In the spring of 1980, Canada’s gymnasts were preparing for what many believed would be a breakthrough Olympic Games. The men’s and women’s teams had both qualified for Moscow, experienced veterans stood alongside rising young stars, and several athletes were realistic contenders for international success. Then Canada joined the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The decision emerged from a complex mixture of diplomacy, political pressure, and financial leverage, but its consequences were felt most directly by the athletes themselves. Some retired soon after the boycott was announced. Others spent four more years chasing an Olympic opportunity that never came. Below, you can find their stories.
Canada’s Road to the Boycott
Canada’s path to the boycott was considerably more complicated than America’s. In Washington, President Jimmy Carter eventually embraced the boycott as a central response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, though he had initially been reluctant before being persuaded by Vice President Mondale and National Security Advisor Brzezinski. In Ottawa, the reaction was more hesitant. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau doubted that keeping athletes out of the Olympics would force the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops and openly acknowledged that the boycott was unlikely to change Soviet policy. Instead, he viewed it primarily as a symbolic demonstration of international opposition to the invasion.
The Canadian Olympic Association initially resisted. Led by Dick Pound, the organization argued that decisions about Olympic participation should belong to the Olympic movement rather than governments. On March 30, 1980, the association voted to send a team to Moscow despite the growing political pressure surrounding the Games.
That position quickly became difficult to maintain because the boycott was not driven by government pressure alone. The Canadian Olympic Association depended heavily on corporate fundraising and government support to finance Olympic participation. In the days following the March vote, the Olympic Trust of Canada announced that it would withhold roughly $1.7 million in funding if athletes were sent to Moscow. Major contributors such as Simpsons-Sears and Eaton’s supported the boycott, and in some cases, Canadian firms were linked to American parent companies that had already aligned themselves with Carter’s campaign. Without that financial support, sending a team to Moscow became increasingly difficult.
Political pressure reinforced the financial squeeze. Senior government officials were making clear that Ottawa favored non-participation. On April 2, Dick Pound met with External Affairs Minister Mark MacGuigan and Sports Minister Gerald Regan; afterward, he acknowledged that the COA would respect the wishes of the federal government. Three weeks later, on April 22, MacGuigan formally announced that Canada would join the boycott. Faced with both the loss of crucial funding and the government’s opposition, the Canadian Olympic Association reversed its earlier decision and voted on April 26 to stay home.
Three Paths After Moscow
The athletes themselves had little influence over the decision, and most opposed it. In March 1980, as politicians debated the boycott, coaches and gymnasts were already confronting a more immediate reality. Several athletes were carrying injuries, and everyone understood how narrow an Olympic window could be. “For quite a few of them, it will be their only chance at an Olympics,” men’s program coordinator Rob Paradis warned. “They really want to go and do well.”
No Canadian gymnast embodied that reality more clearly than Philip Delesalle. The five-time national champion turned twenty-two in 1980 and had already spent fifteen years in the sport. One of Canada’s best medal prospects on pommel horse and parallel bars, he had planned to retire after Moscow. When the boycott became official, Delesalle announced that the national championships would be his final competition. “I was prepared, but I’m still disappointed,” he said. “There should be no connection between sports and politics. The superpowers are just playing games, and it has affected 11,000 athletes the world over.”
Six months later, Toronto hosted the World Cup and welcomed many of the same gymnasts who had competed in Moscow. Delesalle had actually qualified for the event but was no longer training. Instead, he was working as a mill laborer in Port Alberni. While the sport moved on without him, the career he had expected to conclude at the Olympics had already come to an end.
Yet retirement proved harder than he expected. In a 1982 interview, Delesalle admitted that the transition away from elite sport had been difficult. Years of training had left him accustomed to constant motion and intensity. “When I first retired, I had a lot of problems settling down,” he recalled. “I always seemed to be super-hyped when I was training. I had to go from always moving to a standstill.”
By then, he had built a new life in northern British Columbia, splitting his time between a plumbing apprenticeship and coaching at a local gym. The bitterness, however, had not entirely disappeared. Looking back on the boycott, he remained unconvinced that any purpose had been served. “The government said we couldn’t go, and that was it,” he said. “The boycott didn’t sway the Russians. It didn’t have any effect. The Russians are still there. The Olympics were held, so what good did it do? Every athlete in Canada suffered, not just me.”
For a brief moment, he even considered returning. Many athletes who retired in 1980 eventually resumed training in hopes of reaching Los Angeles in 1984, and Delesalle wondered whether he could do the same. The experiment lasted only a few days. After injuring himself during his third practice back in the gym, he abandoned the idea. “That was enough for me,” he said. “It’s just not worth the risk anymore.”
Looking back, Delesalle remained proud of what he had accomplished. His most satisfying memory was not an individual medal but helping Canada qualify for Moscow at the 1979 World Championships. “I never did anything individually, but that still was the top of the line for me,” he said. “I proved I wasn’t a candy-ass. When it counted, I was there.”
In 1982, he showed little interest in preserving a legacy. Asked how he wanted to be remembered, Delesalle shrugged off the question. “To be honest, I don’t care about the past. I never tried to go down in gymnastics’ history or anything like that.” He recalled returning home after retirement and asking his mother to remove the medals that still hung on the walls. “That part of my life is over,” he said. There had been “some good times and a helluva lot of bad times.” Then he paused and summed up his feelings in a few simple words: “But, I’m happy now.”
For younger gymnasts, the calculus was different. Fifteen-year-old Monica Goermann initially reacted to the boycott with the same sense of loss. She had been training twenty-six hours a week and had spent six years aiming for Moscow. When the decision was announced, she admitted that she was “pretty upset.” Yet her disappointment quickly gave way to acceptance. “I’m in athletics, but I’m a Canadian, too, and the country comes before me,” she said. Rather than dwell on what had been lost, she immediately began looking toward Los Angeles in 1984.
At the time, Goermann seemed well-positioned to make that journey. She was one of Canada’s brightest young stars, a Pan American Games champion whose family had literally built a gymnasium to support her career. But gymnastics careers rarely follow straight lines. In late 1981, while training at the World Championship trials, she suffered a serious back injury that left her sidelined for more than two years. Cortisone treatments, body casts, and long stretches away from competition followed. By the time she returned in 1984, she was simply hoping to finish among the top twenty gymnasts at the Olympic selection meet. The athlete who had once viewed Los Angeles as the obvious destination was now fighting merely to reclaim a place in the sport.
Elfi Schlegel’s story was more complicated. Already one of Canada’s leading gymnasts, she was only fifteen when the boycott debate began. She understood better than most what four years could mean in gymnastics. “The Olympics have been my goal since I was 10 years old,” she said when the possibility of a boycott first emerged. Then she added a revealing caveat: “By 1984, I’m not sure where I will be in gymnastics. I just want to participate.”
Schlegel spent the next four years proving that the lost Olympics had not diminished her. In November 1980, only months after Moscow, she became the first Canadian woman ever to win a World Cup medal, earning bronze on balance beam despite competing with a dislocated toe. The following year, when reporters suggested she might be nearing the end of her career, she bristled at the idea. “I hate it when people say you’re washed up at 17,” she said in 1981. “That’s sick. If you love it, who cares how old you are?” She went on to compete at both the 1981 and 1983 World Championships.
By the summer of 1984, Schlegel was twenty years old, a third-year student at the University of Florida, and still one of Canada’s most accomplished gymnasts. Yet the landscape had changed dramatically since 1980. Canada now possessed an unusually deep generation of talent. Twelve gymnasts attended the final Olympic selection camp in Los Angeles, but only six could be chosen. Schlegel did not make the cut. Every gymnast selected ahead of her was younger, several only fifteen years old, but she rejected any suggestion that age alone explained the decision. “I certainly don’t feel I’m ‘too old’ at 20 to be an Olympic gymnast,” she said afterward. Instead, she pointed to the increased competition within the program itself. “Four years ago, it was much easier to make the team, but now it’s very competitive. There were 12 top gymnasts here for the training camp, and only six could be selected.”
Taken together, the experiences of Delesalle, Goermann, and Schlegel reveal the flaw in one of the most common assumptions about Olympic boycotts: that athletes can simply try again four years later. Delesalle decided to move on. Goermann’s Olympic hopes were derailed by injury. Schlegel remained competitive, only to discover that the sport around her had changed. Each followed a different path, yet all arrived at the same destination: Los Angeles came and went without them.
That was the reality hidden behind discussions of diplomacy and foreign policy. Governments could treat the boycott as a temporary gesture, lasting only until the next Olympic Games. Athletes did not experience it that way. Their careers unfolded in real time. Opportunities closed, bodies changed, and circumstances shifted. What looked from a distance like a four-year postponement was, for many Canadian gymnasts, something far more permanent. Moscow was not an Olympics delayed. It was an Olympics lost.
Video
Here’s Delesalle performing Russians on parallel bars. Thanks to Hardy Fink for the footage.
References
Academic
Rice, Andrew C. “The American and Canadian Decisions to Boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics: A Comparative Analysis.” Journal of Olympic Studies 6, no. 2 (2025): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.5406/26396025.6.2.03.
Periodicals
“Olympics Should Be Above Politics,” Toronto Star, January 22, 1980.
Canadian Press, “Gymnasts Hoping for Olympic Upsets,” Ottawa Citizen, March 21, 1980.
“Gymnasts Are Anti-Boycott,” Daily Herald-Tribune (Grande Prairie, AB), April 8, 1980.
“Boycott Will End Delesalle’s Career,” Alberni Valley Times, April 23, 1980.
“Except for Konihowski, Joy Most Athletes Accept Move,” Sun Times (Owen Sound, ON), April 24, 1980.
Woolsey, Garth. “Upset Gymnast Won’t Let Up on Her Schedule,” Toronto Star, April 26, 1980.
Conaway, Tom. “Young Gymnasts Strive for Goal Despite Olympic Boycott,” Waterloo Region Record, May 5, 1980.
Al Sokol, “Ace Gymnast a Fallout Victim of Olympics Boycott,” Toronto Star, October 8, 1980.
“Schlegel Eyes Olympics,” Leader-Post (Regina, SK), May 11, 1981.
“Washed-Up Gymnast at 17? No Way, Says Medalist Elfi,” Edmonton Journal, May 11, 1981.
Hutchinson, Cam. “Delesalle Leaves Stormy Gym Career Behind.” Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon, SK), February 16, 1982.
Senick, Dave. “The Final Diagnosis Was Pinched Nerves,” Leader-Post (Regina, SK), February 13, 1984.
Sokol, Al. “Elfi Schlegel Left Off Olympic Team,” Toronto Star, July 25, 1984.
“Elfi Departs L.A. Scene,” Toronto Sun, August 10, 1984.
Appendix: Karen Kelsall
Delesalle was not the only gymnast whose career ended in the aftermath of the boycott. Karen Kelsall retired, as well. But unlike Delesalle, she had already experienced the Olympics, having competed in Montréal in 1976. Her decision reflected a different set of calculations:
Kelsall a senior citizen among kids of summer
By Marke Andrews
KELOWNA — The petite blond in the white shorts seems to blend in with the multitude of young athletes in town for the B.C. Summer Games.
But Karen Kelsall, former Canadian Olympic gymnast and World Cup competitor, is an alien among the Kids of Summer.
She is a spectator here. At the age of 17, Kelsall is a retired lady. No longer will she carry the weight of a country on her back as she strides into the gymnasium.
It is an odd scene Thursday. Across the street from the Okanagan Kokanees Gymnastic School, where Kelsall is guest teacher for the week, two busloads of Summer Games participants noisily prepare for the opening cermonies. By contrast, Kelsall, who looks too young to be entering university in September, is subdued and soft-spoken.
“I think these games are a lot healthier kind of competition than the Olympics,” the Nanaimo native says. “There’s not as much pressure on you, and you can have a good time.”
Kelsall knows about pressure. At the age of 13 — the minimum for athletes here at the provincial games — she represented Canada at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, coming away with a 27th-place finish.
In Montreal, at that age, Kelsall was oblivious to the responsibilities that others heaped upon the national team members. “I didn’t realize what a big thing I was into,” she says. “The pressure really didn’t get to me.”
Kelsall’s method of avoiding tension was to treat each meet as if it were a practice: striving for perfection but keeping cool in the process. But as she got older, and her performances improved (she finished 10th in the 1978 World Cup of Gymnastics), that method became increasingly difficult to follow.
“When you’re older, you let your mistakes get to you. You let the pressure build.”
Kelsall had hoped to go to Moscow this summer for the Olympics; wanted it enough to endure training for a year on a surgically reconstructed right knee.
But the Western boycott killed all that.
“I had planned to retire after the Olympics. If I had known what was going to happen I would have done it earlier.” So, after eight years of working out seven hours a day, six days a week, Karen Kelsall is calling it quits. She will accept a four-year scholarship to study sports medicine at the University of California, Berkeley campus, where she will be a member of the school’s gymnastics team.
Her parents have moved from Surrey, where Kelsall began her gym career, to California, “so they can be near me for a change.”
“The body can only stand so much,” she says of her decision. “And now I’ll have a chance to do a few things I missed out on.”
Today, Karen Kelsall will likely be the only retired person waterskiing on Okanagan Lake.
The Vancouver Sun, August 15, 1980
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