Bob Ramsak – Notebooks

For nearly four years in the early 1990s, residents of Sarajevo, the host city of the 1984 Winter Olympics, were subjected to daily shelling and sniper fire by Bosnian Serb forces, positioned in the hills surrounding the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, killing 13,952 people. Thousands were children.

Published originally on WorldAthletics.org for this year’s
International Day of Sport for Development and Peace,
recalling the Sarajevo ’96 Athletics Meeting of Solidarity,
the first international sporting event to take place in
Sarajevo after the devastating siege that
strangled the city for nearly four years was finally lifted.

The siege of Sarajevo – all 1,425 days of it – is the longest military siege of a capital city in the modern era, and 5 April marked the beginning of the horrifying tale of the city that just eight years before was hailed by sports officials and athletes from all over the globe for successfully staging the Games.

The days of Olympic glory quickly became a distant memory as shells – an average of 329 a day – started raining down on the city 28 years ago. It was long days and nights of sheer terror. Residents were trapped and held at gunpoint in sub-freezing winters and scorching hot summers. Water, electricity and food were scarce, until they ran out altogether. Snipers targeted mothers waiting in lines for water, fathers queuing for bread at bakeries and schoolchildren running to makeshift classes in basements.

About a month into the siege, mortars pounded the Zetra Arena, host to the skating events at the 1984 Olympics. The bombed out building was later used as a morgue, the seats from which spectators watched Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean ice-dance to a dozen perfect-scoring routines and Scott Hamilton and Katarina Witt launch their dazzling Olympic figure skating careers, fashioned into coffins.

Next to Zetra was Koševo Stadium, an athletics and football facility that hosted the Olympics’ opening ceremony. It too, was pounded by mortars during the siege, soon becoming a bombed out shell of a glorious structure of the past. Instead of parks, it was now surrounded by cemeteries on three sides – two filled with residents, killed in the siege.

It was there, at the stadium, just six months after the siege was lifted on 29 February 1996 that World Athletics, then the IAAF, would put on a track meet. The 9 September competition would be the first international sporting event in Sarajevo since war broke out in the former Yugoslavia nearly five years earlier.

An unlikely event takes shape

In late April 1994, officials from the Bosnia and Herzegovina Athletics Federation attended a European Athletics Council meeting in Bled, Slovenia, presented Primo Nebiolo, then the IAAF’s president, with the improbable idea that the governing body help stage a world class competition in Sarajevo that summer. The meeting would be a strong show of solidarity, they said, that could help create an atmosphere of hope for the people of the beleaguered city. The unlikely idea resonated with Nebiolo, and he agreed, setting the plan into motion.

Over the next two years, the IAAF partnered with the IOC to renovate the stadium, Nebiolo convinced Mondo to donate a track, and a date, 9 September 1996, two days after the Grand Prix Final in Milan where many of the season’s top athletes would gather, was confirmed. Pierre Weiss, then the IAAF’s General Director, led two logistically challenging site visits in the lead-in to meet with local organizers, once in June and again in July. With a promise from local organizers that the stadium would be ready, all that remained was convincing athletes to go. And then getting them there.