ATHLETES WHO DEFECTED

Marie Provaznikova was a Czech official. She was the President of the International Gymnastics Federation and was the first person to defect from the Olympics. Czechoslovakia had recently become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and Marie knew her country would not be the same in the coming years, as the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power in the 1948 coup d’état and established a one-party state allied with the Soviet Union. Provaznikova escaped to the United States, where she later taught gymnastics. She lived in the US until 1991 and died at age 101.

In 1976, four Romanians and one Russian sought to become refugees in Canada. One of the defectors was 17-year-old Russian diver Sergei Nemtsanov. The head of the Soviet Olympic team claimed that ‘unidentified terrorists’ had kidnapped Sergei and brainwashed him to ‘embrace freedom’. However, it turned out that Sergei had fallen in love with an American female diver and was hiding with a family in Ontario, Canada. He eventually revoked his defection and left Canada.

In 1980, there were a lot of defections happening primarily because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Many Afghani athletes were afraid of going to Moscow and did everything they could to avoid it. A month before the Games, seven members of the Afghani basketball team fled to Pakistan. A day before flying to the Games, seven wrestlers escaped to Pakistan. To make things worse for the Afghani squad, five more players defected during the Games, a number of whom fled to America and others to West Germany.

In the 1996 Olympic Games, when Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmed went to Atlanta in America, he carried his country’s flag at the opening ceremony. A week later, he defected to the US because he opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime and he feared execution. In the same competitions, Afghani boxer Jawid Aman Mukhamad had the same problem. Afghan officials had accused him of being a communist since he had trained in Russia. As he was scared for his life, he acquired refugee status in Canada.