Four decades since the ZOI in Sarajevo: When East and West met

On that Wednesday, February 8, 1984, there was a festive atmosphere in Sarajevo despite the clouds that hung over the city. For months, people were preparing for this day, everywhere was building, arranging, cleaning, cleaning Mother said.

And now that moment has come: sixty thousand spectators at the Koševo stadium, and millions in front of televisions across the country, proudly followed the opening ceremony of the 14th Winter Olympic Games. The eyes of the whole world were focused on Sarajevo.

Euphoria was felt at every step. Even today, four decades later, those who were in the city at that time remember the special atmosphere.

"I think Sarajevo was the center of the world that year. We were all happy, excited, it was beautiful. Seeing the whole world in Sarajevo is one of the experiences that I remember as a beautiful event in my life from that time," recalls a woman from Sarajevo.

"And then it started snowing"

"We all felt a great relief when the games were opened," says Zdravko Lipovac, himself from Sarajevo, who broadcast the bobsleigh and luge competitions as a radio reporter.

"In the days before the Games, we were very worried because there was no snow. At this time of year there is always snow in Sarajevo and on the surrounding mountains, but this year - nothing. And then, the night before the start of the competition, it started to rain, it fell a meter. That was ideal," he recalls.

Photo: Tanjug

The next morning it became clear what the games meant to the city's residents and how much they identified with them. Immediately early in the morning, people came out of their houses and cleared the streets and sidewalks of snow. Everything should be nice and tidy for guests from around the world, everyone should feel welcome.

Hospitality has always been important in Sarajevo, especially now when "the world was away".

A few days later, a restaurant owner from Baščaršija experienced it firsthand, says Lipovac. For some reason, the famous Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas was also in town during the Games.

After dinner in a restaurant, the owner cheated him by adding a zero to the bill. But the story about it spread quickly and Raja "wanted to beat up" the owner of the restaurant. He barely got away. And his restaurant is closed.

Deceiving a guest - that was absolutely not allowed, nothing was allowed to spoil the "Sarajevo winter fairy tale".

And everyone felt responsible for hospitality. Many tried to learn some English, in order to communicate at least a little with foreigners who until then were not frequent guests in the city.

Salespeople, waiters who came to ZOI from all over the country to help, taxi drivers - they all went to crash courses in English. Eight hundred taxi drivers sat in the benches during those weeks. How much they learned is not known, but at least they all knew how to say: "No problem." In those days, nothing was a problem in Sarajevo.

The meeting place of East and West

These Winter Olympic Games were also important for the whole of Yugoslavia. It was four years after Tito, and three years after the first major student demonstrations in Kosovo where Albanians demanded a republic.

Tito's heirs wanted to show the unity of the country and the ability to "continue on Tito's path".

However, the ZOI in Sarajevo had an important international dimension. Four years earlier, the US and most Western countries had boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, after which the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries announced that they would not participate in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Photo: Tanjug

At that time, non-aligned Yugoslavia was the only place where West and East met in sports competitions. And so, for twelve days, Sarajevo was, completely in accordance with the Olympic principle, a place of sports competition, international meetings and festivities.

And when the Slovenian Jure Franko won the silver medal in the giant slalom, the only one for Yugoslavia, there was no end to the enthusiasm. "I was personally on the plateau of Skenderija when there was a big welcome for Frank. Those are the events that remain in the permanent memory," recalls a Sarajevo resident who was just a boy at the time.

The war destroyed everything.

Eight years later there was no trace of it. A brutal war was going on in Yugoslavia, nationalists on different sides destroyed and dismembered the country, and the Bosnian Serb army surrounded Sarajevo.

From the mountains, where numerous sports facilities and hotels were built for the Winter Games, they shelled the city in the valley. "Unfortunately, everything was destroyed. They destroyed the bobsleigh track in Trebević, which was the most expensive sports facility. The large Zetra sports hall in the city, which was built especially for hockey and figure skating competitions, was hit and burned," recalled the sports journalist Lipovac.

Sarajevo was shelled the most from Trebević, "from there they had the city in the palm of their hand," he says. His apartment, which was located in the former Olympic settlement for journalists in Dobrinja, was also hit by a shell.

New hope

After the war, Sarajevo and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina first had other priorities than rebuilding the destroyed Olympic infrastructure.

But over time, people remembered again that in the vicinity of Sarajevo there are excellent conditions for winter sports, the cable car to Trebević was repaired, ski slopes and some cable cars were opened, hotels were built, and there is even a toboggan run. With international financial aid, the Zetra hall was also renovated.

Today, four decades after the Winter Olympics, people in economically weak and politically divided Bosnia and Herzegovina remember with nostalgia those days when the whole city stood together, cleaned the snow and joyfully welcomed gestures from all over the world.

Many say that those were the last happy days in Yugoslavia. And the games themselves have never been forgotten: the then mascot Vučko has remained connected to the visual identity of the city where Olimpijska Street still exists today.