Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Extract

There is no need to look far for the mix of politics and sports within nations, among people, and around the world. Consider every Olympic Games from Adolf Hitler's to the present, and it is impossible to disagree with Toby C. Rider's timely book about the early Cold War that, as George Orwell wrote in 1945, “sports is war minus the shooting” (“The Spirit of Sport,” Tribune, Dec. 1945). Rider convincingly proves the case, and even more, exposes the hypocrisy behind notions of purity in American sports.

Steeped in scholarship on public diplomacy, the author shows how, in reaction to the mighty Soviet athletic challenge in the Olympics (and the silly obsession with the national medal count), American officials in the executive branch and Congress prosecuted the Cold War by injecting the government into the private U.S. Olympic movement. They did so unobtrusively, especially because Olympic chief Avery Brundage sought the strict separation of politics from his cherished games. He heroically defended amateurism but failed to hold back the Cold War propagandists.