Whereas some sports were able to withstand the Government's wish to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, hockey was not fortunate. As The Australian newspaper recently reported hockey was placed in an impossible situation.
Australian hockey player Ric Charlesworth (now the celebrated Kookaburra coach) who was in the team readying themselves for Moscow was caught up in the political antics.
Nicole Jeffery wrote: "Cabinet secretary "Sir Geoffrey Yeend's brother Frank was the vice-president of the AHA (Australian Hockey Association), so there was a cozy little connection that didn't give me much optimism about the outcome" (Charlesworth) he said.
(The Australian – 1 January 2010 – 1980 Cabinet Papers, The Nation, page 5)
Charlesworth recalled a sense of betrayal that he and his team mates felt with the AHA withdrew the team from Moscow. Charlesworth said: "But the thing that grates most with me is the letter that Malcolm Fraser sent us after the fact, saying that we were Olympians in every sense of the word. I was already an Olympian, but those who didn't go to Moscow aren't Olympians and they don't get invited to things. They are not recognised."
Moreover the Australian team which was young and inexperienced four years earlier having won the Silver medal, Charlesworth said "was ripe in 1980".
As a hockey writer all these years, every indication was that Moscow was Australia's year for the Olympic Gold. In the event, India who were well down the world rankings beat Spain in the Moscow Olympic final to win Olympic Gold and forever listed in the Olympic hockey records book.
Many Australian sports chose to go to Moscow and this was one of the reasons Olympic president John Coates was so determined to get the Olympic movement self financed so as to make such decisions so much easier. Top athletes that did not go to the Moscow Olympics were given Government grants of between $50,000 and $100,000 (no mean sum in 1980) and other 'would be Olympic' athletes who did not go, got the mere sum of $6,000.
Run ahead now to the end of 2010. Australia itself is in the throws of discussing how they might extradite themselves from their own invasion of Afghanistan.
Moreover The Kookaburras had won everything in 2010 – the World Cup, the Champions Trophy and the Commonwealth Games. They were far and away the best team with outstanding talent.
Yet, only three places in the 18 person international All Stars team – Jamie Dwyer, Eddie Ockenden and Des Abbott. The second placed team Germany had four selections along with their coach and three players from England.
True justice it seems is not part of the Kookaburra agenda, even thirty years apart.
(It may interest the reader that I've been part of the Olympic Religious Services movement since 1984, serve as an IOC volunteer providing Religious Service Protocols to each subsequent host city, spent a week at the IOC in Switzerland working with staff on the Protocol, and as Charlesworth noted that those hockey players who were forced to boycott Moscow "never get an invite", I too have never been invited to an Olympians' function).