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.

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.

Traite des influences socio-politiques sur les Jeux Olympiques. Compare des résultats d'athlètes américains et russes. Une étude de l'époque de la guerre froide et de la propagande des régimes politiques.

"During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics. In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other"--

During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics. In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender --a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood. Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Focusing on assumptions and goals as well as means, Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.

The period from 1948 to 1972 was a time of great growth and expansion of the Olympic Movement, but also a time filled with challenges and controversy. Early in these years, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) grappled with questions about how best to revive the Olympic Games in the aftermath of World War II. Key issues in the immediate post-war years included selection of host cities, how and when to honour the hosting designations that had been cancelled during the war, and the readmission of belligerent nations. As the period progressed, the growing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union took centre stage, and the IOC wrestled with issues such as whether and when to admit Soviet athletes, how to handle apparent breaches of the amateur ideal by "state athletes" of the Eastern bloc, and sporadic instances of hostility on the fields of sport. In the later years of the period, the globalisation and expansion of the Olympic Games predominated, as host cities included Rome, Tokyo, and Mexico City, and the number of athletes and participating nations grew dramatically. The Olympic Movement also confronted the spasm and tumult of the era, as the chaos of the year 1968 struck the Mexico City Olympic Games, first in the form of a violent attack against peaceful student protesters ten days before the Opening Ceremony, and then in the form of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in protest on the medal stand as part of a broader wave of protest known as "the revolt of the black athlete." Finally, as the period came to a close, the Olympics endured their most jarring episode, the terrorist attack against the Israeli team at the Munich Games in 1972. That attack, and the ensuing decision by IOC President Avery Brundage to resume the Games soon after, signaled the end of Brundage's presidency, and the end of an era in Olympic history.