Cold War Games

Abstract

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, this book 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. The book shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States appropriated Olympic host cities to hype the American economic and political system while, behind the scenes, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. The book also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.

Hosting and Human Rights: The Summer Olympics in the Twenty-First Century

“…As early as 1933, the Soviet Union was officially evaluating the value of athletic dominance over their capitalist counterparts (Allison and Tomlinson, 2017 ). The sportive struggles between the USA and USSR, or the “sporting arms race” as they have been dubbed, are well documented by historians and need not be rehashed here (Torres and Dyreson, 2005 ; Rider, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ; Congelio, 2018 ; Hunt, 2018 ; Ross and Nagel, 2018 ). With American millionaire Brundage at the helm between 1952 and 1972, the Olympics were firmly within the USA's sphere of influence.…”

Cold War fostering of scientific elites: International Youth Olympiads in chemistry and physics 1967–1984

“…The decision would soon be followed by many other western countries. 33 Thus, by the turn of the decade the IPhO and the IChO -just like the games of Pierre de Coubertin -had developed into stages where ideas of Olympism and cooperation existed side by side with political tensions, calculated decisions of approval or dislike as well as the ever-present search for gold medals and national pride. In a broader Cold War context, the events also mirrored other theatres of the conflict.…”

Facing the Involvement of Youths in Competitions: Soviet Visions and Adaptations to the Rejuvenation of Elite Sports (Second Half of the 20th Century)

“…This scholarship underlines how gender and race became crucial in the symbolic opposition between Capitalist and Communist countries (Malz et al, 2007;Barker-Ruchti, 2009;Bohuon, 2012;Edelman, 2019). It also analyzes how the Cold War and the growing importance given to sports transformed national sports systems and sporting programs and impacted the relations between sports leaders and athletes (Hunt, 2006;Gygax, 2012;Rider, 2017;Dufraisse, 2019;Mellis, 2019). Moreover, these new works explore "the ambiguous zones within which international organizations, states, sports leaders and athletes interacted in order to achieve their respective goals during the Cold War" (Mellis, 2019).…”