Six world medallists from 1983 reunite in MOWA

A reunion of medallists from the first edition of the World Athletics Championships were greeted at MOWA, the Museum of World Athletics, this afternoon, at a gathering of European athletics supporters and fans.

World Athletics Heritage Director Chris Turner welcomed the illustrious group, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the inaugural championship meeting. Today’s event was held at the MOWA exhibition in Etele Plaza.

The medallists present are among the many athletes who have donated to the MOWA collection of uniforms, equipment and various artefacts of the sport. Turner, in acknowledging their donations, thanked them for “giving us things, and for giving up their time because they want to celebrate 40 years of the World Championships.”

Six medallists from the 1983 edition, held in Helsinki, Finland, were featured. The group included gold medallists Eamonn Coghlan of Ireland (5000m), Steve Cram of Great Britain (1500m), Heike Drechsler of Germany (long jump) and Daley Thompson of Great Britain (decathlete), as well as silver medallists Willie Banks of the USA (triple jump) and Finland’s Arto Bryggare (110m hurdles).

Banks was the first to speak, and as a World Athletics Council Member, welcomed some 180 guests on behalf of World Athletics and their president, Sebastian Coe. Banks, serenaded at the microphone by rhythmic clapping, addressed the throng, thanking ASICS for their support of MOWA and saying: “I want to thank Chris and MOWA, for inviting me and my friends here. I feel like I should be out there, looking this way as a fan of this sport.”

Banks’s welcoming comments were seconded by European Athletics Supporters spokesperson Wilfried Walter. “On behalf of the European supporters, I would like to thank the Director of MOWA, Chris Turner, for this extremely generous invitation to get to know the Museum of World Athletics in this exclusive setting,” he said.

After his opening comments, Banks spoke on a personal level about the first World Championships. “Back in 1983, when we were all so young and good looking, we all had the same dream of being a world champion,” he said. “We all had this wonderful feeling of being a part of something that was really huge, the first World Championships in athletics.”

The first World Championships was a long-awaited creation by the International Amateur Athletics Federation, forerunner of World Athletics. When creation of the event was announced, it filled a void in the sport, one which had been exacerbated by an African boycott of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal and a United States-led boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow. By the time 1983 came around, the most recent global championship had occurred more than a decade earlier, the terrorised Munich Olympics of 1972.

Banks, as a US athlete, was the one person of today’s group whose country boycotted the Moscow Games. He had concluded 1979 as the World University Games champion when he jumped a personal best of 17.23m, defeating Olympic gold medallist-to-be, Jaak Uudmae. He had stamped himself as a medal contender for the Olympics.

For Banks, the boycott seemed the loss of a long-lived dream, delayed for another four years, as he recounted upon hearing of an upcoming World Championships. “I was very excited because the Olympic Games was the epitome of athletics,” he said. “Not being able to go in 1980 because of a boycott, it just meant so much to me to be able to compete in a World Championships, the first World Championships. I was so excited for those games, I had the greatest time in Helsinki. The people were so friendly, they loved the triple jump which was unusual.”

Husband and wife Arto Bryggare and Heike Drechsler were the next to recount their experiences from Helsinki in 1983. For Drechsler (then a youthful Heike Daute) the memories felt distant: “It’s funny when I think that it was 40 years ago, and I can’t recognise that. I remember that I was competing for the GDR – it was another world – and I was just 18 years old. I remember there was a Romanian girl (Anisoara Cusmir), she was very strong in the competition, but I was happy, I beat her.

“I couldn’t sleep the night before the competition,” she added. “My coach said to me, ‘you have to find the board, otherwise you can’t win this competition’. And I watched – all night – Carl Lewis taking his jumps and how he’d find the board. Luckily, I found the board. It was a good start for my career. I learned to never be afraid of big names and to just do it your own way.”

Hurdler Bryggare became the first Finn to ascend the podium in Helsinki and he recounted the time leading up to the event. “There was huge pressure on every member of the Finnish team,” he said. “Going into the 110m hurdles on the second-to-last day, we were still without a medal. And there were a lot of press saying to me, ‘don’t worry, no pressure, but we don’t have a medal’. The pressure was enormous; I didn’t stay in the athletes’ village because of the press. I wanted to avoid every stress, and luckily I could handle it fairly well.

“I could sleep before the race, but after the race I went for a walk through the forests of Helsinki, thinking to myself, ‘what a stressful day, what a stressful thing sports can be’.”

Thompson went into the 1983 World Championships as the reigning Olympic gold medallist. “It was going to be a competition; we didn‘t know how big it was going to be, we didn’t know that it was going to turn into what it is now,” he recalled. “But for me, I just thought, a World Championships, nobody’s ever done that before. So to be the first winner would be incredible. And, as you can see now, the championships itself had turned into something really huge.”

Coghlan remembered the moment he moved into first place in the 5000m in Helsinki, coming into the final straight, fists clenched, ostensibly in triumph, but actually thinking, “’Thank God, thank God, I got it for you guys.’ That one day of judgment every Olympiad, when you come in fourth, not once but twice, It’s like ‘Holy shit!” You live with that disappointment because your dream is shattered. So when I went by the Soviet runner, Dmitriy Dmitriyev, and I looked him in the eye and I clenched my fists, this was my day of fulfilment.”

Cram went to Helsinki as the European champion at 1500m from the year before. He summed up the meaning of the first World Athletics Championships. “Helsinki was a watershed moment in the sport,” he said. “After boycotts, there were a lot of things going on in the world, and athletics was really cutting through there, and the Olympics looked in a fairly precarious position at that point. So for us to have a World Championships where everybody could come meant a lot. The whole world came, in a great venue as well.”

The MOWA exhibition site at Etele Plaza has hosted more than 35,000 visitors since it opened in April of this year. It reached a single-day high of 769 visitors this past Sunday in the 600m2 display area.

The exhibition will close following the conclusion of the World Championships this Sunday (27 August) and will be reconfigured for the World Indoor Championships Glasgow 24.

Dave Johnson for World Athletics Heritage