The remarkable validity of the Miracle on Ice

The time management that politics usually does is usually quite arbitrary. Sometimes too slow. Sometimes too fast.

It is necessary to place ourselves in this logic to begin to follow the path that ended with the boycott that the United States and some of its allies made of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. Even if this is not the real subject of this story, you will see why it is necessary to dwell on these details before moving on to the issues at hand.

In December 1979, the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan began.

On January 20, 1980, US President Jimmy Carter announced that if there was no immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghan soil, the United States would not participate in the Moscow games.

In April of that same year, despite negotiations that included IOC President Lord Michael Killanin (he honored his phrase that “only a third world war could cancel a game”) calling Carter to a summit meeting with his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev, the boycott was confirmed.

In between, not only did the Soviets participate in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid (USA), but on February 24 the teams from both countries staged one of the most amazing ice hockey games of all time.

Now we do get to the heart of our issue today.

On days when the world is going through something like a Cold War from the TikTok Era, remembering what those days of the planet split in two were like no longer seems like science fiction. Today, no one would be extremely surprised if we told them that the basketball final of the 1960 Rome games (the great victory of the North Americans of Oscar Robinson and Jerry West) was one of the first, if not the first, live and satellite broadcast of an Olympic competition from Italy to the United States.

This is how attractive the sporting battle between the two sides of the Berlin Wall was. That’s how powerful the energy generated by the memorable final on ice in the 80s was.

On one hand, a powerful Soviet professional team, worthy representative of a sport that had won five of the last six gold medals in the specialty.

On the other hand, a North American team made up mostly of university students reinforced by rented players with little experience in minor leagues.

First, a resounding defeat in a previous friendly match played between the two teams at Madison Square Garden. Then, a debut in which the North Americans barely equaled Sweden. Nothing, absolutely nothing allowed us to suspect what finally happened in the decisive encounter, not for nothing dubbed Miracle on Ice.

So great was the impact of the 4 to 3 in favor of the locals that neither cinema nor television, nor Disney, resisted the temptation to eternalize that feat between documentary and fiction productions.

It wasn’t just a sporting miracle. It wasn’t just the epic of rookies versus experienced ones. It was also the humiliation of the all-powerful team against the rival against which none of that should happen.

Nor was there any lack of controversy with the programmers of the ABC network, which owned the broadcasting rights to those games. With the intention of giving it space in its prime time, the people on TV requested that the match start at 8pm, local time. However, the authorities of the Sports Federation maintained the 5PM schedule. Among other things, a modification would have forced the Russian audience to watch the match starting at 4 in the morning. Conclusion: ABC did not broadcast the match live but on a delayed basis starting at 8.30 p.m., announcing that the game had already been played but keeping the final result secret.

Beyond the myriad of details that adorned the epic of that match, a few days ago we once again had a dimension of how much that victory represents for many fans even more than 40 years after it was played.

The SCP auction house received an offer of more than $370,000 (24,000 above expectations) for the gold medal from Steve Christoff, one of the members of that team.

What’s more, the recent one was the second time that medal was auctioned in three years: in 2020, a private individual paid Goldin Auction almost 320,000 for the trophy. What’s more, in the last 10 years, two other medals (those of Mari Wells and Mark Pavelich) were also sold for values greater than a quarter of a million dollars.

Of course, no cash value can reach the real size of an Olympic medal. Much less when it is won against all odds.

But cases like these make it possible to become aware of what, in those geopolitically particular times, a confrontation between the two giants of those times of Olympism meant.

A story that, if we were close to it, hopefully will only be repeated on sports stages.