Former President Jimmy Carter turned Bob Giordano's Olympic dream into a nightmare.
President Carter's decision to boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 has frustrated former elite U.S. weightlifters who were set to compete in their first Olympics but were outraged at home.
“It's the biggest disappointment of my life,” Giordano, 73, who is 6-foot-1 and weighs 225 pounds, told The Post, a week before the 2024 Paris Olympics open on Friday.
The Cedar Grove, New Jersey, resident insisted he bore no “ill will” toward the 99-year-old Carter, who is now in hospice care in Georgia, but said when given the opportunity he would tell him his decision was “totally wrong.”
“It was a political spectacle. It was wrong,” Giordano said. “I think he still strongly believes he was right.”
Afghanistan was in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union when President Carter vowed that the United States would lead a boycott of the Moscow Olympics if Soviet troops, who had invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, did not withdraw.
For athletes who oppose the boycott. Bruce Clemens Photography
The February 20th deadline came and passed without any reaction from Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Two days later, the 1980 U.S. ice hockey team in Lake Placid stunned the Soviets in the famous “Miracle on Ice” game.
But a month later, Carter announced a summer boycott.
“Ours is not going,” the president said, “and I'm not being vague about that. The decision has been made.”
“I'd been training for that moment for 10 years,” said Giordano, who served as a spokesman for opponents of the boycott. He said many other U.S. Olympians had never forgiven Carter.
He was selected for the 1980 Olympic team. Helaine Seidman
“I tried to tell him the best thing we could do was beat them. [the Russians] “They're playing their own game on their own land,” he reasoned.
Giordano also endured “nasty letters” and “death threats” for his courage in standing up for his beliefs, including one from a man who described himself as a “Montana vigilante” and used racial slurs to threaten to kill him.
He ran a successful private law practice and then
Administrative Law Judge, retired in 2017. Helaine Seidman
Giordano followed the advice of his fellow Olympians to “give up” and graduated from Seton Hall Law School in 1987. He went on to have a successful private law practice and then served as an administrative law judge before retiring in 2017.
Still, he said he has hardly watched any of the Olympics since the boycott, instead concentrating on life with his wife, Sue, with whom he has had a “happy life” of 43 years, and their three children and six grandchildren.
“The boycott had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet occupation for 10 years caused that collapse. The Soviets overdid it,” Giordano argued. “The only result of the boycott was that 502 U.S. athletes did not participate.”
