28 Years Later, Pain of Boycott Still Stings (original) (raw)

June 29, 2008

EUGENE, Ore. In the United States Olympic track and field trials, which began here Friday, three men will qualify for the Olympic high jump. Benn Fields wishes he could have tasted the Olympic experience himself.

He never did. He was a victim of the United States boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.

Last week, from his home in Salisbury Mills, N.Y., near West Point, Fields spoke about the opportunity that never was.

“I jumped 7-5 at the trials and won,” he said. “All along, I felt my only impediments for a gold medal were Dwight Stones or a Russian or an injury. I never thought about a boycott, so now I’m facing this empty, hollow moment.

“I gave up so much for this. My college girlfriend left me the year before because I was entirely focused on making the team and not paying enough attention to her.”

In Moscow, Gerd Wessig, a 21-year-old East German, won the gold medal with a world-record leap of 7 feet 8 ¾ inches.

“That record belonged to me,” Fields said. “I spent four years preparing for it. I moved to Houston so Tom Tellez could coach me, and he broke me down until I couldn’t jump 6 feet and then built me up to making 7-3 every day. The gold medal was coming.

“In 1977, I went to Los Angeles and met Muhammad Ali, and for four months he paid my rent and my meals and gave me $500 a week in living expenses. All I had to do was train.”

Fields said he did not watch the Moscow Games on television.

“I had a friend in El Paso who watched them on a Mexican TV channel,” Fields said. “And he called me and told me Wessig had won. Two years later, I competed against Wessig in Japan and he, the Olympic champion, asked me for my autograph.”

Fields was built for high-jump success. At 6 feet 4 inches, he had a 42-inch inseam. Marvin Webster, the Knicks’ center at the time, was 7-1 with a 44-inch inseam. When Webster was told about Fields’s dimensions, he said, “Sounds like he has no body, just legs.”

In his college days at Seton Hall in South Orange, N.J., he was Ben Fields until a marketing-wise friend told him he would receive more attention with a distinctive name. So he became Benn Fields.

His run-ups were erratic, but his springing ability was marvelous. In 1978, in Chile, he jumped 7-6 ½, a height only four men had bettered at the time. He had the bar raised to 7-8 ¾, which would have been a world record, and cleared it before brushing the bar off its stanchions with his lower leg.

In 1979, in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia, he beat the world-record holder, Vladimir Yashchenko of the Soviet Union, the last jumper to break the record by straddling over the bar rather than by flopping over it.

In 1980, months before the Olympic trials, Fields heard about the boycott.

“I was competing in Europe, in Belgium, I think,” he said. “I didn’t think a boycott would happen. I took four years off from my life for this and now this happens. I was disappointed, sure, but my goal, my four-year plan, was to make the Olympic team, and I could still do that because the United States Olympic trials were going to happen no matter what, and everyone showed up at the trials in Eugene.”

After winning the trials, Fields continued to compete. He has never left the sport. At 53, he is a consultant for athletic facilities in the United States, the Middle East and the Caribbean, but he has never forgotten what might have been.

“It made me a little cynical, but I succeeded in my plan,” he said. “I took a chance to make the team, and I did what I wanted to do except go to Moscow, and that wasn’t my fault.

“I was an Olympian, but I felt like a stepchild. Everybody knows me and what I have done. I just don’t have the hardware. Walking into the stadium is the Olympic experience. I didn’t walk into the stadium.”

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