Disappointment of the 1980 Olympics Still Vivid for Three Illini

By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com

Forty years ago, two gifted University of Illinois athletes and a talented future Illini coach - all destined for potential Olympic glory - unwittingly became symbolic pawns in a game of international politics.

Mike Durkin, Craig Virgin and Mark Johnson were but three of 466 American athletes and approximately 4,000 individuals from 65 other nations who for years had dedicated their lives to rigorous training regimens, only to see their dreams of participating in Moscow’s 1980 Olympic Games shattered by a purely political decision.

Protesting the Soviet Union’s 1979 Christmas Eve invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. President Jimmy Carter debated whether to use an Olympic boycott or a grain embargo, or both, as leverage against the host nation. Eventually, about 96 percent of the U.S. Congress approved the President’s suggested measure. On April 12, 1980, the U.S. Olympic Committee, under withering pressure, officially voted to boycott the Games. 

Mark Johnson
1980 Olympic Wrestling Team Member
Illinois Head Wrestling Coach (1992-2009)

Perhaps no one was affected more by the President’s decision than Mark Johnson, a former University of Michigan wrestler and, in 1980, a graduate assistant to Coach Dan Gable at the University of Iowa. He had earned an Olympic spot as the 198-pounder on the Greco-Roman team by beating Wisconsin’s Laurent Soucie in the wrestle-offs.

“After the Olympic Trials, we started hearing bits and pieces about a boycott,” Johnson remembered. “We’re thinking, ‘they’re not gonna really stick with this.’ It was in the middle of training camp in Brockport, N.Y. when the word came. It was official. There’s no way we’re going.”

The jubilation that Johnson felt when he made the team turned into total despair.

“At that point, for me, the news was devastating,” he said. 

Fortunately, about the same time, Gable named Johnson as a fulltime member of his Hawkeye wrestling staff.

“Honestly, getting that job at Iowa really softened the blow for me,” he said.

A few months later, in July, Johnson and the rest of the 1980 U.S. Summer Olympic Team that wasn’t were flown to Washington by the USOC to celebrate the team. Johnson still has a picture of himself that was taken with the President. Each team member received a special medal. Still, Johnson’s pain lingered.

The very next week, at the state Special Olympics Track Meet at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, Johnson was asked to be a medal presenter. 

“Of course, those kids didn’t know if they were first or last,” he said. “They were just so happy they were getting a medal. They were hugging me and I remember thinking, ‘Alright, I’m always going to be disappointed (about not being able to go to the Olympics). Stop with the bitterness.’"

Johnson says that the current COVID-19 pandemic that’s caused the 2020 Olympics to be postponed is certainly a disappointing development for today’s aspiring Olympians, but for many it’s just a matter of adjusting.

“As an athlete at that level, you fine tune but you have to be able to adjust because things happen,” Johnson said. “Is it a disappointment? Yes, but I think most of them have already adjusted. There will be some in wrestling and some other sports that will say ‘That was my dream; I need to move on.’ But I think that 90 percent of them will do the extra year. They may look back and say that was a major blip at the time. But, as you get older, that blip isn’t quite so major.”

Today, Mark and his wife of 38 years, Linda, spend their free time doting on two young grandchildren.

Mike Durkin
Illini Cross Country Letter Winner (1971-74)
Illini Track & Field Letter Winner (1972-75)

A member of the 1976 and 1980 U.S. Olympic Teams as a 1,500-meter runner, Mike Durkin’s tale is one of pure perseverance. The nine-time Big Ten individual champion purposely intended to stop competitive running after he graduated in 1975 to focus on law school, but watching a February ’76 meet at the Armory reignited his interest.

“My thought was that if I could get a qualifying time for the Olympic Trials (3:41.7), the Olympic Committee will pay my way to Eugene. I could stay for a couple of weeks and watch the second-greatest track meet, the Olympic Trials.”

With only 14 weeks to prepare, Durkin amazingly reached his objective in a last-chance race at the AAU Championships in Los Angeles. At the ’76 Trials, needing to finish among the top three, he ran the fastest 1,500 of his life—3:36.72—placing just behind Rick Wohlhuter and Matt Centrowitz. At the Olympics in Montreal, he ran a 3:38.7 in a second heat of the prelims, but missed advancing to the semifinals by a tenth of a second.

Now bubbling with confidence, Durkin planned to keep running, aiming ultimately for a spot on the 1980 Olympic Team.

“I wanted to prove that 1976 wasn’t a fluke,” he said. 

Though he says he was never in as great of shape as he was in ’76, Durkin was very competitive and ran 3:39 to make the team. At the ’80 Trials, with a lap to go, Durkin was fourth. 

“Third place was probably 20 yards ahead of me,” he said. “It’s not easy to make up that ground, but I never quit. I caught that fourth-place runner with 10 yards to go and slid into third. I have a photograph on my piano at home. There were three of us—Steve Scott, Steve Lacey and me--with probably only six inches between us. But I was third and I was on that team.”

Hearing news about the U.S. boycott of the ’80 games is seared in Durkin’s brain. 

“It was the middle of February and about 9 o’clock at night,” he remembered. “I passed the bar in ’78, so I was a practicing attorney at that point. It would come home from putting in a full day of work and then going out and train. It was a really cold night, a lot of snow, so I was sitting in the bathtub, trying to thaw out. My wife came in and said ‘Oh my God, I just heard on the news that President Carter said we’re going to boycott the Olympics.’ I was like ‘Oh, that’s just talk. He’s just trying to pressure the Soviets. They’re never going to boycott the Olympics.’

But, as the days went on, it became a reality.

Durkin says that postponement of the Olympics from 2020 to ‘21 is a world of difference from the cancellation of 1980. 

“The circumstance that you have with this postponement is going to be challenging for some athletes,” he said. “But, let’s face it, you ride waves of success. Some people go up and down. If the peak of your career was going to be this year and you lose that edge, it’s hard to recapture. But most people are not in that situation. It’s going to open the door for another class of athletes that 2020 would have proved a year too short. Now they’re going to make it because they’re going to be a year older and a year better.”

A member of the Rosemont law firm of Storino, Ramello & Durkin, he’s been married to his wife, Joannie, for 43 years. They have three grandsons.

Craig Virgin
Illini Cross Country Letter Winner (1973-76)
Illini Track & Field Letter Winner (1974-76)

There were few Olympians more outspoken about the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Games than Fighting Illini Hall of Famer Craig Virgin. The farm boy from tiny Lebanon, Ill.—population 4,000—dominated his competition as a collegian at the University of Illinois. Among his nine Big Ten individual titles were a record four-straight conference cross country crowns.

Virgin was a three-time Olympic qualifier in the 10,000 meter run—1976, ’80 and ’84—but he maintains that his best chance to medal was in Moscow. And though President Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Games had been announced more than two months before the Olympic Track and Field Trials at historic Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., Virgin still held out hope that somehow the verdict would be reversed. 

“Guys like myself who were naïve or optimists still held hope that they were going to come to their senses,” Virgin said. “How can there be an Olympics without USA there? We’re one of the best teams in the world! Surely, there will be a back-door deal cut at the last minute.”

Many others, though, weren’t as confident.

“There were two ways the athletes responded at the 1980 Trials,” Virgin remembered. “Either they were mentally shot and didn’t fight with much vigor or else they said that this was their Olympics and they ran their asses off.”

Virgin fell into the latter category. Wearing a yellow-and-black adidas uniform with Front Runner across his chest and his name on the back, an all-star cast of runners were in the field of 20, including longtime Big Ten foe Herb Lindsay from Michigan State and hometown star Alberto Salazar from Oregon.

In his 2017 book entitled Virgin Territory, author Randy Sharer described the race’s opening laps: Salazar set a 67-scond tempo for three laps. Craig ran the fourth lap in 64.3 to pass the 1,600 mark in front at 4:27.5. 

“I started at a really brisk clip … and then about every 1,200 I would surge,” Virgin recalled. “The first surge dropped a few guys. The second surge dropped a few more. The third surge dropped everybody but Lindsay.”

“But I could tell that Herb was starting to breathe harder each time,” he continued, “and finally, with two miles to go, I had broken him. I could tell that he was on the ropes. He just was mentally strong enough to catch back up to me and I didn’t let him get but one stride, then I reached down somewhere and found one more surge. And that was the nail in the coffin. He dropped from second all the way to ninth place.”

Virgin’s time of 27:45.61 set a Trials record that would last for 24 more years. Unfortunately, President Carter didn’t back down from his threat and the American contingent stayed home.

Mike Durkin agreed with his former Illini teammate’s assessment.

“I believe that Craig Virgin was a lock at winning a gold medal or certainly the silver,” Durkin said. “I’ve talked with him at least 50 times about that. He was the best 10,000-meter runner in the world in 1980.”

As for the pandemic of 2020 that’s postponed the Olympic Games for a year, Virgin maintains that there are events in your life that you simply cannot control.

Said Virgin, “I agree with the person who said ‘you can’t control the events that happen to you, but you can control how you react to the events.’”

He feels worst for 2020’s high school senior athletes.

“They won’t be able to go back and get a mulligan in the corona virus shutdown,” he said.

Today, Virgin has been happily married for the last 20 months to Karen Fox. His daughter, Annie, is a student at American University in Washington, D.C.

NOTE:  A fourth former Illini track and field star, long jumper and triple jumper Charlton Ehizuelen was a member of Nigeria’s 1976 and ’80 Olympic Teams. He, unfortunately, didn’t compete either time because of his country’s decision to boycott the Games. Ehizuelen now resides with his wife, Vivian, in San Antonio, Tex. He has two sons and two daughters.