Carter Reflected On 1980 Olympic Boycott: 'a Bad Decision'

It was a decision that robbed hundreds of athletes of their once-in-a-lifetime chance at Olympic glory, and for more than four decades, it weighed heavily on the man who made it - Jimmy Carter .

Carter's passing Sunday has unearthed memories from his 1977-1981 presidency. Somewhere between his greatest foreign-policy success the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and his greatest failure the Iran hostage crisis sits the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

It was Carter who called for that boycott - a Cold War power play intended to express America's disdain for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter said the invasion "could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the second World War."

The boycott garnered more than two-thirds support from the 2,400 members of the unwieldy U.S. Olympic Committee house of delegates, the governing body that made the official move to keep the athletes out of Moscow. In short time, that move came to be seen as the textbook example of the risks, confusion and low success rate of injecting politics into sports.

"We were not allowed to go for a not-so-clear reason," said Edwin Moses, the hurdling great who won 122 straight races between 1977 and 1987, which included the Olympic gold-medal contests in 1976 and 1984.