The Olympics and the Miracle on Ice The brightest
moment of the 1980’s might very well have taken
place just two months into the decade. In 1980, no
professional athlete (as defined by the West) could
take part in the Olympics. The absence of paid ath-
letes allowed for the larger-than-life story that was
the triumph of the U.S. men’s hockey team, which
won the gold medal in Lake Placid. Although the
U.S. team had no professionals, many of its members
would go on to play in the National Hockey League
(NHL). Along the way, the Americans defeated the
vaunted Soviets, a team considered the best in the
world and that included, many in the West believed,
professionals because of the subsidies provided to
them by their government. The Soviet Union in-
sisted that it was never in violation of Olympic rules.
Just six years later, the distinction between “ama-
teur” and “professional” was a moot point; the terms
had been deleted from the Olympic Charter, the
document that outlines the rules and regulations of
the Olympics. Among the first sports to benefit from
the inclusion of professionals was tennis, which after
a sixty-four-year hiatus returned to the Olympic pro-
gram in 1988. In Seoul, one of the best tennis players
in the world, Steffi Graf, won a gold medal.
Politics also overshadowed the Olympic move-
ment during the 1980’s. President Jimmy Carter led
a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, in protest of
the Soviet Union’s military invasion of Afghanistan
in December, 1979. Though widely criticized both at
home and especially abroad, Carter’s boycott call
was endorsed by a number of Western nations. So-
viet and East German athletes, in the absence of
many of their Western colleagues, dominated the
Games, winning a combined 321 medals. The image
of the Olympics as a place for athletes to gather in
friendly competition free of international politics
had been shattered.
Four years later, the Soviets led a boycott of their
own and refused to send their athletes to Los An-
geles, the site of the 1984 Summer Games. Thirteen
Eastern Bloc nations joined the Soviets, who said the
boycott was necessary because the United States
could not guarantee the safety of Soviet athletes
while they were on American soil. American ath-
letes, especially swimmers such as Mary T. Meagher,
and track-and-field stars, most notably Carl Lewis,
took advantage of the missing Eastern Bloc athletes
to win numerous Olympic medals. The entire coun-
try seemed to revel in Olympic fever.
Although the Americans, the Soviets, and their al-
lies were reunited at the 1988 Summer Olympics in
Seoul, they actually had the chance to compete
against each other two years earlier. In the mid-
1980’s, Ted Turner, founder of the Cable News Net-
work (CNN), began what he called the Goodwill
Games, which brought together athletes from the
Eastern and Western Blocs in an athletics program
that included multiple Olympic sports. The first
Goodwill Games took place in 1986 and were hosted
by Moscow. The games were broadcast in the United
States on Turner Network Television (TNT), a net-
work that was owned by Turner at the time. The loca-
tion allowed American audiences a glance inside the
Soviet Union, a somewhat rare opportunity during
the Cold War. The Goodwill Games continued into
the early twenty-first century, but their expressed
purpose—to allow athletic competition to trump in-
ternational politics—was never more important than
in 1986.Football In the final seconds of the 1982 National
Football Conference (NFC) championship game at
Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Dwight Clark of
the San Francisco 49ers ran to the back of the end
zone and jumped as high as he could. When he came
down, a football that had been thrown by quarter-
back Joe Montana was in his hands. “The Catch,” as it
has become known, not only allowed the 49ers to de-
feat the Dallas Cowboys and advance to the fran-
chise’s first Super Bowl but also ensured that the
49ers would become the NFC’s glamour team for
the remainder of the decade and beyond. Though
the Cowboys were considered “America’s Team,” the
49ers would go on to win 159 regular-season games
and five Super Bowls over the next fourteen years.
If the 49ers were the NFC’s premier team during
the 1980’s, the closest equivalent in the American
Football Conference (AFC) was the Denver Bron-
cos. Although the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders
had a strong reputation and Super Bowl victories in
1981 and 1984, during the decade the Broncos won
more regular-season games (ninety-three to eighty-
nine) and appeared in more Super Bowls (three to
two) than the Raiders. The Broncos lost those three
championship games by a combined score of 136-40,
highlighting an era in which NFC teams, including
the 49ers, were simply better than their AFC coun-
terparts. The Broncos (who went on to win two
Super Bowls in the 1990’s) built their team aroundThe Eighties in America Sports 905