Sarajevo — the bobsled team that crossed the airport runway under sniper fire to reach the 1994 Olympics
Igor Boras had never bobsledded. He was a sprinter. He joined the Bosnian bobsled team because he wanted to be in the Olympics. To get there he had to cross the Sarajevo airport runway under sniper fire, ride in a warlord's van with a stoned driver and no headlights, hitchhike to Split, and compete on a nine-year-old borrowed German sled with missing screws. The team was five Muslims, two Croats, and three Serbs.
Igor Boras had never bobsledded. He was a hundred-metre runner — tall, strong, twenty-four years old, and trapped in besieged Sarajevo. The bobsled track on Trebević where a Bosnian team might have trained was on the front line, being used as a firebase for Serbian mortars. Boras’s only training facility was the long carpeted corridor of a partially destroyed Supreme Court building, where he worked as a security guard and did wind sprints between shifts (Vuic, The Sarajevo Olympics, 2014, pp. 1–4).
He joined the Bosnian bobsled team because, he says, “I wanted to be in the Olympics.”
To get there, he had to leave a city that was sealed by the siege. There were no planes, no buses, no trains leaving Sarajevo for civilians. The only way out was to cross the Butmir airport runway on foot, at night, under sniper fire.
The runway
In February 1993, Boras and two teammates needed to reach Innsbruck, Austria, for the World Bobsleigh Championships — the qualifying event that would let Bosnia send a team to Lillehammer the following year. The Serbs controlled the ridges above the airport and both sides of the runway. The UN controlled the tarmac itself. French peacekeepers drove SUVs back and forth, shining spotlights on anyone trying to cross. If the Serbs saw the UN allowing Bosnians free passage, they would shut the airport down — and the city would starve (Vuic, 2014, pp. 1–2).
Boras hired a smuggler guide. “It was dark, as I remember it, and foggy. You couldn’t see thirty feet in front of you,” he told Vuic in a 2010 interview. “We went back and forth, toward the Serbs, away from the Serbs, toward the French, away from the French. At one point an SUV passed us, but its spotlight was pointed the other way. We ducked down until it went by, then made it to the other side.”
The warlord’s van
The other side was free Bosnian territory on Mount Igman — but it was controlled by Juka Prazina, a paramilitary warlord who had defended the city in the early months of the siege and then turned to looting, confiscating apartments, and robbing refugees. Boras’s teammate Zdravko Stojnić knew Juka from before the war. Juka liked Stojnić and wanted to impress him. He sent a purple American van.
“The driver was stoned,” Boras recalled. “You could smell it. And he drove us up this snowy mountain road with no headlights on, because if the Serbs saw you, even from a great distance, they’d shoot.” At Juka’s headquarters, troops had just received a load of machine guns and were test-firing them outside — “RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT… over and over.” A nurse from Boras’s neighbourhood recognised him and called his name. Boras froze. “My heart was racing. I thought to myself: ‘Now that was close’” (Vuic, 2014, pp. 2–3).
From Juka’s territory they were driven to Konjić, a small town west of Sarajevo. From there they hitchhiked to Split, Croatia, and flew to Austria.
The borrowed sled
In Innsbruck, the German Olympic Committee housed them and gave them a sled. It was nine years old, painted black, and was “missing several screws.” Stojnić — thirty-six, a veteran who had competed in bobsled for Yugoslavia at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics — showed Boras how to use it. “The sled was loud,” Boras remembered, “and you had to breathe a certain way and push your head up into the turns or the G-forces would mash you into the floor. It was brutal. I saw my back in the mirror after one race and it was black and green and blue. That’s when I thought: ‘This is crazy!’” (Vuic, 2014, p. 3).
A third teammate, Denis, joined the team for a different reason: to escape the besieged city. He trained for a few days in Austria, then left for Germany. “You couldn’t leave Sarajevo without a pass,” Boras explained. “They needed soldiers. So Denis joined the team in order to escape the city… And who could blame him?” (Vuic, 2014, p. 3).
After the 1993 World Championships, Boras did something that puzzled everyone: he went back. Across Mount Igman, across the runway, back into the siege. “Where else was there to go? Sarajevo was our home.”
The Markale massacre on a giant TV
Getting to the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics was harder. The Croat-Muslim war had erupted in April 1993, cutting the land route through Herzegovina to the coast. Boras was trapped. He tried the Bosnian Olympic Committee, a Bosnian Croat politician, even CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Everyone said no. Finally, ABC journalist Hilary Brown gave him a letter on ABC letterhead claiming he was an affiliate from Cyprus. The UN accepted it (Vuic, 2014, pp. 4–5).
On 3 February 1994, Boras flew from Sarajevo to Ancona, Italy, then on to Milan and Oslo. At the airport’s Olympic reception area, he saw bread, cheese, meat, fruit, fresh juice. The room was bright and clean. He sat down and thought: “I’m gonna relax. I’m gonna put the war behind me.”
Then, on the giant TV screen, CNN showed the Markale market massacre: a mortar shell had landed in a crowded Sarajevo market. Sixty-eight people were dead, 144 wounded. The footage was among the most graphic ever broadcast — a man with a severed leg dragging himself toward the camera, people sitting in pools of blood.
“I froze,” Boras said. “And then, without warning, I wept. I wept, and I wept, and I wept… My lips trembled, and my chest was heaving. All those years in Sarajevo… all the fear and all the killing and all the suffering. It just came out at once. I cried for a good forty minutes, while the other athletes asked, ‘Who is that guy? What’s wrong with him? Why’s he crying?’” (Vuic, 2014, p. 5).
Reporters swarmed him at Lillehammer. “You ask me about doping?” he told one. “I went a year without fruit.”
Remember Sarajevo
By the time Boras and Stojnić reached Lillehammer, eight other Bosnian athletes who had fled Sarajevo or were living abroad as refugees had joined them. The team included five Muslims, two Croats, and three Serbs — members of all three ethnic groups competing together while their compatriots were killing each other back home (Vuic, 2014, p. 5).
CBS, the American broadcaster, made “Remember Sarajevo” the leitmotif of its entire Lillehammer coverage. It opened with a documentary contrasting the Sarajevo of 1984 with the Sarajevo of 1994: “The world reveled in Sarajevo then, saying it would remember, but when Sarajevo needs it most, the world has forgotten.” For two weeks, before every major event, CBS aired retrospective vignettes — Scott Hamilton remembers Sarajevo, Katarina Witt remembers Sarajevo, Torvill and Dean remember Sarajevo. Norwegian speed skater Johann Olav Koss set three world records and donated his entire bonus, $32,000, to the Olympic Aid Relief Fund for Sarajevo. At the closing ceremony, every person in the Olympic Stadium — forty thousand in all — was given a flashlight inscribed “Remember Sarajevo” (Vuic, 2014, pp. 6–7).
A reporter asked Boras the most common question of the Games: how could the same people who had hosted such a warm Olympics ten years earlier be killing each other now? William Oscar Johnson of Sports Illustrated put it plainly: “This is the single most unbearable truth I face in trying to reconcile Sarajevo 1984, Olympic city of brotherly love, with Sarajevo 1994, human slaughterhouse” (Vuic, 2014, p. 6).
Boras did not have an answer for that. He had a borrowed sled with missing screws, and a team that had crossed three front lines to get to the starting gate.
Sources
- Jason Vuic, The Sarajevo Olympics: A History of the 1984 Winter Games (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). Introduction: “Remember Sarajevo,” pp. 1–12. Vuic interviewed Boras on 10 July 2010; all Boras quotations are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
- William Oscar Johnson, “The Killing Ground,” Sports Illustrated, 14 February 1994, 46. The “single most unbearable truth” quotation.
- Gary Shelton, “War Follows Bosnian Team,” St. Petersburg Times, 13 February 1994. Contemporary reporting on the Bosnian delegation at Lillehammer.
Sources & further reading
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