On Sunday, 4 May 1980, in Split, the national league’s soccer game between archrivals the Croatian Hajduk and the Serbian Crvena Zvezda was inter- rupted early in the second half. When loudspeakers announced the news of Tito’s death, the players, referees, stadium crew, policemen, and 50,000 spec- tators burst into tears. The crowd chanted: “Comrade Tito, we pledge to you that we will never stray from your path.” Only a year earlier, Tito had been there, at the opening of the Eighth Mediterranean Sport Games. Official commemoration and funeral ceremonies were held at Belgrade on 5–8 May 1980. Belgrade welcomed 209 delegations from 127 countries. The delega- tions included 38 heads of states, 10 premiers, 7 vice-presidents, 6 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign ministers, 2 kings, and 5 princes.15 A hundred
and sixty reporters and 58 television networks from 42 countries provided the news coverage of the funeral ceremonies.16From 4–8 May 7,768 prom-
inent citizens and state officials held vigils by Tito’s bier in the antechamber of the Federal Assembly at Belgrade, and five hundred thousand people made pilgrimages to the capital city.17
Yugoslav newspapers published statements by and interviews with for- eign leaders, politicians, diplomats, and delegates of liberation movements who portrayed Tito as one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth cen- tury. Tito’s nonaligned friends, such as the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and other Third World lead- ers were favored by the domestic media, as if to suggest that a country with so many friends had little to worry about. The regime launched a slogan: “And after Tito, there will be Tito!” A discourse of eternity and continuity was echoed in the media. Poet Velimir Milosˇevic´ echoed the “mood of eter- nity” in the following verses:
If Heaven exists, he flew up there to bring us stars
If eternity exists, then he met with it, on his way to the sun. The people, down here, await the eternal wanderer who
went to the future to see what is going to happen with his people.18
Tito’s burial place and mausoleum, officially called the 25 May Memorial Complex, was labeled in the press the “eternal house of flowers.” There, according to Tito’s last wish, “people will come to rest and children will play.”19Tito was laid to rest on 8 May (i.e., on V-E Day and the thirty-fifth
anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe) in the “house of flowers.” The white marble tomb bore no symbols but the name and dates of birth and death. A Yugoslav journalist at the scene wrote: “Tito is gone but his Yugoslavia remains. She is eternal.”20
The ensuing years seemed to corroborate the optimistic prophecy. Yugo- slav pride soared when in February 1984, the capital city of Bosnia- Herzegovina, Sarajevo, hosted the Fourteenth Winter Olympic Games, the first Olympics held in Eastern Europe. In the same year, Belgrade was rec- ognized as a prospective candidate for the 1992 Summer Olympics (even- tually be held in Barcelona, Spain). No other phenomenon better symbolized the pride, elan, and relative prosperity of Tito’s Yugoslavia than internation- ally recognized Yugoslav sports. The Sarajevo Olympics came as an inter- national recognition of Yugoslavia’s success as a nation and an award for its sports development. The globally televised opening ceremony of the Olympiad on 8 February was spectacular. At the Sarajevo Kosˇevo Stadium, thousands of performers took part in the artistic program. The Sarajevo Olympics hosted 49 countries with 2,500 athletes and officials, 7,283 re- porters and media people, and 12,500 invited guests. The host country em- ployed 30,000 people with the organization committee and the Games’ serv- ices. All employees and retirees in the country donated 2.5 percent of their incomes for more than four years for the Games. In addition, 1.5 million people made special donations for the construction of Olympic facilities. Con- struction firms with experts and workers from all Yugoslav republics built 167 main facilities and 400 accessory building for the Games. The country, caught up in a galloping economic crisis (the number of unemployed per- sons neared a million in 1983), bore an enormous financial burden. “When Sarajevo was selected ahead of Sapporo or Gothenburg,” a Western sport historian would later write, “even the host’s organizing committee was sur- prised; nevertheless, 1984 saw the Winter Games held in the Balkans for the first time . . . after the Olympic torch had been carried through Yugosla- via by 1,600 relay runners, the Olympic flame was lit by the figure skater Sanda Dubravcˇic´ in Sarajevo’s Olympic Stadium.”21
According to some assessments, two billion people watched the television broadcast of the opening ceremony. The spectacle, designed by the Olympic Organization Committee under the chairmanship of the Bosnian politician Branko Mikulic´, put on parade Yugoslavia’s diversity, folklore, youth, energy, and optimism. The Olympic Organization Committee pointed out in a wel- coming message to athletes and guests that the Fourteenth Winter Olympic Games had come to this city and this country to reassure the world that the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and Sarajevo were no longer what used to be viewed as a “powder keg” and zone of conflict.22
A monograph published that year in Sarajevo by the Olympic Organiza- tion Committee cited greetings, letters, and telegrams received from foreign viewers and visitors. Most of the letters came from the United States of America, which was warming up for the upcoming Summer Olympics in
,
Los Angeles and the ensuing Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York. In one letter, Jonnie Mundt from Dallas, Texas, exclaimed: “the wonderful peo- ple of Sarajevo worked together and showed a fascinating talent, creativity, honesty and self-sacrifice. . . . Your people gave to the world such a wonder- ful example of peaceful cooperation.”23 Laureen Ruffner, from Las Vegas,
wrote as follows: “Nothing in the world is so badly needed as mutual un- derstanding and cooperation among different peoples; your country is the best example in the world! Americans can learn a lot about the special spirit and compassion of the Yugoslav peoples. I was touched by the sincere to- getherness and warmth of the Yugoslav people.”24
“You have shown to the world that peace and cooperation among all peoples are possible,” wrote Charles C. Dierks when he returned from the Balkans to his native Hemet, California, and added: “thank you for the most beautiful Olympic spectacle I have ever seen. Your wonderful children look so healthy; may the good Lord bless you all!” Jack and Agnes Mudry from Grand Junction, Colorado, dedicated to the host country of the Fourteenth Winter Olympic Games the following piece of poetry:
Oh amazing Yugoslavia, country of many nationalities, United in a magnificent single whole,
Full of beauty, customs, folklore and taste
Your children are wonderful, your men are courageous Let the wonderful Yugoslavia live forever!25
The Yugoslav press boasted that the Sarajevo Olympics was the world’s re- ward to Yugoslavia as a factor of stability in international relations and hon- ored its success in international sports. The host city of Sarajevo, with its domes, crosses, synagogues, and minarets, epitomized the Olympic ideal of peace and cooperation in the world. The host country took the opportunity to show the world a new kind of socialism different from the Soviet model. For ex- ample, the Olympic Organization Committee provided halls for prayer and wor- ship in the Sarajevo Olympic village. The Committee chairman, Branko Mik- ulic´, held meetings with religious officials to discuss how to improve spiritual services for guests and athletes. Even though Mikulic´ was a “liberal commu- nist” in economic matters, he showed no compromise over the issue of a mul- tiparty system in Yugoslavia. At the 7 February 1984 press conference, a West- ern journalist, having declared that Yugoslavia seemed more democratic than other communist countries, asked Mikulic´ why the League of Communists still hesitated to allow the multiparty system. The Yugoslav leader replied:
If we allow [a] multiparty system in this country, all . . . the people would get would be several new ethnic and religious parties without any specific political or economic agenda and issues except hatred for one another and their leaders’ cries for partitions and secessions. We would have another Lebanon in this country, and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia will never let it happen!26
At the Sarajevo Olympic Games, even the otherwise mediocre Yugoslav ski team, propelled by national pride, managed to win an Olympic medal. Yugo- slav pride also energized other more competitive Yugoslav sports. Before and after Tito, Yugoslav sports in international competition was the source of na- tional pride and cohesion. The national team (reprezentacija) was an efficient instrument of official nationalism. The reprezentacija epitomized the patriotic idea of brotherhood and unity and brought the idea into action before a large popular audience. The victories of the multiethnic national team testified to the strength in unity among diverse groups in the multinational federation.27
The communist founders of the second Yugoslav state appreciated sports as an effective political tool. As early as during the Partisan resistance in World War II, the movement’s communist leaders had put sports in the service of the liberation struggle, nation-making, and communist revolution. Members of the soccer team “RSˇK Split” from Split, Croatia, were among the first martyrs (“people’s heroes”) captured after a battle with the Italians and Ustasˇas and executed in the summer of 1941. In 1942, an “Olympiad” was held in Focˇa, in eastern Bosnia. In the summer of 1944, soccer and water polo teams repre- senting the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia played international games against British and U.S. teams in Italy. In August 1944 in Rome, a Brit- ish military newspaper praised the water polo skills shown by “Marshall Tito’s Dolphins.”28After 1945, The communist regime in Tito’s Yugoslavia encour-
aged a rapid development of all sports. The national team, sponsored by the federation, had a special place in the Yugoslav system. As a Croatian basket- ball coach put it, the state forged a “cult of the national team” that mirrored the nation’s pride and diversity.29
According to the records of the Yugoslav government sports association, in the year of Tito’s death, the Yugoslav national team won 93 world or Euro- pean trophies (gold, silver, or bronze medals, that is, winning one of three first places in official international competition) and 105 trophies in 1981. In 1982, 175 Yugoslav athletes from 54 Yugoslav cities and from all of the Yugo- slav republics and autonomous provinces; competing as members of the na- tional team in official international competition in 22 sport disciplines, won 70 trophies worldwide; in the same year Yugoslav athletes won seven gold medals in world championships with 11 first places in European contests: Yu- goslavia was ranked, according to the total output in international competi- tion, tenth in the world.30In the Olympic year 1984, the Yugoslav national
team won a total of 88 international trophies, including 24 first places, and was ranked third in total number of medals won in world championships.31