1980: Moscow Olympics
July 20, 2019
By AHNZ
Today in New Zealand History, 19 July 1980, the Moscow Olympics opened for business. New Zealand officially snubbed the Games for the competing event, the Liberty Bell Classic.
Westerners weren’t cool with the Commies invading Afghanistan. The Yanks gave Osama bin Laden a very particular set of skills. Rambo pitched in. Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand refused to attend the Olympics. After all, we had gone to the Nazi Olympics and that turned out to be embarrassing later.
New Zealand Attended Nazi Olympics
What if Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage refused state support to the New Zealand 1936 Olympic team to compete in the Nazi Berlin Olympics?
That seems reasonable in hindsight! Embarrassing that it wasn’t done? Imagine they did and that the PM telephoned Mr Wattie for a word or two about an employee who insisted on running on Hitler’s track. The employee says ‘get stuffed’ and attends anyway, under his own Kiwi, not NZ, flag, and the government simply left it at that.
Sub in 1980 for 1934, Soviets for Nazis, Moscow for Berlin, Muldoon for Savage; No longer hypothetical…
New Zealand Refuses to Attend Communist Olympics
New Zealand’s official team did not go but, led by athlete Brian Newth, a rogue team did attend under a Kiwi flag of their own.
It was in Muldoon’s power to stop Newth but all that happened was a legitimate phone call of concern to his employer, Watties. Newth didn’t have to burst a blockade, just had to play at his fancy rich-boy hobbies (equestrian, fencing, shooting,..) on his own dime with his own flag. I do respect him for having done that.
Somehow, the horrors of totalitarian Stalin somehow feature less in our minds than the lesser atrocities of Hitler’s reign.
“The campaign waged by the New Zealand Government of the time was extremely nasty and more in keeping with the actions of a totalitarian state than a democracy,” says Newth.- Athlete who told Government to ‘get stuffed’ tells his story; NZ Herald
Fellow citizens, Newth’s alleges, are responsible for bomb threats, blood letters, phone threats etc. So why blame Muldoon’s “totalitarian state” for waging a campaign against him?
The most controversial thing someone like Newth could do these days would be to perform at Trump’s presidential inauguration of 2017. It doesn’t stretch the imagination to think New Zealand’s Prime Minister and the public would have disapproved. Huge pressure would be upon a representative of New Zealand not to do so and few would appreciate a ‘don’t mix politics with sport’ stand.
When New Zealand sent the All Blacks to tour South Africa or had the Springboks tour here no such standard was respected. Indeed, the All Blacks tour of 1976 incited many nations to boycott the Montreal Olympics of that year. When the Springboks came to New Zealand we all know what happened then- riots and violence!
The institution of not mixing politics with sports is an admirable Dignity Culture premise. In times of Tribal Culture (HC, VC) the mainstream only cares about Identity Politics, in-groups vs out-groups; Everything is personal, everything political. Newth and his Olympians were ‘firing’ the first shots of the era that would become KZ7 Honour Culture (c. 1980-87.)
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Image ref. Gold against the soul: An athlete’s story of the 1980 Moscow boycott; CNN
Image ref. Jack Lovelock winning Nazi Gold; Alexander Turnbull Library
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