The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games PDF Download

Author: Philip D’Agati
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137360259
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.

Author: Josh Lieser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
A study of the nature and meaning of athletic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. Internal politics, foreign policy, and cultural propaganda were directly influenced by these competitions, yet their importance is often overlooked. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. engaged in a wide-ranging cultural Cold War, with athletic competition being an important part. The height of the cultural Cold War saw Olympic boycotts by the United States in 1980 and the Soviet Union in 1984.

Author: Matthew Llewellyn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317502450
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games stand as the most profitable and arguably the most important event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. Fresh off the back of the financially disastrous Montreal Games of 1976 and the politically controversial Moscow Games of 1980, the Olympic movement returned to the United States for the sixth time in an attempt to salvage the economic viability and global prestige of the Olympics. The Los Angeles Olympics proved to be both provocative and polarizing. On the one hand they have been heralded as an overwhelming, transformative success, ushering the Olympic movement into the modern commercial age. On the other hand, critics have repudiated the Games as a manifestation of commercial excess and a platform for western political and cultural propaganda. In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the Los Angeles Olympics, this volume examines their legacy. With an international collection of contributing scholars, this volume will span a range of global legacies, including the increasing commercialization of the Games, the changing participation of women, the Communist boycott movement, nationalism and sporting identity, and the modernization and California-cation of the Games. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Author: Erin Elizabeth Redihan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627282
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
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.

Author: Toby C Rider
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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 US 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 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. Rider 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.

Author: Harry Blutstein
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147664523X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The political tension of the Cold War bled into the Olympic Games when each side engaged in psychological warfare, exploiting sport for political ends. In Helsinki, the Soviet Union nearly overtook the United States in the medal count. Caught off guard, the U.S. hastened to respond, certain that the Soviets would use a victory at the next Olympics to broadcast their superiority over the Western world. Following the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a Soviet athlete struck a Hungarian opponent in the Melbourne water polo semifinals, turning the pool red. The United States covertly encouraged Eastern Bloc athletes to defect, communist Chinese agents nearly succeeded in goading the Taiwanese government into withdrawing from the games, and a forbidden romance between an American and Czech athlete resulted in a politically complex marriage. This history describes those stories and more that resulted from the complicated relationship between Cold War politics and the Olympics.

Author: Zlatko Jovanovic
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030765989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book examines the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. It tells the story of the extensive infrastructural transformation of the city and its changing global image in relation to hosting of the Games. Reviewing different cultural representations of Sarajevo in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the book explores how the promotion of the city as a future global tourist centre resulted in an increased awareness among its populace of the city’s cultural particularities. The analysis reveals how the process of modernisation relating to hosting of the Olympics provided an opportunity to re-imagine the city as a particularly environmentally progressive city. Placed within the field of studies of late socialism, the book offers important insights into Yugoslav society during the period, including those relating to the country’s unique geopolitical position and its nationalities policies.

Author: Nicholas Evan Sarantakes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521194776
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War offers a diplomatic history of the 1980 Olympic boycott. Broad in its focus, it looks at events in Washington, D.C., as well as the opposition to the boycott and how this attempted embargo affected the athletic contests in Moscow. Jimmy Carter based his foreign policy on assumptions that had fundamental flaws and reflected a superficial familiarity with the Olympic movement. These basic mistakes led to a campaign that failed to meet its basic mission objectives but did manage to insult the Soviets just enough to destroy détente and restart the Cold War. The book also includes a military history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which provoked the boycott, and an examination of the boycott's impact four years later at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott.

Author: Harry Blutstein
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781760405687
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games have become known as the 'friendly games', but East-West rivalry ensured that they were anything but friendly. From the bloody semi-final water polo match between the USSR and Hungary, to the athletes who defected to the West, sport and politics collided during the Cold War.

Author: Kevin B. Witherspoon
Publisher:
ISBN: 1682260763
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
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.