The Sun Still Rises

It's the morning of March 30th. Members of the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees, Metropolitan Government of Tokyo, and ministers of the Japanese Government are slated to hold a teleconference on the viability of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in the wake of a global pandemic. Thousands of athletes around the world wait, holding their collective breath, hoping that their Olympic dreams will still get to become a reality.
 
The result of that late-March teleconference confirmed our suspicions: that the games of the XXXII Olympiad would be postponed until the summer of 2021. While postponement was by no means the worst possible outcome, many athletes were understandably saddened by the decision, as one of their greatest dreams has been deferred by an enemy without a face. Their sadness was understandable. We all wish that we could live in a world where this virus never took hold.
 
History has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Looking back on the happenings of the past century, we are reminded of a similar set of events occurring in both 1980 and 1984, as athletes from around the world were forbidden to participate in the Olympic Games due to political boycotts stemming from the Cold War. Following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in early 1980, American President Jimmy Carter elected to pull the United States out of the 1980 Moscow games. Many American allies followed suit, and the Soviet Union along with its allies retaliated in 1984 by pulling out of the Los Angeles games.
 
One of the athletes personally affected by that boycott was Aggie volleyball coaching legend Laurie Corbelli, who discussed the challenging internal conflict between doing what's right and living out your athletic dreams. Corbelli recalls her own arduous path to qualification and having her Olympic dreams taken away in 1980.
 
"Our coach, Ari Sellinger, put a team together in 1978 and I received an invitation to join them," said Corbelli, who was a collegiate standout at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. "We trained in any high school, junior high or elementary school gym that was available for eight hours a day. We gave up our homes, our families, our jobs and our schools. My teammates and I quit college. We were required to train full-time, which was eight hours a day. We did that in 1978 and 1979, and we finally qualified."
 
Years of blood, sweat, and tears finally paid off, as the U.S. Women's National Volleyball team was poised to challenge some of the greatest international programs for the gold in 1980.
 
"We were gold medal favorites," Corbelli remembers. "We had come out of nowhere, and because of our training and investment in the sport, we became a top-three team in the world alongside the Soviet Union and Cuba. We were going to go for the gold, and that ended up being our team's greatest quest."
 
Similar to the 1980 squad, the 2020 U.S. National Team was poised to make another run for the gold, ranking No. 2 in the FIVB World Rankings behind China. Coach Karch Kiraly and his team qualified in August of last year, and the team had been preparing for weeks prior to the postponement of the games late last month.
 
Corbelli and her teammates didn't get the word that their dreams would be deferred as abruptly as the 2020 team. The decision to pull the U.S. out of the 1980 Olympics took months, and she remembers how challenging that wait was.
 
"In the final months of 1979, we got word that we could go home for Christmas for the first time in quite a while," Corbelli said. "We never really got to visit our families. Once we got back, we had to meet in Colorado Springs to start our final training block before the Olympics. There was word out that President Carter didn't agree with the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, so he was considering pulling the United States out of the Moscow Olympics. So we were like 'What? That doesn't make any sense. What do we have to do with any of this other than simply representing America in sports?' But he didn't make a decision. He said we might not go."
 
Waiting in limbo is never a fun experience. Even now, many Americans wonder when they will be able to return to work, athletes wonder when they'll get to step out onto the court or field again, and seniors in both high school and college wonder if they'll ever get to put on a cap and gown and walk across the graduation stage. All of us have worked hard to get where we are, and all of us are left with nothing to do but wait, hope, and dream for a world after Coronavirus.
 
"We got back to the training center," Corbelli continued. "And sure enough, we're training every single day knowing in the back of our minds that there's a likelihood we won't even get to do this thing. We might not get to show the world what we've been working on for the past two years. We had to wait until April. The president said at noon on April 24, I think was the date – 'I will be making my final announcement on national TV.'"
 
President Carter held up his end of the bargain, he did make his final announcement at noon on April 24th. Unfortunately for the American athletes, it was one of the most painful announcements any of them could have ever imagined.
 
"We were on tour in the U.S. and invited the East Germans over to scrimmage against us in different cities around the country," Corbelli said. "At that time they were the No. 4 or 5 team in the world, and we had beaten them every time we played. The day that the President made his announcement was when the team flew into San Antonio. My family was there, since I'm a Texan, and they came to San Antonio to meet the team. Once we got off the plane and walked into the terminal, my sisters, parents, family and friends were all crying. There were big tears rolling down their cheeks. We knew at that point we were done."
 
Time certainly has healed some of those wounds, but Corbelli recalls how traumatic the events seemed at the time, as she and her teammates stood in shock in the middle of a San Antonio airport terminal.
 
"It was just surreal," Corbelli said. "Just the whole team realizing it was over. And it wasn't like it was being postponed. It was being canceled. Your window to compete in the Olympics is really small, and that window closed for probably six or seven of the older players on the team. Some of those players were already 28 and 29 and ready to get on with life. We made $60 a week during those years. They needed to move on, and the door shut on them. I was still considered young. I was 23 and seven others were too, so we decided to go out and try for L.A. in '84. That was the biggest thing in the back of our minds, 'well at least we know we'll get to go to this one.' That story, the seven that didn't end up staying for four more years, those are what makes this so hard. Their bodies were already falling apart from our training. They are still really bitter."
Corbelli's original Olympic dream was postponed, but later realized when she helped lead Team USA to the silver medal at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.
 
It's completely understandable to be frustrated by events outside of your control. It's painful to see your dreams get canceled or postponed. It's not easy to push yourself to the highest levels of international competition, only to have all of that hard work put on pause. But these times, just like the athletic landscape of the early 80s, are not "easy." Our society is confronted with a perilous international pandemic, and before we can take down our opponents on the court, we must first take down the invisible opponent challenging our very way of life.
 
That realization doesn't make the pain of missing out hurt any less. There is, however, comfort in the fact that there are thousands of athletes that have traveled this path before, and their experiences provide all of us with lessons on how to deal with this crisis. Corbelli still meets up with her teammates from the 1980 squad, and that team's togetherness serves as a source of inspiration, even today.
 
"We have reunions all the time and we are a much closer unit than the 1984 team because we went through such adversity together," Corbelli said. "I think the IOC made a really good decision for everyone's health, but it's definitely a tough decision to move something that huge. The Tokyo Games are going to be amazing. The best part of this decision is that we're going to get through this. There will be Olympics in 2021, the athletes will still get to compete, they just have to wait a little while longer."
 
We all have to wait a little while longer, but until the day comes where we can go about our regular business again, it's important to remember that even in the middle of the darkest and most perilous night, the sun still rises in the morning. Just over the horizon, hope for a brighter future is dawning. All we have to do now is wait.