Australia Challenges Estonian Athlete's Victory in 1980 Olympics

Australia's athletics federation has demanded an investigation into the 1980 Moscow Olympics in which Estonian Jaak Uudmae won the gold medal for the triple jump for the Soviet team, the organization said in a statement on its website.

According to Athletics Australia, athlete Ian Campbell won the long jump, and the penalty he received for scraping his foot before the jump was not legitimate. The report notes three-time gold medalist Viktor Saneyev, who now lives in Sydney, to be one of the favorites in the competition.

The Australian request is partially based on a rule change which came into force after the games, in which a scraping of the trailing foot is not considered as a factor that grants an advantage. According to the report, there is also no evidence that a scraping of the foot took place, and if there was one, it would not have given the athlete an advantage.

"Experts in triple jumping acknowledge the logic behind this proposition," the statement says.

The association has sent a report to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), claiming that Campbell, who set the Olympic and world record for his jump, did not scrape his foot significantly enough to earn a penalty. Because of the penalty, only the athlete's second attempt was counted.

Saneyev, who is mentioned in the statement as a favorite of the competition, told Russia's Argumenty i Fakty weekly in June that he considers Uudma's jump illegitimate, claiming that judges ignored that the athlete allegedly overstepped the line while jumping, making Saneyev lose the potentially quadruple-gold-medal status. Saneyev also claimed Communist Party interference in the judgment of his results, which granted him silver rather than gold.

"It seems that the judges did not notice or did not want to notice the overstepping. Maybe they reinsured themselves. That is, probably I could have been a four-time [champion]. Probably…" Saneyev told the weekly.

Athletics Australia said that it also intends to challenge the results of the 1948 London Olympics, in which Australian Shirley Strickland de la Hunty placed fourth in the 200 meter run, but according to the association, actually placed third.