Former President Jimmy Carter turned Bob Giordano’s Olympic dreams into nightmares.
Carter’s decision to boycott the Moscow Summer Games in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 still irks the ex-elite Team USA weightlifter, who was set to go to his first Olympics but stewed at home instead.
“The biggest disappointment of my life,” the 6-foot-1, 225-pound Giordano, 73, told the Post a week before the 2024 Paris Olympics kick off on Friday.
The Cedar Grove, NJ resident insisted he has no “ill will” towards Carter, 99 — who is currently in hospice in Georgia — but would still tell him his decision was “dead wrong” if he had the chance.
“It was a political show. It was the wrong thing to do,” said Giordano. “I think he still strongly believes he was right.”
The country was locked in a cold war with the Soviet Union when Carter vowed the United States would lead a boycott of the Moscow Games if Soviet forces did not withdraw from Afghanistan, which they invaded Dec. 27, 1979.
for the athletes against the boycott. Bruce Klemens Photography
The Feb. 20 deadline arrived and passed without Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev blinking.
Two days later, the 1980 US hockey team in Lake Placid stunned the Soviets in the famed “The Miracle On Ice” game.
But a month later, Carter announced the summer boycott.
“Ours will not go,” the president said. “I say that not with any equivocation. The decision has been made.”
“I trained 10 years for that moment,” said Giordano, who was the spokesman for the athletes against the boycott. He said a number of other USA Olympians never forgave Carter.
for making the 1980 Olympic squad. Helayne Seidman
“I tried to tell him that the best thing we could do was go beat them [the Russians] at their own game on their soil,” he reasoned.
Giordano also endured “nasty letters’ and “death threats” for having the courage of his convictions, including one from a man who dubbed himself the “Montana vigilante” who used a racial slur and threatened to kill him.
He had a successful private law practice and then served as an
administrative law judge, retiring in 2017. Helayne Seidman
Giordano, took his own advice to fellow Olympians and “let it go,” going on to graduate Seton Hall law school in 1987. He had a successful private law practice and then served as an administrative law judge, retiring in 2017.
Still, he hasn’t watched much of the Olympics since the boycott, and said he focuses on life with his wife of 43 “blissful years,” Sue, and his three children and six grandchildren.
“The boycott had no bearing on the downfall of the Soviet Union. Their 10-year occupation led to the fall. They overextended themselves,” Giordano insisted. “The only thing that came out of the boycott is 502 American athletes didn’t go.”
