The Australian triple jumper looked set for gold at the Moscow Olympics until dubious fouls awarded medals to the Soviets
Ever heard the one about the Australian triple-jumper duped out of a medal by dodgy judges at the Moscow Olympics? Set against the cold war and what New York Times writer James Dunaway called "the games of shame", Ian Campbell's story is every bit as astonishing as it seemed that day 33 years ago when Soviet track officials fouled a seemingly legitimate jump in which he smashed an Olympic record.
Campbell and Brazilian Joao Carlos de Oliveira were the two best jumpers in the world. De Oliveira was the world record holder at the time. Of their 12 jumps in the final, nine were adjudged to be fouls, a situation so unlikely that it forced Dunaway to say "believe me, this doesn't happen in real life. Jumpers that good rarely foul." They are sentiments echoed by Campbell all these years later. The gold and silver medals were won by Soviet competitors and the bronze by Oliveira, who was crestfallen at what had happened to him and his Australian friend.
Campbell's career started at 15, when he was a skinny, lightning-fast Teal Cup footballer who had attracted the interest of recruiters from Collingwood. He pestered nuclear physicist and track coach John Boas to teach him the art of triple jumping. Boas was reluctant, telling Campbell that he "didn't know anything about it," but the youngster's persistence paid off with Boas combining his scientific knowledge with a more homespun knowledge of jumps events gleaned from whatever coaching manuals he could get his hands on.
Under the tutelage of Boas, Campbell's talents soon outgrew his Ivanhoe training base, taking him to the US and a scholarship at Washington State University. A self-described "independent thinker", Campbell would go on to win consecutive NCAA indoor triple-jump titles in 1977 and 1978, ideal preparation for the nearby Edmonton Commonwealth Games at which he defied a pre-event bout of mononucleosis to claim a silver medal. For Campbell, it was vindication that he was on the right path.
When Campbell returned home to Australia he was not the only person who believed that glory beckoned at Moscow. Both the Ivanhoe Harriers and the Australian Olympic Committee afforded Campbell training grants that allowed him to commit full-time to his preparations for Moscow. Campbell recalls, "[the money] allowed me to train full-time basically from February of 1980 through to the Olympic Games, which in those days was unusual. It was just a total commitment and nothing else mattered."
In the summer of early 1980, Campbell would notch up 23 A-qualifying jumps, including a Commonwealth and several Australian records, to put his place on the team beyond doubt. "And then during the early part of the season in 1979 the technique really wasn't happening and I'd been working on a technique that used my speed more because I was a speed and power guy; technically I didn't ever think I was that great. There are probably only ten jumps in my career that were technically outstanding. That sounds strange but it's probably fairly accurate."
Technical changes complete, Campbell carried out one last fitness test at Melbourne's Olympic village facility as part of his preparations. In cold, damp conditions, one of his jumps measured 17.30m, a mark unseen in Australia until that point. Campbell remembers, "it was pretty obvious that whatever I was doing it was working. I knew that, they knew that, so off we go.
At Stuttgart, in the major lead-in event to the Games, Campbell jumped a fraction under 17m into a headwind to beat a gathering of the world's best jumpers, including the Americans who were not to take any part in Moscow.
Campbell's confidence was bubbling. "I'd just beaten everybody, two weeks out from the Olympics and I jumped an enormous distance even for a legal jump, into a headwind. I probably that night realised in my own mind, I wasn't talking to anybody else about it, that I could potentially win it [Olympic gold]."
If Campbell arrived in Moscow with a clear purpose, what he found in front of his eyes at the athletes' village came as a culture shock. "The food was average, the atmosphere was bizarre because you were in the Soviet Union and you knew that every second guy 'assigned to the team' was KGB or ex-KGB. We kind of laughed about that and I think that general Australian mentality kept everyone in pretty good spirits."
Having run a lightning-fast 100m time trial only two days before the triple-jump was due to start, Campbell had worked himself into peak condition. "I came off the track after running that time and said I've got to keep it to myself and keep my emotions under control and I've just got to go out and do the job."
Breezing through one qualifying jump at a leisurely lope, Campbell was surprised as an enthusiastic crowd alerted him to his 17.02m effort. "It was 17m and I was the only person to jump [the distance] in the qualifying and I was the No1 qualifier and as [Soviet jumper Viktor] Saneyev later said, 'you shouldn't have done so well in the qualifying, you should have backed off'. But the point was I did back off. I was just jumping out of my head." Campbell's relaxed practice run had become the equal longest jump in Olympic qualifying history.
From there the dream turned to nightmare, with Campbell and Oliveira constantly and erroneously called for fouls in the final. The most notorious of the Campbell's was for his fourth jump of the final, a staggering effort that BBC camera crews would later estimate to be just under the 17.60m mark. Campbell's memories of that jump, augmented over the years by repeat-viewing of the clip, remain crystal clear.
"There's a couple of things you can see in the clip. One, there's a record marker. That is 17.89m, what was then the world record. So I didn't jump that far but the Olympic record was 17.39m and I blew that out of the water. I could see that as I was going into the sand so after I landed I looked down and I knew that I'd obliterated the Olympic record and that I'd be in first place."
The clip shows the exaltation and unbridled joy of an athlete breaking new ground, followed swiftly by the heartbreak of the judges' call. "It looked like something in the mid 1750s or 1760, something along those lines, which incidentally would have got me a medal [at London 2012] but that's another story. It was an Olympic record." Judges ruled that Campbell had 'scraped' his right foot. It was an arcane rule that was removed in the wake of the Moscow controversy. In the heat of the moment, Campbell lashed out, telling reporters, "Look, I'm a good sportsman … I always have been, but to say I scraped was the biggest load of bullshit of all time."
There remains a tone of wearied exasperation in Campbell's voice as he explains the ruling now. "If you scrape, the chances of you completing the jump correctly are low. The chances of you not hearing it or feeling it are impossible. The chances of you doing all of those things and breaking the Olympic record are absolutely impossible."
Unlike his Brazilian counterpart, Campbell immediately protested the foul to Soviet officials, but his claims were ignored and, unbelievably, the pit immediately raked. The blame was later attributed to the language barrier, a claim that has never washed with Campbell.
"I think that, clearly, in an Olympic Games, if any athlete is remonstrating with the officials and telling them not to do something until they get the referee … these officials, whatever they did or didn't do, are experienced long jump and triple jump officials, so they know exactly what I was intimating. They would have been doing it for 10 or 20 years. Rules are based not on language but on what transpires. I was on the track so I can tell you I rule that [language] out."
Campbell's calls to summon the IAAF field events referee to sort the situation fell on deaf ears: "We found out later that the IOC had agreed with the Soviets to get all the IAAF field event referees off the field. No one knew about it."
There also remains speculation as to whether it was Campbell or Oliveira who was robbed of gold, as neither men received an official measurement of their monstrous, fouled jumps. "I think being perfectly honest, and I could see his jumps from the side, I do know that he had one jump that was absolutely enormous. In saying that, I did too. I think maybe all these years later without the emotion I'm prepared to accept that there's every chance he jumped further than me. But I would have finished no worse than second and I think that I could have finished first."
It is equally Oliveira's tale as it is Campbell's; whistled and jeered by the crowd as he prepared to jump, the Brazilian was publicly gracious on the podium though privately shattered by the events that eventually transpired. A bronze medal was no consolation.
Adding a further layer of scandal, research by the Australian sportswriter Roy Masters and published in his book Higher, Richer, Sleazier claimed that the two Soviet jumpers had unknowingly found themselves at the centre of what looked like a fix. In what Masters called 'the great shoe-in', the IOC president, Baron Killanin, was alleged to have been at loggerheads with Mizuno, the Japanese athletic company that had paid to be the official torch relay sponsor of the Games. At the culmination of the relay the flame was lit by Soviet athletes who, to the despair of Mizuno, were both wearing Adidas shoes.
In response to Mizuno's protest, Masters claims that Killanin sought out the Adidas boss, Horst Dassler. The solution they hatched was to have Mizuno shoes on the feet of athletes in an event that the Soviets were expected to win. That event just happened to be the triple jump.
In truth the foul ruling on Campbell's first jump of the final foreshadowed the depth of corruption that was to follow. "What people don't know is that on the first jump I came down and it was a pretty good jump. I'm a right foot take-off. I come back to the board and an official shows me that it was a foul so I say, 'let me see the Plasticine' because you always have to check the Plasticine. He shows me a Plasticine board where the indentation is on the far left hand side of the board. I say, 'that's not me', and this is a guy who claims not to speak English. So my right foot is supposedly on the left hand side of the board which means half my body would have been outside the lane. So I knew right then that something was up."
Campbell's only legal jump of 16.72m, the one that secured him fifth place, came as a result of an exaggerated attempt not to foul with the Australian taking off "well before the board". Measured from where Campbell actually took off, it would have been closer to 17.20m.
"There may have been one legitimate foul in there, the rest, including the infamous scrape, were not fouls," says Campbell. "Based on the first jump it appeared that the Plasticine scenario was rigged anyway."
Once Campbell had resigned himself to a dubious defeat, his public protests lessened with time, an approach he now regrets. "I probably took that path that I wasn't going to whinge about it for the rest of my life and probably on reflection, that was a bit of a mistake. I think I probably should have basically pursued it to the Nth degree and I didn't."
Campbell has received private suggestions from the IOC that he will never receive any official recognition of the way he and Oliveira were wronged in Moscow and none have been forthcoming from the AOC either. "I can tell you this, had I been an American and that had happened to me I can guarantee you I would have got my day in court. I guess from my point of view that is somewhat disappointing.
"I guess after all these years my view on it is that the Australian Olympic Committee could write me a letter or something – and say 'we acknowledge that whatever happened on that day was not right.'"
Though Campbell feels contentment at what he's been able to achieve in a varied career as a sports and marketing executive, dealing with the emotional fall-out of the episode was not easy. "It was devastating. It's never an easy journey to get there for anybody. When you know that you performed at the level required to win the actual medal and you don't get it for a reason unrelated to your own performance … and the Olympics don't happen every week, it's four years and from the age of 11 it was my focus and dream and I was shattered, frankly in a lot of areas I was a bitter person for a long time about that particular issue."
The story of Campbell's athletic career came to a swift conclusion after Moscow. Within 18 months of the Games an ankle injury had ended his career. "So I was basically washed up before I was 25 years of age so the other frustration for me was that I was never able to redeem myself in Los Angeles or Seoul as an athlete. Not being able to redeem what happened in Moscow has played on my mind a lot."
To watch each successive Olympics now is a bittersweet reminder for Campbell, both of the medal he missed out on and the path his life took as a result. "It's a feeling of disappointment to a degree, although that reduces a little over time."
"I never really talk about it to people. People who know, know and we just move on. I've never liked talking about it that much but I think probably after my father died I probably had a different view, probably that I needed to try and come to grips with it and put it to rest." It's only in the past year that Campbell's own sons have seen the YouTube clip of their father the Olympian, sharing it on Facebook with friends and taking Campbell back to a time when he was younger than they are now.
His bitterness is tempered by the perspective offered from the path of Oliveira, who lost a leg in a car accident before descending into an early, alcohol-related death in 1999. "I think we need to be careful feeling sorry for ourselves because there is always someone worse off and in [Oliveira's] particular case it is a staggering tragedy. In that sense, I've been very lucky." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.
Ever heard the one about the Australian triple-jumper duped out of a medal by dodgy judges at the Moscow Olympics? Set against the cold war and what New York Times writer James Dunaway called "the games of shame", Ian Campbell's story is every bit as astonishing as it seemed that day 33 years ago when Soviet track officials fouled a seemingly legitimate jump in which he smashed an Olympic record.
Campbell and Brazilian Joao Carlos de Oliveira were the two best jumpers in the world. De Oliveira was the world record holder at the time. Of their 12 jumps in the final, nine were adjudged to be fouls, a situation so unlikely that it forced Dunaway to say "believe me, this doesn't happen in real life. Jumpers that good rarely foul." They are sentiments echoed by Campbell all these years later. The gold and silver medals were won by Soviet competitors and the bronze by Oliveira, who was crestfallen at what had happened to him and his Australian friend.
Campbell's career started at 15, when he was a skinny, lightning-fast Teal Cup footballer who had attracted the interest of recruiters from Collingwood. He pestered nuclear physicist and track coach John Boas to teach him the art of triple jumping. Boas was reluctant, telling Campbell that he "didn't know anything about it," but the youngster's persistence paid off with Boas combining his scientific knowledge with a more homespun knowledge of jumps events gleaned from whatever coaching manuals he could get his hands on.
Under the tutelage of Boas, Campbell's talents soon outgrew his Ivanhoe training base, taking him to the US and a scholarship at Washington State University. A self-described "independent thinker", Campbell would go on to win consecutive NCAA indoor triple-jump titles in 1977 and 1978, ideal preparation for the nearby Edmonton Commonwealth Games at which he defied a pre-event bout of mononucleosis to claim a silver medal. For Campbell, it was vindication that he was on the right path.
When Campbell returned home to Australia he was not the only person who believed that glory beckoned at Moscow. Both the Ivanhoe Harriers and the Australian Olympic Committee afforded Campbell training grants that allowed him to commit full-time to his preparations for Moscow. Campbell recalls, "[the money] allowed me to train full-time basically from February of 1980 through to the Olympic Games, which in those days was unusual. It was just a total commitment and nothing else mattered."
In the summer of early 1980, Campbell would notch up 23 A-qualifying jumps, including a Commonwealth and several Australian records, to put his place on the team beyond doubt. "And then during the early part of the season in 1979 the technique really wasn't happening and I'd been working on a technique that used my speed more because I was a speed and power guy; technically I didn't ever think I was that great. There are probably only ten jumps in my career that were technically outstanding. That sounds strange but it's probably fairly accurate."
Technical changes complete, Campbell carried out one last fitness test at Melbourne's Olympic village facility as part of his preparations. In cold, damp conditions, one of his jumps measured 17.30m, a mark unseen in Australia until that point. Campbell remembers, "it was pretty obvious that whatever I was doing it was working. I knew that, they knew that, so off we go.
At Stuttgart, in the major lead-in event to the Games, Campbell jumped a fraction under 17m into a headwind to beat a gathering of the world's best jumpers, including the Americans who were not to take any part in Moscow.
Campbell's confidence was bubbling. "I'd just beaten everybody, two weeks out from the Olympics and I jumped an enormous distance even for a legal jump, into a headwind. I probably that night realised in my own mind, I wasn't talking to anybody else about it, that I could potentially win it [Olympic gold]."
If Campbell arrived in Moscow with a clear purpose, what he found in front of his eyes at the athletes' village came as a culture shock. "The food was average, the atmosphere was bizarre because you were in the Soviet Union and you knew that every second guy 'assigned to the team' was KGB or ex-KGB. We kind of laughed about that and I think that general Australian mentality kept everyone in pretty good spirits."
Having run a lightning-fast 100m time trial only two days before the triple-jump was due to start, Campbell had worked himself into peak condition. "I came off the track after running that time and said I've got to keep it to myself and keep my emotions under control and I've just got to go out and do the job."
Breezing through one qualifying jump at a leisurely lope, Campbell was surprised as an enthusiastic crowd alerted him to his 17.02m effort. "It was 17m and I was the only person to jump [the distance] in the qualifying and I was the No1 qualifier and as [Soviet jumper Viktor] Saneyev later said, 'you shouldn't have done so well in the qualifying, you should have backed off'. But the point was I did back off. I was just jumping out of my head." Campbell's relaxed practice run had become the equal longest jump in Olympic qualifying history.
From there the dream turned to nightmare, with Campbell and Oliveira constantly and erroneously called for fouls in the final. The most notorious of the Campbell's was for his fourth jump of the final, a staggering effort that BBC camera crews would later estimate to be just under the 17.60m mark. Campbell's memories of that jump, augmented over the years by repeat-viewing of the clip, remain crystal clear.
"There's a couple of things you can see in the clip. One, there's a record marker. That is 17.89m, what was then the world record. So I didn't jump that far but the Olympic record was 17.39m and I blew that out of the water. I could see that as I was going into the sand so after I landed I looked down and I knew that I'd obliterated the Olympic record and that I'd be in first place."
The clip shows the exaltation and unbridled joy of an athlete breaking new ground, followed swiftly by the heartbreak of the judges' call. "It looked like something in the mid 1750s or 1760, something along those lines, which incidentally would have got me a medal [at London 2012] but that's another story. It was an Olympic record." Judges ruled that Campbell had 'scraped' his right foot. It was an arcane rule that was removed in the wake of the Moscow controversy. In the heat of the moment, Campbell lashed out, telling reporters, "Look, I'm a good sportsman … I always have been, but to say I scraped was the biggest load of bullshit of all time."
There remains a tone of wearied exasperation in Campbell's voice as he explains the ruling now. "If you scrape, the chances of you completing the jump correctly are low. The chances of you not hearing it or feeling it are impossible. The chances of you doing all of those things and breaking the Olympic record are absolutely impossible."
Unlike his Brazilian counterpart, Campbell immediately protested the foul to Soviet officials, but his claims were ignored and, unbelievably, the pit immediately raked. The blame was later attributed to the language barrier, a claim that has never washed with Campbell.
"I think that, clearly, in an Olympic Games, if any athlete is remonstrating with the officials and telling them not to do something until they get the referee … these officials, whatever they did or didn't do, are experienced long jump and triple jump officials, so they know exactly what I was intimating. They would have been doing it for 10 or 20 years. Rules are based not on language but on what transpires. I was on the track so I can tell you I rule that [language] out."
Campbell's calls to summon the IAAF field events referee to sort the situation fell on deaf ears: "We found out later that the IOC had agreed with the Soviets to get all the IAAF field event referees off the field. No one knew about it."
There also remains speculation as to whether it was Campbell or Oliveira who was robbed of gold, as neither men received an official measurement of their monstrous, fouled jumps. "I think being perfectly honest, and I could see his jumps from the side, I do know that he had one jump that was absolutely enormous. In saying that, I did too. I think maybe all these years later without the emotion I'm prepared to accept that there's every chance he jumped further than me. But I would have finished no worse than second and I think that I could have finished first."
It is equally Oliveira's tale as it is Campbell's; whistled and jeered by the crowd as he prepared to jump, the Brazilian was publicly gracious on the podium though privately shattered by the events that eventually transpired. A bronze medal was no consolation.
Adding a further layer of scandal, research by the Australian sportswriter Roy Masters and published in his book Higher, Richer, Sleazier claimed that the two Soviet jumpers had unknowingly found themselves at the centre of what looked like a fix. In what Masters called 'the great shoe-in', the IOC president, Baron Killanin, was alleged to have been at loggerheads with Mizuno, the Japanese athletic company that had paid to be the official torch relay sponsor of the Games. At the culmination of the relay the flame was lit by Soviet athletes who, to the despair of Mizuno, were both wearing Adidas shoes.
In response to Mizuno's protest, Masters claims that Killanin sought out the Adidas boss, Horst Dassler. The solution they hatched was to have Mizuno shoes on the feet of athletes in an event that the Soviets were expected to win. That event just happened to be the triple jump.
In truth the foul ruling on Campbell's first jump of the final foreshadowed the depth of corruption that was to follow. "What people don't know is that on the first jump I came down and it was a pretty good jump. I'm a right foot take-off. I come back to the board and an official shows me that it was a foul so I say, 'let me see the Plasticine' because you always have to check the Plasticine. He shows me a Plasticine board where the indentation is on the far left hand side of the board. I say, 'that's not me', and this is a guy who claims not to speak English. So my right foot is supposedly on the left hand side of the board which means half my body would have been outside the lane. So I knew right then that something was up."
Campbell's only legal jump of 16.72m, the one that secured him fifth place, came as a result of an exaggerated attempt not to foul with the Australian taking off "well before the board". Measured from where Campbell actually took off, it would have been closer to 17.20m.
"There may have been one legitimate foul in there, the rest, including the infamous scrape, were not fouls," says Campbell. "Based on the first jump it appeared that the Plasticine scenario was rigged anyway."
Once Campbell had resigned himself to a dubious defeat, his public protests lessened with time, an approach he now regrets. "I probably took that path that I wasn't going to whinge about it for the rest of my life and probably on reflection, that was a bit of a mistake. I think I probably should have basically pursued it to the Nth degree and I didn't."
Campbell has received private suggestions from the IOC that he will never receive any official recognition of the way he and Oliveira were wronged in Moscow and none have been forthcoming from the AOC either. "I can tell you this, had I been an American and that had happened to me I can guarantee you I would have got my day in court. I guess from my point of view that is somewhat disappointing.
"I guess after all these years my view on it is that the Australian Olympic Committee could write me a letter or something – and say 'we acknowledge that whatever happened on that day was not right.'"
Though Campbell feels contentment at what he's been able to achieve in a varied career as a sports and marketing executive, dealing with the emotional fall-out of the episode was not easy. "It was devastating. It's never an easy journey to get there for anybody. When you know that you performed at the level required to win the actual medal and you don't get it for a reason unrelated to your own performance … and the Olympics don't happen every week, it's four years and from the age of 11 it was my focus and dream and I was shattered, frankly in a lot of areas I was a bitter person for a long time about that particular issue."
The story of Campbell's athletic career came to a swift conclusion after Moscow. Within 18 months of the Games an ankle injury had ended his career. "So I was basically washed up before I was 25 years of age so the other frustration for me was that I was never able to redeem myself in Los Angeles or Seoul as an athlete. Not being able to redeem what happened in Moscow has played on my mind a lot."
To watch each successive Olympics now is a bittersweet reminder for Campbell, both of the medal he missed out on and the path his life took as a result. "It's a feeling of disappointment to a degree, although that reduces a little over time."
"I never really talk about it to people. People who know, know and we just move on. I've never liked talking about it that much but I think probably after my father died I probably had a different view, probably that I needed to try and come to grips with it and put it to rest." It's only in the past year that Campbell's own sons have seen the YouTube clip of their father the Olympian, sharing it on Facebook with friends and taking Campbell back to a time when he was younger than they are now.
His bitterness is tempered by the perspective offered from the path of Oliveira, who lost a leg in a car accident before descending into an early, alcohol-related death in 1999. "I think we need to be careful feeling sorry for ourselves because there is always someone worse off and in [Oliveira's] particular case it is a staggering tragedy. In that sense, I've been very lucky." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.