Heino Lipp - Career

Career

Heino Lipp, born in Erra Parish (now Sonda Parish) near Kiviõli, Estonia was one of the great decathletes in history, but all his achievements have been obscured in the era of the Cold War politics. He was an Estonian, whose family were prominent advocates of Estonian sovereignty and brother was deemed a disloyal Estonian nationalist and was eventually murdered in a camp in Siberia. Therefore, Lipp was kept as a political prisoner and was periodically jailed by Soviet authorities. He was also not allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union.

In 1948 Track & Field News ranked him No. 1 in the T&FN World Rankings in decathlon. Four days after Bob Mathias won the 1948 Olympic decathlon with a total 7,139 points, Lipp, produced a decathlon score considerably higher than that of Mathias, scored 7,584 at a meeting in Tartu, Estonia and month after Olympics scored personal record 7,780 points in Kharkiv.

Lipp's achievement, however, was discounted or disbelieved in the West, because the Iron Curtain policies of Joseph Stalin did not allow foreign observers, so there was no way to verify the results. The West never saw Lipp perform, and neither did Soviet bloc countries other than the USSR. Lipp, for example, was not allowed to travel to Budapest for the World University Games in 1949. Photos of the physically imposing Lipp were done in the style of the superman image of the new Soviet man, a Stakhanovite.

In 1951 the Soviet Union joined the Olympic movement and participated in the 1952 Summer Olympics. Lipp’s absence from the games was explained by the Soviet press as being due to “illness”. The real story is that the KGB had vetoed Lipp’s participation in the Olympics even though it was short distance away in Helsinki, Finland. Competing in 1952, he probably would not have challenged eventual gold-medal winner Mathias, but a silver medal was well within the range of possibility. (Lipp’s training was hampered when his scholarship was revoked in another Estonian repression in 1950, and he had to stalk deer and track small game animals daily to sustain himself.)

Lipp was a Soviet champion 12 times and set 13 national records, and never gave the Soviet regime any cause of concern, yet his “suspect” family made him a “political unreliable” to the authorities.

After Estonia broke from the Soviets in early 1990s Lipp came to United States for an Goodwill Games in Seattle as a guest of the US Chamber of Commerce.

He was out of favour with the authorities and did not get his chance to appear on an international stage until Barcelona when, at the age of 76, he proudly carried the Estonian flag at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Summer Olympics.