Canadian Doubles, 1,000 metres, Men

The Soviet Union was the defending Olympic champion in the C-2 1000 and was represented at the 1980 Summer Games by 1977 and 1979 World Champions Vasyl Yurchenko and Yury Lobanov, the latter of whom was also a 1972 Olympic champion and 1978 World bronze medalist. Hungary’s Tamás Buday and Oszkár Frey, meanwhile, had picked up the only recent World Championship that the Soviets had missed and were also the 1976 Olympic bronze medalists. Finally, Romania was the 1976 Olympic and 1978 World runner-up, as well as the 1979 bronze medalist, and sent Toma Simionov and multiple Olympic medalist Ivan Patzaichin to the Games. The day prior to the final of this event, Patzaichin won silver in the C-2 500.

These three nations met in the second opening heat, in which Romania won and the Soviet Union was second, while the other heat was taken by Czechoslovakia’s Jiří Vrdlovec and Petr Kubíček. Romania continued its dominance in the medal round, winning gold with ease, while the East German pair of Uwe Madeja and Olaf Heukrodt, who had been fourth in Romania’s heat in the opening round and survived to the final only through the repêchage, came in for a surprise silver medal. Heukrodt was also the C-1 500 bronze medalist at the Moscow Games. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had to battle Yugoslavia’s Mirko Nišović and Matija Ljubek, the latter of whom was the 1976 Olympic C-1 1000 champion, for bronze, emerging victorious by a margin of only 0.02 seconds.