With a thorough exploration of the political climate of the time and the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, this book describes the repercussions of Jimmy Carter's American boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Despite missing the games they had trained relentlessly to compete in, many U.S. athletes went on to achieve remarkable successes in sports and overcame the bitter disappointment of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity dashed by geopolitics.

Olympische-Spiele, Moskau, Politik, Boykott, UdSSR.

This book relays the factual details of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boycott. The narrative provides multiple accounts of the event, and readers learn details through the point of view of a Soviet athlete, a U.S. athlete, and a member of the United States Olympic Committee. The text offers opportunities to compare and contrast various perspectives in the text while gathering and analyzing information about a historical event.

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.

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.