[Sport] Friendship Games 1984: When Great Britain took part in the 'Iron Curtain Olympics'

[L-MOK7H]

https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/58822355

Jayne Mitchell turned the key and pushed open the door.

"There was a small single bed, a weird thing in the bathroom that seemed like a mix of shower and bath, and this dodgy wallpaper, grease patches all over it, that looked about 100 years old," she remembers.

Three weeks before, on 28 July 1984, a man on a jet pack had flown into the Los Angeles Coliseum to open the city's Olympics. But in a divided era, Mitchell was on the other side.

Instead of Los Angeles, she was in Prague. Instead of the athletes village, she was in a low-rise hotel. And instead of the Olympics, she was at the Friendship Games.

They were an alternative Games for a different world view. After the United States and a clutch of its allies had stayed away from the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the Soviet Union and its allies retaliated with their own boycott four years later.

Pravda, the Soviet state newspaper, said the Friendship Games, organised by the USSR and its satellite states, would show "that Socialist society provides more favourable facilities for the human beings' all-round physical and spiritual development".

Sergey Bubka, the fresh-faced 20-year-old Soviet pole vault world holder, went further.

''It is a pity that the Olympic flame in Los Angeles was darkened by the spirit of profit-making," he was quoted as saying by the Soviet Union's official press agency.

"The atmosphere of anti-Soviet and anti-socialist hysteria in the USA prevented athletes from most Socialist countries from participating in the Olympic Games.

"We hope that 'friendship' competitions will show to the world at large anew the strength of athletes from socialist countries and their loyalty to the Olympic ideals."

Mitchell, then aged 21 and competing under her maiden name of Andrews, had little knowledge of what she and the four-strong British team of female athletes were getting into.

And, more pressingly, as she stood surveying her sparse hotel room, she had no luggage.
Short presentational grey line

The Friendship Games had its own opening ceremony. One with fewer jet packs and more political messages.

In Moscow's Lenin Stadium, about 100,000 spectators, including future leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the VIP seats, watched troupes of dancers go through precisely choreographed routines.

Banners were unfurled exhorting the 'health of the people' and the place of sport in the Communist government's latest five-year plan.

Finally, there was a song. Specially composed for the event, it included the lyrics: "To a sunny peace, yes, yes, yes, to a nuclear war, no, no, no."

As Mitchell and her team-mates had gathered together on the tarmac at Heathrow, they'd thought they were heading to a regular continental meet.

Joyce Hepher was a long jumper. She had gained the distance to qualify for Los Angeles - but only two days after the British team had already been submitted to the International Olympic Committee. There was no way of adding her. So, instead she was boarding a plane to Prague, where the women's athletics events for the Friendship Games would be held.

In all, nine countries served as hosts. The table tennis was in North Korea, the boxing in Cuba.

"I only heard about it a week before we are about to travel," Hepher, then competing under her maiden name of Oladapo, tells BBC Sport.

"I had no idea about the magnitude of it all. I initially thought it was a Grand Prix type meeting and it was only when we arrived at the hotel and saw all of the other athletes. Literally anyone who was anyone in the Eastern Bloc was there."