In 1995, John McArdle put down the hammer and stepped out of the ring.
After he graduated from the University in 1979, McArdle enjoyed a 16-year career as a professional athlete, one of few athletes to have competed in parts of three decades.
Athletics behind him, he tried politics. He ran, unsuccessfully, for Oregon representative in 1996 before becoming the mayor of Independence in 1998, a post he still holds.
A curious move, considering that in 1980 politics took away his one and only chance to compete on the U.S. Olympic Team.
While he competed for more than a decade after, making the World Championships team in 1983 and being an alternate for the 1988 Olympic team, many of his teammates’ careers stopped after the 1980 Olympic Trials, the last to be held at Hayward Field. That competition was held nearly four months after President Jimmy Carter announced the U.S. would boycott the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier.
Today, 28 years after they came to Eugene for a spot on a ghost team, almost three-quarters of the athletes will be at the Trials, celebrating their achievements at 3 p.m. on the festival stage and helping in the opening ceremonies. Earlier today, they met with Gov. Ted Kulongoski in Salem.
But back in 1980 as a new college graduate, McArdle knew bad politics when he saw it.
“While I was at the beginning of my career, it was really hard to see so many people who didn’t get the chance to do everything they wanted to do,” said McArdle, 51, now the director of development at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany.
“The hardest part was that (the boycott) didn’t really accomplish anything. It was an exercise in political power,” he said.
That exercise in power was one the athletes wholeheartedly disagreed with, said middle-distance legend Mary Slaney, then an up-and-coming talent running for Athletics West.
“I did not meet one athlete in any sport that felt that the boycott would do any good, for starters, or that it was the right thing to do,” Slaney said.
Like it or not, it was a decision they had to live with. Slaney watched the Olympics from a hotel room in Rome, waiting in front of the TV with most of the U.S. track team.
“The athletes coming from Moscow and from the other countries were coming to Rome to compete next, so we were there and we’re watching our competitors compete someplace we should have been,” Slaney remembered last week. “That was difficult.”
In a sport whose biggest prize only comes around every four years, the decision was especially cruel.
“This really was my retirement,” said Fred Dixon, who was ranked first in the world in the decathlon in 1977, but who would have been 34 years old in 1984, the next summer Olympiad.
For the then 23-year-old McArdle, he moved on. What else could he do?
“Life doesn’t stop; it has to go on,” he said. “You have to keep moving on and do the best you can. We continued to compete.”
Long before athletes arrived in Eugene for the 1980 Olympic Trials, their fate had been sealed by the Carter administration, which made its announcement on March 21, then confirmed it the week before competition began.
That’s not to say the trials became a mausoleum to the sport.
McArdle remembers the hammer throw alone drawing more than 4,000 fans to its site a block away from Hayward Field, where Howe Field now stands.
“Largest crowds that they ever had at that field,” he said.
Runners Leann Warren and Bill McChesney Jr., one of eight Oregon athletes who made the 1980 team, ran improbable races to finish third in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters – Warren going from last to third on the bell lap and McChesney grabbing the lead with three laps left, holding onto third place at the finish.
“You’ll see athletes that may not have a name that just come out of nowhere because it’s the Olympic Trials,” Slaney said.
Still, the atmosphere wasn’t quite right for Dixon.
“It was a little different,” Dixon said. “It changed things a little bit once you knew that there was going to be no Olympics for the U.S. team.”
Even more than the athletes themselves, the spirit of the Olympics was sacrificed, McArdle said. Instead of “quiet diplomacy” that the Olympics foster, he said, the world got publicized agendas. Later, when he competed internationally and sat with competitors from around the world, he realized what the U.S. had missed in Moscow.
“Everybody, it’s idealistic, but everybody feels that politics and sports shouldn’t mix,” Slaney said.
McArdle still isn’t happy that athletes were sacrificed for politics. Twenty-eight years of perspective have given him the time to think about it. Remembered by most as the only Olympics that America didn’t compete in, McArdle remembers his and his teammates’ performances the most.
“That is still something I’m very, very proud of,” he said. “Nike talks about the most difficult team to make? Darn right.”
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