An event worth remembering

These celebrations have helped keep Sarajevo’s Olympic heritage alive. They began in the year of the Games and have continued ever since, even during the Bosnian War of 1992-95, when the city came under siege. In 1994, and despite the artillery battles taking place around it, Sarajevo’s National Theatre staged exhibitions and concerts to mark the tenth anniversary.

In the years that followed the war, the International Olympic Committee helped rebuild the city’s shattered Olympic venues. Among them was the Zetra Olympic Hall, whose reopening formed part of the events held to mark the 15th anniversary in 1999.

Further celebrations were held in 2004, 2009 and 2014, a year in which several commemorative events had to be cancelled due to political tensions. One event that did go ahead was the return of British ice dance pair Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean to the city where they had won Olympic gold 30 years earlier. Some 5,000 Sarajevans turned up to watch them reprise their routine, performed to the sound of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.

In recent years, Sarajevo has also been making its Olympic legacy more visible. Visitors to the city can take Olympic-themed tours of the Sarajevo 1984 venues, where information panels and signs specifically designating their Olympic status have been installed. For its part, the nearby town of Pale opened an Olympic Park in 2010. And the reopening of the Olympic Museum in the building that originally housed it – which was bombed during the Bosnian War and subsequently restored – is another sign of the city’s continuing determination to showcase its Olympic heritage.

Olympic symbols have also helped bring the people of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo together. A prominent example is the Olympic mascot, Vucko, which remains a popular and instantly recognisable figure on both sides of the divide. Pahuljica, the Games’ snowflake emblem, is another common sight. Sarajevo and East Sarajevo also joined hands to host the 2019 European Youth Olympic Winter Festival jointly, respectively hosting the opening and closing ceremonies.

The largest single sporting event that the former Yugoslavia ever hosted, Sarajevo 1984 remains a common point of reference for all the region’s inhabitants. An independent 2014 survey of 90 people born before and after the Games found that all but one of them were able to associate something with the words “Olympic Winter Games Sarajevo 1984”. Though the respondents came from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina and were made up of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims and people of all ages, the associations they made were positive or very positive, and none were explicitly negative.