In 1978, at the World Championships in Strasbourg, France, Kurt Thomas became the first American man to win a world title. The achievement was all the more remarkable because Thomas, then twenty-two, had discovered gymnastics only eight years earlier after wandering into a gym in Miami. A year later, he surpassed even that breakthrough, collecting six medals at the 1979 World Championships, including gold on floor exercise and high bar and silver in the all-around.
By 1980, Thomas was one of the best gymnasts in the world, and the Moscow Olympics, scheduled to open on July 19, were supposed to be the culmination of nearly a decade of work.
But the opportunity never came. On April 21, 1980, President Jimmy Carter formally announced what he had threatened since January: the United States would boycott the Moscow Games. For Thomas—and for dozens of other American gymnasts at different stages of their careers—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had suddenly become something more than a distant geopolitical crisis. It had become the reason they would never compete in the Olympics they had spent years preparing for.
