Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when Greg Louganis was favored to become the first man in more than 50 years to win two gold medals in diving at the same Olympics, he instead sat home with the U.S. boycott team and watched the victories go to a Soviet and an East German whom Louganis had outscored at Montreal four years before. Louganis achieved his double at Los Angeles in 1984 and hinted at retirement. But next week he too will be competing in Seoul, perhaps in part because he is one of just a handful of U.S. and Soviet athletes with a personal memory...
...Seoul is the 8-ft. high jump. Sweden's Patrik Sjoberg and West Germany's Carlo Thranhardt shared a world record of 7 ft. 11 1/4 in. until last week, when Cuba's Javier Sotomayor soared 7 ft. 11 1/2 in. in Spain. At least three other jumpers, West German Dietmar Mogenburg and Soviets Igor Paklin and Gennadi Avdeyenko, are potential Olympic eight-footers. Sotomayor is among the boycotters...
...West German officials had a more visceral reaction. Defense Minister Rupert Scholz declared that air shows "will never again take place," though he soon modified the ban to cover only military displays. Shows scheduled later this month in Bitburg and Lechfeld were hurriedly canceled. Many officials expressed doubt that the Ramstein event -- an annual fixture since 1955 -- would ever be held again...
...cosmetic response to the changed public mood, West German Defense Minister Scholz had already somewhat reduced the volume of low-flight military exercises, from 68,000 hours a year to 66,000, and insisted that his new ban on aerobatics applied not just to the German Luftwaffe but to NATO allies as well. In stating that claim, he seemed to be challenging the idea of the extraterritoriality of allied air bases. The 1963 NATO troops statute gives U.S. forces in West Germany the right to hold exercises in the air "as is necessary to the accomplishment of its defense mission...
Scholz's declarations raise the delicate question of whether a West German Defense Minister can decide what is and what is not part of NATO's defense role. But as a NATO diplomat in Bonn noted, "We are in an emotionally charged situation." Nowhere more so than at Ramstein, where the blackened remains of the Italian jet lay crumpled late last week amid abandoned picnic tables, uneaten potato salads and indelible memories of nightmare...