much has been written about the effect of the Cold War on sports, from analysis of the 1972 Canadian-USSR Hockey Series, to the various Miracles on Ice, to critiques of the doping regimes embraced as state policy by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), relatively little has been written about the process of transition from Cold War to post-cold War sports. This paper will explore the process of the transition of sport through the lens of the International Luge Community. The break-up of the Soviet Union left the newly independent Latvia with the only sliding track in the former USSR. Meanwhile the unification of East and West Germany required luge enthusiasts on both sides of the Wall to create a new sports organization embracing the skills and talents of athletes and coaches from the GDR and the FRG. Evidence concerning that transition will include an analysis of the 50 year history of the FIL (Federation Internationale de Luge), newspaper and magazine articles, and personal observations from the author, who was there when the Latvian flag was raised over the luge track at Lake Placid for the first time. By looking at the singular sport of luge, patterns specific to the transition across all sports, winter and summer, can be developed and further studied. Everything changed. While almost no one would have predicted it at the end of the summer Olympic Games at Seoul, South Korea in 1988, everything was about to change. When the Olympics reconvened at Albertville, France for the Olympic Winter Games in 1992 everything had changed. Longtime assumptions about the permanence of the political arrangements arrived at at the conclusion of the Second World War proved to be just that assumptions. As it turned out, the Soviet Union and its empire could not be held together, despite the huge importance Soviet governments had put on creating a national identity based on a shared ideology and a shared goal to resist the lure of capitalism and its material wealth. As it turned out, the post-war division of Germany into East and West could not be maintained, despite the enormous effort expended by the government of the German Democratic Republic to create a real East Germany defined by its excellence in international sports. And, as it turned out, the Yugoslavian state established after World War I was not a state at all, but a conglomeration of people holding a variety of religious and ethnic identities with no common loyalty or commitment to a Yugoslavia. And during the turbulent years which saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia along with the reunification of Germany, sports officials, coaches, trainers, and athletes were forced to find their way across the confusing landscape of change affecting everything they had known as they prepared for the 1992 iteration of the Olympic Games. In any event, the question at hand is, what did this mean for all of those involved in the sports programs of the GDR, Yugoslavia, and the USSR? Would athletes from the former GDR be welcomed 96

2 What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition 97 by West German Olympians? And what about the athletes who competed for the Soviet Union in 1988? Would they compete for the new countries with which they identified or compete for a Unified team or for the Russian Federation? Likewise, what would be the fate of athletes from Yugoslavia? Would they play for Croatia, or Slovenia, or Bosnia-Herzegovina or Serbia, or would they play for what remained of the Yugoslavia they had known in their childhoods? In this paper I will examine the process that brought together a team of athletes from both East and West in a newly unified Germany. Likewise, I will consider the efforts of former Soviet republics, especially the Baltic states, to establish themselves as independent players on the Olympic stage. Finally, I will look at the fate of Yugoslav athletes as the IOC struggled to decide who could come to Barcelona and who could not. The Olympic Winter Games: Albertville, France, 1992 The situation facing the international sliding sports community as the East German government imploded in November 1989 is especially instructive for understanding how international federations and their national governing bodies responded to the challenge of political change. In the decades that followed the admission of luge to the Olympic program in 1964, sliders from the German Democratic Republic had dominated the sport. When athletes from the GDR participated in the first Olympic luge competitions at Innsbruck, Austria, in 1964, they did so as part of a combined German team, as required by the International Olympic Committee. But in the official history of luge at the Olympic Games, 50 Jahre FIL 50 Years FIL, the Olympians from 1964 are recognized by whether they were from the West Germany or East Germany. Over the years, sliders from East Germany dominated Olympic luge competitions. In fact, there was no occasion during the period when sliders from the GDR failed to take a majority of the Olympic medals. And they were equally dominant in World Championships and World Cups during the same years. 1 When Germany reunited, then, the question was what role GDR and FRG athletes, coaches, and administrators would ultimately play in the combined team. One answer came with the 1989 FIL meetings at Albertville, France. That year, Josef Fendt from the FRG was elected Vice President for Sport and Klaus Bonsack from the GDR was elected Vice President for Technical Matters. By the FIL meeting in 1990, Fendt and Bonsack were no longer identified with those entities but as representatives of a single Germany. 2 While Bonsack obviously was able to maintain his position with the International Luge Federation, other sports administrators and coaches from the former GDR were struggling to find their place under the new system. 3 While many coaches and sports officials from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) set off to find work outside of Germany, athletes as well had to fight anew to be included on future German teams especially those athletes tainted either by allegations of doping, or more crucially in 1992, tainted by association with the East German secret police, the Stasi. Before the Olympic Winter Games at Albertville, Klaus Kotter, President of the German Bobsleigh, Luge, and Toboggan Federation asked his athletes to disclose whether they had ever worked for the secret police. The bobsled pilot, Harald Czudaj, admitted that he had been used by the Stasi to spy on his own teammates, but explained that he would not have done so had he not been blackmailed after a drunk driving arrest. While Kotter s position was that any athlete whose work for the secret police affected the lives of other athletes, causing them to lose their jobs or be arrested led to job loss or arrest for a member of the German team would be suspended, Czudaj s teammates announced that they had forgiven him and he was able to drive their sled during the Olympics. 4 While Czudaj was able to justify his actions, other East German athletes were strongly criticized after reunification for their presumed

3 What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition 98 cooperation with authorities. One of those athletes was figure skater Katarina Witt, who had always seemed to cozy up to the East German government. Another was the swimmer Kristin Otto, who retired from the sport after being publicly criticized for the advantages she had gained due to her success under the old system. Other famous East German athletes had their cars vandalized or were hassled on the street. 5 Meanwhile, the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, required the International Olympic Committee to figure out which new National Olympic Committees should be recognized and invited to compete in For the Baltic states, the process was relatively smooth as the Olympic movement had already recognized National Olympic Committees from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia before the countries were annexed by the USSR during World War II. Therefore, at Alberttville, Baltic athletes competed as citizens of their newly independent nations. But what about the athletes from the rest of the old Soviet Union? After much discussion, the International Olympic Committee invited a unified team of athletes from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to the 1991 Olympic Winter Games. While, according to Andrei Petrov from Izvestia, there was much ambivalence among Russian sportswriters about this arrangement, for many athletes nothing much seemed to have changed. 6 Indeed, as Tamara Moskvina, Soviet pairs coach explained, while the cost of ice time, costumes, and training had gone up, Truthfully, these changes have not affected the preparation of these couples [the gold and silver medalists] greatly. 7 Other former Soviet athletes also effected a smooth transition from the old system to the new. The Unified Team s ice hockey team won another gold medal to go with the gold medals won by Soviet hockey players in 1956, 64, 68, 72, 76, 84, and And the Unified Team was able to do so even without their traditional uniforms backed by the CCCP. The Summer Olympics, Barcelona, Spain, 1992 Between the conclusion of the Games at Albertville and the beginning of the 1992 Summer Olympics at Barcelona, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch weighed in on the political changes that had occurred since Seoul. Beyond the Olympic Committee s quick recognition of the new Olympic Committees for the Baltic states and a reunified German Olympic Committee, Samaranch argued that the IOC played a part in facilitating those changes. As he put it, the International Olympic Committee had been feeling the effect of the wind of freedom that is blowing across our planet a phenomenon we often helped to create. 8 While the IOC under Avery Brundage had endeavored to ensure a single German team during the 1950s and 1960s, by 1968 that effort had failed. During the subsequent two decades, scholars would be hard put to identify any particular action by the IOC that created freedom. But if Samaranch wanted to claim that mantel in 1992, there were still matters to be resolved before the Games began. One of those matters was the organization of the 1992 Olympic basketball tournament. Samaranch had opened the doors to professionals early in his tenure as IOC President, and the result of his decision was fully on view at Barcelona. During the tournament, the American Dream Team put on an exhibition of their sport that was both beautiful and indicative of the stupidity of denying great athletes such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird a chance to have competed earlier in their careers. As Magic told reporters, he had been hurt that I didn t get a chance to compete for a gold medal [in the past] but was ready to show the world his skills in But the tournament had another Dream Team, that of the men from Lithuania. In 1988, the Latvian Arvydas Sabonis and his colleagues, the good shooting guards Rimas Koutinaitis and Sarunas Marchulionis, had made up the bulk of the Soviet team that defeated the United States in a semi-final game at the Seoul Olympics

4 What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition 99 in 1988 and then went on to win gold. Four years later they would arrive in Barcelona in uniforms designed by the Grateful Dead s chief designer and play their way to a bronze medal. 10 The bronze medal showed that the Lithuanians had avoided what Sarunas Marciulionis said would have been a tragedy had they been beaten in the semi-finals by the Unified Team. Reflecting the on the joy of Lithuanian independence, Marciulionis said afterwards that winning bronze at Barcelona was better than winning gold in As he put it, This is an important event, perhaps unique in our lifetimes. 11 While the presence of the Lithuanian basketball team at Barcelona was virtually assured by the end of 1991, the fate of the Seoul silver medalists from Yugoslavia was not. The stars of that Yugoslav team were ready by 1992 to play only for their new countries and not for their old. Thus, Drazen Petrovic, who had pursued a professional career in the United States after Seoul, affirmed that he would not play for Yugoslavia at Barcelona, but would be ready to play for Croatia, which had been admitted to the Olympic movement as an independent country, if asked. Meanwhile, the Serb Vlade Divac expressed his wish that the old Yugoslavian team could get together one last time but failing that, would play for the rump Yugoslavia should it end up in the Olympic tournament. 12 Unfortunately for Divac. his Olympic dreams were dashed in the wake of the wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. The IOC eventually decided that Yugoslav athletes could compete at the Games only as individuals, so Divac was not able to play as part of a team and missed the Olympics. 13 On the other hand, Petrovic joined his Croatian teammates in winning a silver medal after losing to the Dream Team in the Final game of the tournament. Conclusions And so the International Olympic Committee had handled the vast changes following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the elimination of Communism in Europe in a variety of ways. They had allowed athletes whose countries had already been recognized internationally, such as the Baltic states, to come together to play at both Albertville and Barcelona. They had dealt with the situation in the Balkans before Barcelona in a way that allowed a team of Croatian basketball players to play for Croatia rather than Yugoslavia. And they established a structure that would allow athletes from the former Soviet Union to play their best as part of a Unified Team until such time as the Olympic road-show settled down again this time in Lillehammer and Atlanta. Endnotes 1 Further information about the International Luge Federation can be found in its official history, 50 Jahre FIL: 50 Years FIL, : History (International Luge Federation: Salzburg, Austria, 2007). 2 Ibid. 3 Marc Fisher, East German Coaches Seek Work with West German Teams, Washington Post, 15 November For a retrospective discussion of the results of reunification, see Thomas Kistner, Still Divided: The Unification of East and West German Athletes Has Led to Fewer Wins that Ever, The Atlantic Times, October, 2009, at accessed August 2, Stephen Kinzer, Albertville; German Bobsleds to Carry Reminder of Police State, New York Times, 13 February 1992, B, 19; Allan B. Gold, Albertville; Bobsledder Publicly Apologizes for Spying on Teammates, New York Times, 17 February 1992, C5.

5 What Happened Afterwards: Sports and the Post-Cold War Transition See Michael Janofsky, An Upheaval in Sports, Too, New York Times, 11 December 1989, C1; Tarpley Gers News, New York Times, 19 November 1989, S8. 6 Serge Schnaemann, Albertville; A Unified Feeling of ambivalence, New York Times, 25 February 1991, B, Michael Janofsky, Albertville; No Longer Soviet Skaters, But They are Still the Best, New York Times, 12 February 1992, B9. 8 Speech by HE Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the I.O.C., 294 Olympic Review, April Clifton Brown, Basketball; U.S., in No Surprise, Will Go With the Best, New York Times, 22 September 1991, 8,9. 10 David Rohde, Olympics; Baltic Republics Hope for Donations from Abroad for Olympics, New York Times. 11 Barcelona; Lithuania Avoids Tragedy, New York Times, August 9, 1992, 8,4. 12 Politics May Hinder Basketball Abroad, New York Times, 27 October 1991, 8,4. 13 Barcelona; Bosnian Delegation Certified, New York Times, 24 July 1992, B, 13. As someone interested in sport I missed paying sufficient attention to the IOC s 1992 decisions concerning the former Yugoslavia. While I knew that Croatia and Slovenia were in, and that Bosnia-Herzogovina was recognized at the last minute, I failed to catch the situation with regard to another break-away republic. I only realized how the IOC had finessed the Macedonian situation in 1995 when I went to the white-water canoe and kayak test event at Ocoee, Tennessee. On the official program from those test races a few athletes were identified as coming, simply, from the Former Republic. Former Republic I said to myself what is that? Only later did I learn that the Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia was forced to refer to itself as the Former Republic because of objections at the UN from Greece, which also has a region called Macedonia. Wow.