The choice of the venue for the XIV Winter Olympics took place in 1978, at the 80th session of the IOC in Athens. There were four candidate cities, but the American Los Angeles did not confirm its application, and it took only two rounds of voting to make a decision. With a slight advantage of only three votes, it was decided to give the right to host the competition to the Yugoslav city of Sarajevo.
By the time of the XIV Winter Olympic Games, Sarajevo was the capital of one of the union republics of Yugoslavia with a population of more than 500 thousand inhabitants. It was not an ultra-modern metropolis - houses in a hilly area were compactly located along narrow streets, along which trams ran. Such conditions excluded the eternal problem of megacities when organizing large forums - traffic jams. For the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympiad, as well as part of the competition, the largest stadium in the republic "Asim Ferhatovich-Khase" was reconstructed.
The opening ceremony took place on February 8, 1984, but the start of the competition was given the day before - hockey players began their tournament. On that day, the USSR national team won the biggest victory of this tournament, defeating the Poles with a score of 12: 1. This team became the Olympic champion in 1984, leaving the eternal rivals in second place - the national team of Czechoslovakia.
At the 1984 Winter Olympics, 39 sets of awards were played in ten sports in 12 days. According to its results, the USSR was the first in the team competition in terms of the total number of awards (25), but lost to the GDR (24 medals) in their quality - the Germans had three more gold awards. The unsuccessful performance of US athletes turned out to be unusual - the team of this country was only fifth in the number of awards (8), behind Finland (13) and Norway (9) in this indicator. The Austrian team, which has always been strong in winter sports, also performed unsuccessfully - it got only one bronze medal. But the only award won by the home team was, on the contrary, recognized as a great success - the silver medal in the super giant slalom became the first in the Olympic history of this country. In total, 1272 athletes from 49 countries of the world took part in the Sarajevo Olympic starts.
