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The Olympics and the Cold War, 1948-1968
For Olympic athletes, fans and the media alike, the games bring out the best sport has to offer--unity, patriotism, friendly competition and the potential for stunning upsets. Yet wherever international competition occurs, politics are never far removed. Early in the Cold War, when all U.S.-Soviet interactions were treated as potential matters of life and death, each side tried to manipulate the International Olympic Committee. Despite the IOC's efforts to keep the games apolitical, they were quickly drawn into the superpowers' global struggle for supremacy, with medal counts the ultimate prize. Based on IOC, U.S. government and contemporary media sources, this book looks at six consecutive Olympiads to show how high the stakes became once the Soviets began competing in 1952, threatening America's athletic supremacy.
Winning Hearts and Medals
Despite IOC president Avery Brundage’s and others’ best efforts to keep the Olympic Games free of political concerns, politics had become a driving force behind the Games by the 1960s. What Brundage and others never realized was that politics and nationalism have always been important aspects of the modern Olympic Movement. While Brundage strove to keep the Games true to his construction of their founder’s vision, the Games were not immune to change. They needed to grow and evolve to remain viable. Rather than ruining the Games as Brundage feared, these external politics, and especially those related to the Cold War, actually helped the Games. These forces made the Olympics more relevant to international affairs while simultaneously inflating governmental, spectator, and press interest in the Olympic Movement. Therefore, the superpowers and the Olympic Movement both profited from the Cold War’s intersection with the Games. While Moscow and Washington gained a low-stakes battlefield, the IOC benefitted from the added exposure and intrigue associated with all things Cold War-related during the 1950s and 1960s."--Page [ii].
Defending the American Way of Life
Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology. The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism. In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
Skimpy Coverage
Skimpy Coverage explores Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. The first book-length study of its kind, this accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated—arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America—engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned. Bonnie Hagerman examines the emergence of the magazine’s archetypal female athlete—good-looking, straight, and white—and argues that such qualities were the same ones the magazine prized in the women who appeared in its wildly successful Swimsuit Issue. As Hag...
The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos … Reconsidered
This work examines American sport from its traditional roots to the influence of the 1960s-era counterculture and the rise of a post-Cold War ethos that reinterprets competition as a relic of a misbegotten past and anathema to American life.
International Security and the Olympic Games, 1972–2020
Drawing on new archival documents and interviews, this book demonstrates the evolving role of international politics in Olympic security planning. Olympic security concerns changed forever following the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) choice to ignore security after the attack in Munich left individual Olympic Games Organizing Committees to organize, fund, and provide security for the major international event. Future Olympic hosts planned security amidst increasing numbers of international terrorist attacks, and with the Cold War in full swing. For some Olympic hosts, Olympic security now represented their nation’s largest ever military operations. By the time the IOC made security more of a priority in the early 1980s, the trends in Olympic security were set for the future.
The Gerald R. Ford Administration and the Olympic Movement
This article looks at the ways in which the Gerald Ford administration involved itself in the United States Olympic program. Though short in tenure, Ford's administration dealt with four Olympic-related issues and acted in the best interest of the US Olympic Movement in each case: the creation of the President's Commission on Olympic Sports, funding for the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games, the revocation of Radio Free Europe's press credentials in Innsbruck, and the status of the Republic of China's team in Montreal. It argues that Ford understood the distinction between presidential support for the Games and too much presidential interference in the Olympic Movement and that his administration always acted appropriately. Though often overshadowed by his successor Jimmy Carter's outright interference in American sporting diplomacy, Ford's legacy regarding American amateur sport and particularly the Olympic Games should be positive.
The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy, and the Cold War
This study examines the Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic sport during the Cold War. It analyzes how sport administrators used political savvy and professional pragmatism alongside ideological drive to expand participation, maximize chances of success, and achieve Soviet political and diplomatic aims.
Sport in Socialist Yugoslavia
The history of sport in socialist Yugoslavia is a peculiar lens through which to examine the country’s social, cultural and political transformations. Sport is represented as one of the most popular and engaging cultural phenomena of social life. Sport both embodied the social dynamics of the socialist period as well as revealing questions of the everyday lives of the Yugoslav people. Ultimately, sport was closely intertwined with the country’s overall destiny. This volume offers an introduction into the myriad social functions that sport served in the Yugoslav socialist project. It illustrates how sport was central to the establishment of Yugoslavia’s physical and leisure culture in t...
Cold War Games
It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré o...
