PERSPECTIVES: Sharing Olympic glory (09/24/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Sharing Olympic glory

Not so long ago the Olympic Games were a high-profile political showdown between the East and West. People kept track of winners and saw the success and failure of entire economic and political systems reflected in the medal totals for their national teams. The Soviet Union tried to squeeze every advantage from the Games and offered the victories of Communist bloc athletes as proof that the Communist philosophy and way of life was better, more vigorous, more successful - triumphant.

For Ukrainian Americans this was too much. We knew - many of us from bitter family experience - that the Soviet Union was just an evil empire, responsible for the murders of untold millions. How can they be superior, we'd think, when they needed a band of KGB agents posing as coaches and journalists to make sure none of their athletes defected? Even worse, was the convenient shorthand everyone used where every Soviet athlete was "Russian." We knew that many of their Olympians were Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian or some other nationality.

That was a time, though, when you were considered somewhat eccentric for insisting that the Soviet Union was an empire of reluctant peoples joined by force and kept together with the threat of violence. In theory, people knew that was true, but that's not how most Americans, including "leading experts," viewed it back then. Equating Russia with the Soviet Union was common even in the State Department and the CIA. The Soviet republics, after all, were fictions and Ukraine's membership in the United Nations a joke, a meaningless victory Stalin had won at Yalta for whatever unfathomable reasons only he understood. Ukraine was equated with Pennsylvania, Armenia with Ohio. And no one seriously challenged Moscow's right to rule its empire.

Protests from Americans of Central and Eastern European heritage were handled with a proclamation and a wink. In the final analysis, the Kremlin ruled with an iron fist and little could be done about it. Behind concrete walls and barbed wire borders, the Communist Party suppressed religion, eliminated traditional holidays and substituted new Soviet-style rituals. Languages were suppressed, Russification enforced. Given enough time, police state tactics and social engineering would forge a new Soviet identity.

Here the Olympic Games and other international competitions played a big role. Athletes from all 15 republics of the Soviet Union competed under the red flag. They were world-class and they won a lot of medals. Because Soviet sprinters are faster, weightlifters stronger and gymnasts more agile, the Soviet Union is better, stronger, more humane - that was the argument. Soviet citizens, cut off as they were from the rest of the world, had no way of knowing any different.

All of this bothered Osyp Zinkewych, too, only he decided to do something about it. A low-key, unassuming chemist from Baltimore, he was one of those with a personal grudge against the Soviets: they had killed his father because of his political beliefs. Osyp, therefore, dedicated his life and his considerable charm and political skills to defeating them. In the Olympics he saw the opportunity to penetrate the Iron Curtain - for a brief moment, at least - and change the frame of reference for Soviet citizens, particularly those from Ukraine.

Mr. Zinkewych understood that most people root for the home team. Patiently going over the rosters of the Soviet Olympic team, he compiled lists of athletes based on the republic they came from, and by so doing changed the definition of the home team.

Forty-four years ago - the same year that Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising - Mr. Zinkewych formed a Ukrainian Olympic information service. With the dogged energy that characterizes his work to this day, he mailed press releases and memoranda to national Olympic committees, sports enthusiasts and media around the world.

In 1956 he made the same argument he would make in every subsequent Olympiad until 1992: Ukraine, a sovereign country in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a charter member of the United Nations, had the right to compete in the Olympic Games. To illustrate his point, Mr. Zinkewych provided lists of Ukrainian Olympic athletes. So, when distance runner Vladimir Kuts won two gold medals at the 1956 Melbourne Games, Mr. Zinkewych pointed out that he wasn't Russian at all. He was really Ukrainian and his name was Volodymyr.

Patiently, with a determination that spanned decades, Mr. Zinkewych was planting seeds, keeping hope alive in a concrete way. Not many people paid much attention to all that, but Volodymyr Kuts sure did. Before his untimely death in 1975 at the age of 48, he courageously spoke out and endorsed the idea that Ukraine should send its own team to the Olympic Games. And so, ever so subtly, Mr. Zinkewych was indeed changing the frame of reference and helping to undermine the Soviet Union in the process.

I first noticed it in 1972, when Jim McKay of ABC Sports was calling the finals of the 4 x 100-meter relay at the Munich Olympics. The anchor for the Soviet team, Mr. McKay said, was two-time gold medal winner Valerii Borzov, and he's not Russian at all - he's Ukrainian. Mr. Zinkewych had been in Munich ... of course.

Four years later Mr. Zinkewych convinced me along with a couple dozen other young people to spend three weeks in Montreal. Wearing bright T-shirts that said "Freedom for Moroz," we passed out fliers, brochures and lists of athletes and medal winners from Ukraine. At the finals of the 100-meter sprint we all sat together to see Mr. Borzov defend his gold medal. That year Soviet athletes wore blue warm-up suits with the "CCCP" monogram, only Mr. Borzov's was different. Over the blue trousers he had donned a bright pair of yellow leggings that he took off just before the race. In 1976 that took a lot of guts. Today Mr. Borzov is the Ukraine's minister of sports.

As for Mr. Zinkewych, he's gone on to other projects, nurturing young Ukrainian writers and civic leaders. The Olympics was just one of the canvases he used. Over the years he attended or sent delegations of diaspora Ukrainians to a whole slew of international venues - the Helsinki Accords review meetings, women's conferences, writers' conventions - to distribute memoranda and to ask the same question over and over again: Why isn't Ukraine here? When the Soviet Union shattered in 1991, astonishing all the experts, it cleaved precisely along the lines Mr. Zinkewych had outlined in his quadrennial Olympic memoranda with their rosters of home team members representing Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Armenia, Russia.

In 2000 in Sydney, Ukraine is at the Games with its own flag and high hopes. I know you're busy, Osyp, but just this once take a break and enjoy the Games. In no small measure, every time the Ukrainian flag goes up to honor a medal winner from Ukraine, it's your triumph, too.

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