When it comes to Olympic boycotts, it's the athletes who suffer.

When Russia's invasion of Afghanistan prompted Canada to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, a generation of our country's athletes were deprived of their once-in-a-lifetime chance to make history.

It was the first time Canada had refused to compete at an Olympics since it started fielding a national team in 1908. Even the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany went ahead with Canada's participation.

“I was so focused on training and school, it was a complete shock to me,” says gymnast Monica Goermann, who was sixteen years old when Canada pulled out of the Moscow Games. Reporters hounded her for weeks looking for a comment and she struggled to understand what they expected her to say.

“I kept trying to be a good girl, saying I was sorry not to be going but I supported the government's decision.”

Despite the boycott, the Canadian Olympic trials went ahead and she, along with her mother, coach Elfriede Goermann, were named to the now hypothetical 1980 Olympic team. Many believe that Monica and her teammates — Elfie Schleigel, Karen Kelsall, and Sherry Hawco — remain the strongest women's gymnastics team Canada has ever fielded. Alternate events were organized, but Goermann quietly admits that nothing really could have served as a satisfying substitute.

Sixty-one other nations joined Canada in the U.S.-led boycott. It was the Cold War era and shunning Moscow was the popular thing to do.

Yet there were a few former Olympians — such as pentathlete Diane-Jones Konihowski and swimmer Dick Pound (who was then president of the Canadian Olympic Committee) — who publicly argued against mixing politics and sport. Their opinions brought them hate mail and death threats for months afterward.

The 1980 boycott was not the first — twenty-eight African nations boycotted Montreal's 1976 Olympics over racism issues. Nor was it the last. At the next Olympics in 1984 in Los Angeles, most Eastern Bloc countries refused to participate. The politicization of the Olympics was getting out of hand.

Olympic committees recognized that to be independent of politics, they had to become independent of political funding. And so began the Olympics commercial era we know today, where athletes can be professionals and the Games are heavily sponsored by the private sector.

The waning influence of politics could be seen when pressure began building to boycott the 2008 Beijing Games.

Chris Rudge, head of the Canadian Olympic Committee, told the Toronto Star, “I could see the government wanting to do that again…. But we don't need (government support) to go to the Games.”

Indeed, providing an Olympic opportunity for financial partners to promote their products and reach into new markets like China and South America has created a whole other set of pressures on athletes; athletes who are also professionals must focus on sponsorship and advertising deals in addition to training for competition.

Twenty-nine years later, the difference between the Olympics of today and yesterday are not lost on Goermann, who now runs Monica's Danz Gym in Winnipeg. She trains students for international gymnestrada competitions and has created and choreographed several Cirque du Soleil-style aerial dance shows.

“The Olympics have changed so much,” she says.

“It's now all about sponsorship and entertainment. It's like a business in and of itself.”

Still, she doesn't believe that's a bad thing. Nor has her experience caused her to discourage her daughter Maia's own dreams of possibly going to the Olympics.

“You have to know there will be sacrifices, and that it takes a lot of hard work. But the returns are a thousandfold. Things may block your way, but the journey alone is worth it.”

The Olympics will always be about the athletes. For the rest of us, the Games are a chance to celebrate the athletes' journeys and to marvel at the extraordinary skills they've developed along the way.