Boycotting Montreal, Moscow, and Los Angeles: The Olympics After Détente

Olympic Games do not always land as originally planned. With a decade from conception to realization, political circumstances can change and, with them, the essence of the event. Boycotts or threats of boycott can result. Disruptive at the time, these are long remembered and often gain additional significance as the only mention of sport in the standard general histories. The most obvious example of this is the Berlin Games of 1936. Conceived in the second half of the Weimar Republic and approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1931, they were under fire within months of the National Socialists coming to power in 1933. Over the following two years, early misgivings grew into a boycott campaign that drew support, most vociferously in the United States, before failing narrowly in late 1935.1Nearly fifty years later, a changing political landscape led to the equally famous—and actually executed—boycotts of the Summer Games in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984. Again, the Americans were to the fore. Having lost to Montreal in 1970 for the right to stage the 1976 Games, both reentered the fray in 1974. The prize of 1980 went to Moscow as the first socialist host.2 Los Angeles received its turn in 1978, as the sole candidate for 1984 and the first city to bid with a privately funded, commercial concept.3 As with Berlin, calls for a boycott over Moscow's human rights record soon began to circulate in the United States (as they would later in other Western countries)—a reflex of the early decline of détente on the US side that rapidly gathered pace in the second half of the 1970s.4 Were it not for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979, it is unlikely oppositional voices would have trumped the public's appetite for the Cold War sporting rivalry which had been fed by the media since the 1960s.5 The invasion threw struggling President Jimmy Carter a lifeline, and he seized the opportunity for a show of strength, calling for a boycott by mid-January 1980 unless the Soviets withdrew their forces within a month. By Easter, US Vice President Walter Mondale had appeared before the United States Olympic Committee's House of Delegates, evoking the Nazi Olympics. The world should not repeat the mistakes of 1936, he warned: Had the US stayed away from Berlin, the National Socialists might have been stopped in their tracks.6Virtual history is a skilled art, dangerous in the hands of a politician. The rich and abundant literature on the Cold War has shown in fact that the transition from détente to the so-called Second Cold War was complex and fluid.7 First was the nature of détente itself. Far from a rigid framework, it represented an international mindset, not universally shared in domestic settings. As Nancy Mitchell put it: “Détente was a description rather than a prescription. It described a slight slackening,” but also “introduced an element of confusion.”8 Its decline into stalemate brought clarity, on the one hand, and further confusion, on the other. Second, the superpowers either read each other with acute bias or misread each other altogether. Still processing the defeat in Vietnam and besieged by problems at home and abroad, the United States overestimated its own weakness in the Carter years and misinterpreted every Soviet move as a sign of strength. In the 1980s, as the Soviet political system hollowed out, its ever-aging old guard took Ronald Reagan's rhetoric at face value and fell foul to its own anxieties. Third, there was not one but two distinct détentes: one superpower-driven, the other European. While the former (based on the rapprochement between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev and centered on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT I) wilted most quickly on the American side, the latter (characterized by West German “Ostpolitik” and founded on the Helsinki Accords of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) laid a firmer bedrock for lasting cooperation. As the first dissolved, the second did not. Finally, the period was subject to longer-term developments, some more readily apparent than others. The human rights provisions from the Helsinki Final Act (1975) burned slowly before igniting in Eastern Europe in the 1980s; at the same time, economic failures were forcing the Soviets to grant their satellites greater autonomy.Throughout the preparation of the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, these—and other—developments were moving in divergent and overlapping patterns. Some aspects of the boycotts fit easily within them—for example, Carter's defiance; the divided response to it in Western Europe (West Germany was the only major power to comply); the (less) divided response within the Eastern Bloc to Moscow's call four years later (with Romania and Yugoslavia joining China as major communist exceptions); and the Soviets’ concerns about the safety of their athletes in Los Angeles (this latter, revealed by Robert Edelman, an important corrective to the master narrative of tit-for-tat boycotts).9 Yet, the ever-shifting imbroglios of the time take us only so far in understanding the boycotts—in part because contemporaries were caught up, deliberately or unwittingly, within their vortex, and in part because sport does not always follow political changes. While the mainstream scholarship on the Cold War is important, the boycotts demand specialist attention of sports history. Just as talk of a boycott was not new in 1980, neither were boycotts themselves. The Olympics were no stranger to them. In 1956, the People's Republic of China (PRC) left the Olympic Village in Melbourne at the sight of their Taiwan-based Nationalist rivals’ flag. The Nationalists, for their part, left the Village in Helsinki four years earlier when the PRC arrived. Two years later, they withdrew from the international Olympic movement, only to return in 1979 and immediately join the US-led boycott of Moscow. The twin crises of 1956—the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt over the Suez Canal—left their mark on the Games. Spain, Switzerland, Cambodia and the Netherlands protested the crushing of the revolt on the streets of Budapest, while Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq stayed home to demonstrate their outrage at events in the Middle East. Beyond the Olympics, new geopolitical boundaries led to multiple frictions. There were boycotts in all manner of championships, from soccer and basketball to youth Games and hockey. The fact that these are now largely forgotten speaks eloquently of their ineffectiveness.The history of sporting boycotts is yet to be written—and due to their overall lack of impact might never be written. Our working hypothesis is that they could each be characterized in one of three ways: (1) In most cases, the desired outcomes were never clear, and the actions undertaken do not appear to have impacted the international behavior of the host nations.(2) These moments should be seen as reactions to world events rather than powerful attempts to influence them.(3) Many were the result of bloc loyalty, which over time wore thin as nations resented sacrificing their own success on behalf of “a friend.”10It is fair to say, paraphrasing anthropologist James C. Scott's famous phrase, that sports boycotts, in the main, were weak weapons deployed by weak actors who had few alternatives.11 In point of fact, the most impactful actions were either nonboycotts or a long-term mix of boycott and ban. The former is exemplified by the African American athletes who, consumed with their struggles for racial justice, considered boycotting the Games in Mexico in 1968 only to abandon this approach, choosing to win and demonstrate instead.12 Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raised-fist medal ceremony remains the most iconic visual representation of politics and sport to this day. The latter is demonstrated by the banning of apartheid South Africa by multiple sporting federations (including the IOC), the sustained pressure from a determined bloc of recently empowered African nations to ensure that these were maintained, and the boycotting of teams and nations that broke ranks. In 1976, the African states withdrew en masse from Montreal over the dalliance of New Zealand's rugby All-Blacks with South Africa's Springboks. It was the largest rejection of any Olympics to that point and one that established a wider shunning of South African sport and set a precedent for the two boycotts that followed.13 In this most politicized of cases, sport, which contributed so mightily to South Africa's proudly racist and highly masculinist national identity, played a sustained role in highlighting the injustices of the regime and holding it to task. These two examples are among the few that prove the rule. Boycotts of individual events—the hockey world championships in Moscow (1957) and Colorado (1962), the world basketball championships in Chile (1959) and so forth—were largely nonevents.On the surface, 1980 and 1984 present a different picture. No other boycott of a major multisport event had been led by a superpower. No other boycott had forced nations around the globe, in direct bloc allegiances or under broader spheres of influence, to make such a stark choice. No other boycott had entangled governments across the world in the affairs of autonomous sporting bodies. No other boycott had reduced the athletic stock of competition to such an extent. Moscow registered the lowest level of participating nations since Melbourne 1956; Los Angeles, primarily through the absence of the Soviets and East Germans, lost 58 percent of the medal winners from Montreal in 1976. Yet the results of the 1980 and 1984 boycotts were not so distinct from any that went before.Picking up the three strands of our hypothesis: (1) It is not clear what either boycott achieved, apart from a reaction to, and symbolic comment on, rising Cold War tensions. The presence of high-class athletes, who would have won anyway, ensured the competitions were not fatally undermined. Host nations enjoyed their festas, and—even within the realm of sport—there was no retaliation against those who stayed away. A year after participating in the first boycott, South Korea was awarded the Games for 1988.(2) If Carter's call in 1980 was—rhetorically at least—an attempt to change the course of world events, it had little success, with the Soviets remaining in Afghanistan (to their actual detriment) for another nine years. Equally, the Soviets’ demand that its allies stay away in 1984 had no impact on US politics or society, nor did it, realistically, hasten the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.(3) Bloc loyalty was ignored or wearing thin. Key allies or aligned states ignored the calls (in 1980, e.g., Britain, France, Italy, Spain; in 1984, Romania, Yugoslavia, China); others that fell in line (in particular, East Germany, which beat the Soviets into second place in Sarajevo) did so with regret.In sum, the boycotts of 1980 and 1984 were like and unlike any that preceded them. In reacting to world events, they themselves—as never before or since in the realm of sport—became world events. But—to extend our adaptation of Scott—even in the hands of the strong, boycotts remained weak weapons. Or going one step further: while appearing to show strength, boycotts rendered strong actors weak. Quite how and why this was so requires explanation. Scholarship on sport and the Cold War has increased immensely in the last decades, and the literature on boycotts has expanded commensurately. Readers are very well served by the recent survey article by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, which appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies.14 Sarantakes, himself the author of an authoritative account of the Carter administration's flawed campaign to spread the 1980 boycott to the rest of the world, reviews monographs, collections and articles from some forty-eight academic journals, in English, French, and German. Here we simply add the most pertinent Russian scholarship.15 The leading Russian historian of sport, Mikhail Prozumenshchikov, co-edited a 700-page collection of documents on Moscow 1980 culled from the archives of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Along with discussions of the Games themselves, this massive volume contains much material on the preparations and later consequences of the event.16 Prozumenshchikov's account conveys the Party leadership's overall satisfaction despite the absence of so many nations. More recently, Igor Orlov and Aleksey Popov have led a cohort of younger Russian colleagues who have combed the archives and produced a number of detailed works on the Games and their preparation. They set this research in a rich reading of the international literature on sports diplomacy with particular reference to the Soviets’ cumbersome and ultimately unsuccessful deployment of soft power.17We mention Russian scholarship not just to fill a gap but to suggest that the fullest understanding of Cold War sport requires knowledge and analysis of multiple foreign-language sources. Accordingly, the articles in this issue draw on archival material from Russia, Estonia, the GDR (German Democratic Republic; East Germany), Czechoslovakia, Britain, and North America. While we acknowledge the recent turn toward fully global approaches in Cold War studies—in particular, the superlative works of Lorenz M. Lüthi and Odd Arne Westad—we also note the recent, persuasive reminder, in light of a decline in scholarship on the Soviet Union, not to let “vanished states . . . fade from the literature.”18 As our articles show, there is still much to learn about the “old players.” The seven pieces in this collection cover the concerns not just of front-line states in Cold War sports but, via their interconnections, the interests of a host of other nations as well, from the African subcontinent to Cuba and North Korea. They not only enrich but go beyond the exchanges of diplomatic elites, incorporating the drive of commerce, tracing the reactions of media and larger civil societies, and revealing the evolution of the IOC's responses and those of the national sporting federations beneath them.Michelle M. Sikes examines the African nations’ threatened boycotts of 1968 (against the potential participation of South Africa) and 1972 (against Rhodesia) and the aforementioned actual boycott of 1976—an interlinked set of actions that formed a powerful precursor to the campaigns of 1980 and 1984. Paul Corthorn explores the tensions within the British Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher before and after her government's call for a boycott in 1980, showing how the issues cast critical light on firmly held beliefs and, even within a single political tradition, revealed inherent contradictions between them. Mikhail Prozumenshchikov and Sergey Radchenko uncover the story of the US-led boycott as recorded in the Soviet Party archives and produce an in-depth picture on multiple levels, from high diplomacy (not least with wavering West Germany) to service provision for demanding athletes and tourists and the monitoring of critical journalists. Carol Marmor-Drews looks beyond Moscow to focus on the Estonian capital of Tallinn, one of four centers beyond the capital to host Olympic events. Describing the triangular relationship between the center, the periphery, and the world of international sports, she shows the lengths to which organizers went to enact the Soviet idea of multinational unity.Mark Dyreson explains how the Los Angeles Games, despite missing the majority of Eastern Bloc athletes, marked a fundamental transformation of the Olympics, arguing that the commercial model and television coverage (particularly to China) not only sold American soft power but set a stage for others to sell their own in years to come. Oldřich Tůma introduces Czechoslovakia's interest in hosting the Games of 1980, a dream extinguished by the quashing of the Prague Spring in 1968. He recounts the (sometimes contradictory but ultimately predictable) actions of the resultant regime and those under it when it came to the boycott of 1984. Jutta explores the to the to showing how it the Soviets’ in world sport to with the its they (to in the of Cuba and North Korea to a boycott of the Summer Games in the are they a powerful set of general Boycotts are only when they are and by a These are that the African nations but the of 1980 and 1984 with the of all to South Africa) they defeat to greater some at political In Britain, the were across a from for a boycott by and the in the of within there were many and in between sport is political it often an do not simply when stay away. at the Moscow Games, pressure on and among while the human rights by even and In this period before sporting to they did every was by an and are far from in the the competitions of 1980 to its own identity, on a with Moscow and a to the one they might have had in the capital are not they also have long (in this from to the of the Cold do not only in the of détente but also in the of other the the Los Angeles Games produced a television that new it for nations to in can be for but away. No one in was at their government's to nor the for it, but the the and yet more that would have to change are only over when they are as the Soviet satellites were from away from Los Angeles, allies Cuba and North were to in further political four years the of boycotting were clear, and time was on (as it was on some of the states that it was the invasion of Afghanistan that four years of Olympic If the Soviets’ a struggling US “a more world, one with a and Nancy Mitchell put did change which to be and more than any event in the boycotts of 1980 and 1984 the of They in complex and with sports often complex As our show, the up their own and often going beyond about what those might show and that this is far from is why we are still about Moscow and Los that is with Berlin still be so for some time to go to for and on the of this