I was going to link to this on last week's all-blog Thursday renewal, but that was pre-empted, so I'll pass it along here because it's worth it -- Now THAT'S Amateur's marking of last Tuesday's anniversary of the United States' pullout from the 1980 Olympics, which led to the tit-for-tat Soviet bloc's boycott of the '84 Games:
One thing I know for certain: the 1980 boycott was a tragedy for sport. The world's best athletes were robbed of an opportunity to meet on the playing field, not once, but twice. Those individuals who were brave enough to publicly oppose the boycott, like Canada's Diane Jones Konihowski, suffered even worse.
To the IOC and the international Olympic movement, these athletes simply do not exist. But in Canada, they hover in a sort of twilight zone. Although the COC joined the boycott on April 22, 1980, they still named 212 athletes (and a flagbearer) to the Olympic team. All of those athletes can be found in the COC's athlete database, distinguished by the soldier's identification: a Name; a Serial Number (database id); and finally a Rank, which is universally denoted by the three letters DNP.
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