1980 swimming olympic trials

Moffet, meanwhile, finished second for his second consecutive year, having lost to John Simons in at nationals. Simons went on to take fifth at Trials with a Mills and Moffet had Nick Nevid to chase in the finale, as Nevid went out explosively fast with a The duo, however, paid the price for the strategy by fading to the final two spots at the finish. At the metre mark, Moffet then took the lead, I could see somebody just ahead of me off the last wall but I didn't know who it was.

I had a good finish but I was awful lucky too. Left Sidebar. Sentiment that had swayed pro-boycott suddenly surged against the decision. As late as April 24, , the U. Again, nothing, and the U. Swimmers lived through that spring in a steady state of uncertainty. Still, the stress intruded. And it was really slow motion. Because every step of the way, there was always something [that] gave everyone hope that yeah, it would be reversed.

Of the 45 members of the U. Olympic swim team, 22 were in high school the spring leading up to the Trials. As teenagers, they knew little of the political minutiae beyond broad-strokes coverage on the nightly news, but they also felt less cheated than their older teammates.

In , there was no such thing as a career in swimming, no chance to pursue the sport as anything but an amateur. And their times from that summer would have won the Olympics, even with these Germans and Soviets and doping for women. John Hencken, a breaststroker who won two gold medals in Montreal, had put his career on hold to train for the games; he was 26 at trials. Though he made the Olympics in , he missed medaling by one spot. It has to do with, where were you from an age perspective?

Were you an up-and-comer? Were you already there at the top of the mountain, And, you know, basically, four years from now, you wouldn't have made it, or you were already on the decline? Four years later, LaBerge had a poor showing and fell short of qualifying for a second Olympic team. So you're just an optimistic person, if you're going to go after it.

When LaBerge finished her final event in Irvine, she had 74 points; only three women tallied more. She did have a passport, and she did compete in China. But first, the team had a cross-country engagement. When she looks at her picture with the president, she sees the Band-Aids before everything else. At the lunch, the 45 swimmers each received what they believed to be a commemorative medal, gold plated with bronze. Few thought much of the gifts, preoccupied with the idea of Hawaii or China.

He went so far as to find the Congressional Record from , tracking the dates when legislators made the decision to honor the Olympians. And so what could they do? This is a last-minute decision to make these medals, and they had to do with the only way they could, which is the U.

Mint made them out of bronze and then gold-plated them. But for others, it opened old wounds. Mills remembers hearing chatter among his former teammates that they should ask for new, solid gold medals.