Sport, Politics, and the Olympics: The1984 Communist boycott

In 1980, the US had led 54counties in boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympics on account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So when the USSR led 15 nations in a boycott against the Los Angeles Olympiad four years later, naturally most Americans assumed it was about getting revenge. The Soviets claimed it was a response to the “anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the US,” essentially claiming that they pulled out for security reasons. Cuba, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were among the Soviet bloc nations who sat out of the 1984 Olympics. President Reagan attempted to convince the Soviets to reverse their boycott, to no avail (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1122084/). This is a pretty clear example of sport being used for political gain, in addition to (probably) revenge. As far as politics in international sport are concerned, the Olympics boycotts are the tip of the iceberg.

Sport has been used as a tool for political gain for thousands of years. The statement "sport is pure and devoid of political interference" is completely absurd and false, impossible to believe for any American familiar with a recent history of the NFL, NBA, or the MLB, all of which have been beset by numerous extremely political relocations sagas (such as the Seattle Sonics moving to Oklahoma, the Cleveland Browns moving to Baltimore, the entire NFL in Los Angeles saga, to name a few). And that’s just domestic sports; international sport is a very different animal, albeit with much of the same (or far worse) corruption.

This is why the soccer-crazed people of Brazil have been protesting the upcoming World Cup- because FIFA is one of the most ridiculously corrupt organizations on Earth, and they are allowing shady politicians and shadier contractors to make millions off this event while pricing out the general public.

If you want a more detailed look at how political US sports have become, I would recommend the documentary Sonicsgate to anyone who hasn’t already seen it. It chronicles the 2008 relocation of the Sonics to OKC, which was heavily tied in with the state politics of Washington (i.e. Olympia’s refusal to pay for a new arena, the popular movement that rose up against stadium subsidies in Seattle, etc.).