I have to admit feeling very sorry for the athletes whose seasons, and in some cases careers, have been cut short by the season-ending coronavirus. There must be so many stories to tell of what it has meant for them, how they feel, and how they face the future, and how they will look back on these events.

Perhaps I’m sensitive to it because my cousin, Joan Lind Van Blom, was an Olympic rower, a two-time silver medal winner, who was the favorite to win the gold in the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

She had won the silver medal in single sculls in 1976, coming in just a 65/100th second behind the winner. And in 1980, she felt she was stronger and faster.

And then the U.S. pulled out of the games in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leaving Joan and the other American athletes with all those “what might have been” regrets.

I was thinking about Joan, who died of brain cancer in 2015 after a long career in rowing, and located an oral history interview in which she talked about how she felt about the U.S. decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics. It’s unedited and rough, but she describes what happened in her own words.

I don’t remember exactly when I’d heard it. There had been news about it, with the Afghanistan thing, the Russians invading Afghanistan and Carter talking about that. I remember around February hearing about it. And, I remember being over at John’s. I used to lift weights at John’s, he had a workshop, and thinking, they are not really going to do it. We are just going to keep on training because they just really couldn’t do this. And, I just kept training, and thinking that no, they are not really going to do it. I’m still going to the trials in May. I think until it actually happened, after the trials, we were still on the team and did the whole deal, the Olympic team. I won the trials. They were in Princeton. There was a lot of competition but I won. It wasn’t close that I remember. Here I was a single sculler and felt that I was the fastest I had ever been because I had a whole year off to train and not really believing it until, maybe June or July.

Q: Did you get involved with any of the stuff…as far as protesting and speaking?

A. No, no, no. Maybe that made me look bad. I don’t know if I was maybe naive. Maybe I think of it as patriotic, thinking well, maybe the president of the United States knows more than I do about what’s going on. I think that was my attitude. I was angry and thinking, well if he really thinks this is going to make a difference to Afghanistan, he’s the president.

Now I am more angry about it than then. Afterwards I was angry seeing that it make no difference, but I’d say (that at the time} I was a little bit embarrassed about some of the rowers, about the protest because I thought, this is the president. I did have bad feelings. Obviously, like I said, I think I was the fastest. I took a year off and I was fast. Things were all going for me. So I would say it was more sad at that time than anger. I wasn’t involved in the…I didn’t wear the shirts. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t outspoken that way, I didn’t say, “this is wrong.” They do what they feel they have to do. Going back, I still probably wouldn’t do it because it didn’t do any good, it just made you look…A lot of athletes were in on that, and most people I guess felt that way. I really don’t know. I was just with myself, I’d just trained so hard and kept training. We went to Europe and we raced there. And, I remember talking to the British who went, the West Germans. They went to Moscow….

It was all terrible and I am angry about it, realizing that it didn’t do any good. In fact, it wrecked ’84. So, it was wrong, but it happened.