Polish gold medal winner, Władysław Kozakiewicz, enraged spectators at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow with insulting gesture has been honoured in new biopic, to be premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival.
Kozakiewicz described what happened. “The Russian crowd was whistling at any non-Russian contestant. They were whistling to distract us, you can only imagine the noise: 70,000 people at the Luzhniki Stadium, probably only 10,000 of them were foreigners. It occurred to me that I’m the only person in the world who got whistled at for breaking the world record.”
After winning gold in the pole vault, beating hometown favourite, Konstantin Volkov, Władysław Kozakiewicz, made an obscene gesture—slamming his left hand against his right bicep as he raise his right fist—known in cultured circles as bras d’honneur, or in down-to-Earth Anglo-Saxon it means: “screw you”. He was responding to an angry Moscow crowd, upset that he had .
Back in Poland there was widespread dissatisfaction with Soviets and its brand of communism. A month before the Olympics there had been strikes across Poland. These led to the creation of Solidarność [Solidarity], a union that would lead the way for the overthrow of the communist régime a decade later. While Kozakiewicz’s gesture was mainly driven by his anger at the unsporting behaviour of Russian spectators, at home it was interpreted as a protest against the Soviets. As a result, Poles in the streets chanted Kozakiewicz’s name, shook his hand and hugged him.
After winning gold, the Soviet ambassador to Poland demanded that Kozakiewicz be stripped of his medal. Although this didn’t happen, he was severely reprimanded and received a six month ban in 1983 from the PZLA, the Polish Athletic Association.
