The ghost of Winter Olympics past: Sarajevo’s legacy lives on three decades later

The site of the successful 1984 Winter Games was later devastated by war, but Olympic pride still prevails in Bosnia-Herzegovina today, reports Borzou Daragahi from Sarajevo

The medals podium at the ski jump venue built for the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics on Mount Igman, near Sarajevo (Jasmin Brutus)

It was the apex, not only for a mysterious city off the beaten path, but for a nation emerging from obscurity. It would not last.

Sarajevo, host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, became a city of cosmopolitan glamour and athletic excellence. Yugoslavia, a nation that had boasted about belonging to neither the eastern nor the western bloc, which at the time were confronting each other, was showcasing itself – coming in from the cold as an international player.

Before the Games, most westerners only knew Sarajevo from their history classes, as the city where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in 1914, sparking the First World War.