Left: lighting the Tallinn Olympic flame in 1980 for an Olympic regatta – indeed an Olympic Games – where at least half of the major medal favourites stayed at home. We often hear about the largely Anglo Saxon sailing teams that were absent, but track and field fans sometimes need to be reminded than many of their ‘gold medal heroes’, including from the UK, were also racing against much depleted opposition. Below: seen it all raced it all. Gus Miller made and continues to make an eloquent case for the lasting damage to the sport brought about by the consequences of that half-hearted boycott of 40 years ago. After a minimum of four years’ dedicated preparation, among the medal favourites kept away a significant number will go on to suffer serious personal issues directly attributable to the turmoil of that summer
professional Olympic sailors, but he was never part of Menkart’s big group out of Fort Lauderdale, preferring to do his own thing out on the west coast. But between Bertrand’s small San Francisco group and the Fort Lauderdale squad the Europeans had quickly realised that by 1979 US Finn sailors had developed a whole new way of sailing the boat – and it took the Europeans a couple more years to catch them up. ‘The stupid boycott killed that power-
house American Finn group stone dead. ‘And that was it. In 1980 the USA
owned the Finn class. They had dominated the past three Finn Gold Cups. There was no question that, whoever it was, an American was going to get the gold in 1980. And get it by a big distance. There was no one close to them. ‘If that had happened and the US had a
Games and completely dominated all the events, then that would also have sent a pretty strong message. ‘I was so ignorant. I was just a young
kid, but in hindsight it was complete bull- shit. In the Olympics your window of opportunity to win a medal is not that big. ‘In 1984 I ended up screwing up the
Finn trials and went in the Star boat. After that you are starting to get too old. But after 1980 for some weird reason I just kept plugging away. That’s probably why I don’t sail much now. I just did it for too many years.’
A generation lost Finn legend Gus Miller, still competing in 2023 aged 88, has a darker view of the last- ing damage wrought by an ill-conceived intrusion of politics 40-odd years ago. ‘John Bertrand won the Pre-Olympics in
1978. Stewart Neff [who died in 2021] was second and I was third. We had a really strong team in the US. Cam Lewis was also here that year but he was goofing off! ‘For the US trials in 1980 before the
boycott the Europeans were going to charter a plane to come over and watch the US trials as there were any of eight
50 SEAHORSE
guys who could win it, and they thought that it would be the Finn race of the year. ‘Cam [Lewis] had won the previous
1979 Gold Cup in Weymouth and won it again in New Zealand in 1980 in strong winds. Carl Buchan was (and still is) an absolutely superb sailor. ‘In the US there was also this Florida
training group that included Lewis, Neff, Andy Menkart, Buzz Reynolds and Alex Smigelski. That was powerful! ‘When Carter declared the boycott most
of them put their boats away, but when they announced they were going to have a trials as a booby prize some guys decided to go. I think the only guy who continued training and practising the whole time was Bertrand. Buchan found his boat some- where and the others just grabbed their boats out of the weeds and showed up in Newport for the “trials”. ‘At the end I felt that Menkart was sail-
ing better than Bertrand but Bertrand took it on the last beat of the last race. ‘Bertrand was a good sailor, a phenom-
enally good sailor. JB changed dinghy sail- ing with that super-athletic approach… much as Elvstrøm did 30 years before. ‘He was also the first of the real
gold medal, which it has never had in the Finn class, then I think that would have drawn more guys into it – instead US Sail- ing decided to put the Finn aside and focus on boats like the Laser. The upshot was that many of the best right-sized guys never bothered to start sailing Finns. ‘Worst of all was that his very destructive
political boycott was a huge strategic blunder on Carter’s part! The Olympics brought lots of foreigners into the Soviet Union, which was otherwise prohibited. All those guys coming into Moscow, and to Tallinn, formed friendships with the Rus- sians and Estonians that produced all kinds of relationships and stories about those rela- tionships. There were marriages and other things that came out of the pre-Olympics. ‘Those stories spread across the Soviet
Union and that was precisely the kind of thing that the Soviet Union didn’t want to have happen. So you could make the case that Glasnost and Perestroika would have happened four or five years earlier than it did if there hadn’t been a boycott. ‘Of course today people forget all the
bad stuff that followed, lives that in a few cases were pretty screwed up. Talk of not going to Marseille or LA 2028 because of this or that rights abuse or political stance. I’d like to tell them to think very carefully indeed about what they are saying. Maybe read up a little on what happened to some of the actors last time.’
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ROBERT DEAVES
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