The Politicized Olympics of the 1980s

The Soviets and Americans both hosted the Olympics in the 1980s.  Matt Andrews explains that the fraught political situation of the time spilled into the Games, including boycott threats and fallout from a shot-down commercial airplane. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university
Welcome and we're back on the untold history of sports

(00:29):
in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we're returning
to the international stage as the Olympics are front and
center in the Cold War. Will be examining how the
US toiled with the decision of whether or not to
boycott the Moscow Olympics as tensions rose between Russia and
the United States. Here's Matt with the whole story in

(00:54):
an age before ESPN in twenty four hour Sports News.
The way Americans got their televised sports was by watching
ABC's Wide World of Sports, a two hour show that
ran almost every Saturday afternoon from nineteen sixty one until
thirty seven years now. ABC was an American broadcasting company.

(01:18):
In fact, that's what ABC stands for, the American Broadcast Company.
So American sports were the focus of this two hour show.
But as the name suggests, the Wide World of Sports
was really a global sports show, and there was cliff
diving and Acapulco, Mexico ski jumping in Austria. This is

(01:39):
where you can see the running of the bulls and Pamplona,
Spain and Formula one racing in Monte Carlo. In fact,
when FIFA's World Cup started being televised in the United States,
it was on ABC's Wide World of Sports, and it
was the Wide World of Sports that televised the Olympic
Games in this era as well. And that's what I

(02:00):
want to talk about today. I want to return to
our focus of the Olympic Games, and it's time to
jump up ahead to the nineteen eighties and our focus
is going to be on how politicized the Games were
in this decade. You know, in this course, we've talked
about the political dynamics of sport. We've explored many of
the links between the Olympic Games, the United States and

(02:20):
international politics. Jesse Owens versus Nazi propaganda in nineteen thirty six,
the Cold War battles between the United States and the
Soviet Union. The Olympics as a stage for protests by
two black Americans in nineteen sixty eight. Back in nineteen
sixty eight, when Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists,

(02:43):
the Olympic officials said that politics had no place in
the Olympic Games. But by the nineteen eighties, the Olympic
Games were one of the most visible and symbolic arenas
of international politics. But by the nineteen eighties, the Olympics
were nothing but politics, especially Cold War politics, and we
saw it all unfold on ABC's Wide World of Sport.

(03:06):
So the last time we explored Cold War tensions at
the Games, we were focusing on the athletes. Today we're
going into focus on political leaders, though there are some
sports to talk about today. In fact, today we discuss
a miracle that happened on the ice. All right. In
the nineteen seventies, the International Olympic Committee awarded the first

(03:28):
two Summer Olympics of the nineteen eighties to the two
Cold War superpowers. The nineteen eighties Summer Games would be
in Moscow. In the four Summer Games would be in
Los Angeles, the Soviet Union in the United States. You
each get one. The IOC hope that having the games
in these two countries would be a good way to
use sports to reduce the tensions of the Cold War.

(03:51):
And I suppose it was a fine idea, but that's
not what happened. In fact, the opposite occurred, and for
a few reasons. The first was that on Christmas Day
seventy nine, the Soviet Union invade ated Afghanistan. And from
the perspective of today, the opposition in the United States
to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is is somewhat ironic,

(04:15):
as the Soviet military charged into Afghanistan for the purpose
of squashing and Islamic revolution in that nation, and this
is kind of more or less the reason why the
United States military went into Afghanistan in two thousand and one.
But when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of nineteen nine,

(04:36):
the question immediately became what would the US response be,
and specifically, what would the response of the US President,
Jimmy Carter be. In the United States, Americans did not
see this as a regional issue of limited importance outside
of Central Asia. Could have, but most saw it in
the context of the Cold War. In the United States,

(04:59):
this was viewed as an aggressive move by the Soviets
and a major shift in international affair, and so Jimmy
Carter's advisors, they were telling him, you have to do something.
To do nothing will be to look weak. In nine
eighty was an election year. You don't want to look
weak in an election year, almost passing out while jogging.

(05:21):
That was bad enough. You've got to stand firm against
the Soviets. But what were the options. Well, one option
was war, but that wasn't really an option. A nuclear
war over Afghanistan come on. That, that wasn't going to happen.
Another option was to bring economic pressure on the Soviet Union,

(05:42):
and the US tried this. In January of nineteen eighty,
the United States government announced a grain embargo American farmers
will not silkhorn and wheat to the Soviet Union. But
this policy ended up hurting American farmers more than it
hurt the Soviets, and so the embargo ended a year later.

(06:02):
A third option was a symbolic option, boycotting the Moscow
Olympic Games. All right, look, Jimmy Carter wasn't naive. He
didn't really think that the threat of a boycott would
cause the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. But he felt that
if the United States sent a team to Moscow, it

(06:22):
would be seen as condoning the Soviet actions, just just
laying down and giving in. And I want to emphasize this,
many Americans felt this way. If that most Americans felt
this way, we can't go to Moscow. Here's Red Smith
of the New York Times. It is unthinkable that in

(06:43):
existing circumstances we would go play games with Ivan in
Ivan's yard and participate in a great lawn party showing
off Russian splendors to the world. So going to Moscow
playing with Ivan, as he put it, this would be
a statement that it's just business as usual. But this

(07:03):
was not business as usual. But from the perspective of
the US government, this was a crisis. The push for
an American boycott of the Moscow Games. It began in
earnest On January, Jimmy Carter appeared on the TV news
show Meet the Press, and on this show, Carter said

(07:25):
a deadline. He said, if the Soviets did not leave
Afghanistan in one month, the United States would boycott the
Moscow Games. Now, there is a big problem with Jimmy
Carter saying this. The President is not in charge of
the United States Olympic Committee. According to the rules of

(07:47):
the IOC, all national Olympic committees are supposed to be
independent of their governments. So it's the United States Olympic
Committee that is supposed to decide whether or not to
send a team. Carter had not spoken with the members
of the U s OC. He had made his announcement
without consulting with them. But Carter felt he needed to

(08:10):
talk tough, and he knew he had the support of
the vast majority of Americans. And here's a fact. People
forget this all the time. In January night, public opinion
in the United States was overwhelmingly in favor of a boycott.
Every newspaper and polling service conducted a poll and the
support for a boycott hovered around seventy five overwhelming support

(08:37):
not to go to Moscow. But then a few things happened,
and one of them was the Winter Olympic Games. That February.
They were in the United States in Lake Placid, New York.
And at these Games, as fate would have it, the U.
S Olympic Hockey team faced off against the Soviet Union

(08:59):
in the semi finals to see who would advanced to
the gold medal game. From a sporting perspective, I think
it's difficult to overstate what the U. S team was
up against when they took the ice against the Soviets
in Lake Placid. In nineteen eighty. The Soviet hockey team
had won the gold medal in the previous four Olympics,

(09:20):
and they dominated their opponents. After nineteen eighty, the Soviets
would not lose another game in international play for five years.
No one disputes that the Soviets were the better team.
There are hockey experts who say that this Soviet team
in nineteen eighty was the greatest hockey team ever assembled, pro, amateur,

(09:44):
NHL international, whatever. That's why what the US team did
is considered a miracle. The American team was made up
of college players thrown together a few months before the Olympics,
but they forged a bond enduring a brutal training camp
led by their head coach her Brooks. But there was

(10:05):
little reason to be optimistic here against the Soviets, especially
since the Americans and the Soviets had played an exhibition
game just two weeks earlier, and the Soviets won ten
to three that they dominated and toyed with the Americans.
A US victory in this game was so unlikely that

(10:26):
ABC's Wide World of Sports, which was broadcasting the Olympics,
they didn't even show the game live. Americans watched the
game hours later on tape delay. So if you know
someone who tells you they watched this live on TV,
they are either lying or misremembering. Well, the puck dropped

(10:47):
and it was a tough, tense, physical game. I remembered
I was watching it live. Okay, I wasn't, of course,
I was watching it tape delayed, But I didn't know
who it won. You would have to have listened to
the radio to find it out. Keeping a result like
this secret would be possible now with our smartphones and
instant score alerts. There was back and forth scoring. The

(11:12):
Soviets led three to two going into the third period,
but then the Americans quickly scored twice and the arena exploded,
and with ten minutes to go, the US shockingly had
a four to three lead, and so for the next
ten minutes, which felt like ten hours, the Americans desperately
tried to keep the USSR from tying the game. As

(11:36):
the last seconds finally wound down, this is when Al
Michael's shouted into the microphone and asked Americans watching back
at home, do you believe in miracles? Probably the most
famous announcers line in American sports history, And that's what
the American victory is known as In American popular culture,

(11:57):
this game is known as the Miracle on Ice, giving
it a quasi religious status. You know, sometimes context is everything,
and let's face it, most Americans didn't and don't like
hockey all that much. But in this was not a
hockey game. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion

(12:19):
of Afghanistan, this was seen as a Cold War battle,
and so the next day newspaper headlines they boasted of
the victory as if the United States had won the
Cold War. Americans drove through the streets with American flags,
national pride swelled, and then the United States would win

(12:39):
the gold medal two days later, defeating Finland. I think
that the Miracle on Ice is a great example of
how sports can be emotionally meaningful and symbolic. But let's
be honest, it did not really do anything. You know,
the US did not win the Cold War in this moment.

(12:59):
The Soviet Union did not leave Afghanistan after the horns sounded.
Although what I just said is not entirely true, because
here's something that the victory did do. The Miracle on
Ice changed a lot of minds about boycotting Moscow, because
with that emotional victory, all of a sudden Americans were saying,

(13:22):
we want more. They started saying, on second thought, let's
go to Moscow and kick Ivan's butt in Ivan's backyard
because that was fun. Here's another thing that happened. One
month after the Miracle and Ice in March of Jesse
Owens died of cancer. The hero of ninety six was gone,

(13:47):
and then the op eds began spinning out. Had the
United States boycotted Berlin in nineteen thirty six, which had
been on the table, then the world never would have
known about the Great Jesse Owens. Perhaps this is what
the Soviets needed to suffer humiliation at the hands of
a mary Arican athletes, just like Hitler had suffered at

(14:07):
the hands of Owen's. After the break to boycott or
not to boycott the Moscow Olympics in April, the United

(14:36):
States Olympic Committee they gathered to debate and vote on
the boycott proposal, and the United States Olympic Committee was
under a lot of pressure. President Carter had made himself
clear he wanted a boycott both the House of Representatives
and the Senate. They overwhelmingly passed resolutions calling on the

(14:58):
United States Olympic Committee to vote for a boycott. Now
these were non binding resolutions, but they were very strong requests,
and there was some public talk in Congress about provoking
the tax exempt status of the United States Olympic Committee
if they did not vote for a boycott. This very

(15:19):
much begs the question just how independent was the U.
S o C. On the day that members of the
Olympic Committee voted whether or not to go to Moscow,
the US Vice President Walter Mondale, he addressed the committee
and urged a boycott strongly. Here's what he said, as

(15:40):
we meet today, the lesson of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan waits to be drawn. History holds its breath for
what is at stake here is no less than the
future security of the civilized world. If one nation can
be subjected to Soviet aggression, is any sovereign nation truly

(16:02):
safe from that fate? Now I'm not saying he was
wrong calling for a boycott, but I do think that
this is a wee bit over dramatic, and if I may,
as I see it here here's the major flaw with
this particular argument. If this is true, if the quote
future security of the civilized world truly hangs in the balance.

(16:27):
Then why is the United States just talking about a
sports boycott. If the issue is that important, shouldn't the
weapons being used be more powerful than just not sending
American athletes to Moscow? Well, Mondale made his case for
the administration, and then American athletes they took the floor
and then they begged the United States Olympic Committee not

(16:50):
to boycott. We've worked all our lives for this moment,
they said. Well, the U s o C voted and
by a two to one margin, they voted to boycott.
The United States would not be sending a team to Moscow.
Robert Kane, he was the head of the United States
Olympic Committee. He announced the results to the assembled press.

(17:13):
He said, I am completely satisfied it was the right decision.
At the same time, I am desperately sorry for the
American athletes. He was in tears. Not only would the
US boycott the Moscow Games, but the United States tried
to get other nations to boycott as well. The United States,

(17:36):
most important, ally Great Britain did not boycott the Moscow Games,
and this was considered a major defeat for the Carter administration.
As was this, Jimmy Carter tried to get African nations
to join the boycott, and so he asked Muhammad Ali
to go to Africa to convince the African heads of

(17:57):
state to boycott. As you know we've talked about this,
Ali was one of the American heroes of the nine
sixty Rome Olympics. Then he became a figure who was
beloved in the global South, and I suppose he seemed
like the perfect ambassador. But Ali came back from this
trip and announced that the African leaders had convinced him

(18:20):
that the boycott was a mistake. In fact, he said
the African leaders had given him a list of grievances
that they had against the United States and he would
like to meet with President Carter to discuss them. Oops,
just like that jogging exhibition in V nine, that idea
of boomerang on Jimmy Carter. Although in the end, sixty

(18:45):
five nations boycott at these Moscow Games, making it the
largest boycott in Olympic history. Eighty one nations did participate,
but with the United States not they're not surprisingly, the
Soviets dominated the metal count at the Moscow Olympics, and

(19:06):
then four years later, the Soviets returned the favor. The
nineteen eighty four Summer Olympic Games were in Los Angeles,
and so the night four Olympic Games are going to
take place in the United States, and they are going
to take place at a time when the Cold War
was even more intense than it had been. In nineteen
eighty four. Tensions were close to an all time high

(19:31):
between the Americans and the Soviets the Soviet invasion and
their war in Afghanistan. That was one reason why, and
another was the election in the United States of Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was elected in nineteen eighty and so he
entered the White House in one and with the Reagan

(19:51):
administration came a return to the more provocative rhetoric of
the early Cold War. While campaigning for the presidency against
Jimmy Carter, Reagan said, the only reason the Soviets felt
comp dorble invading Afghanistan in the first place is they
no longer fear the power of the United States. So

(20:12):
we here in the US we need to get tough.
For Ronald Reagan, the simple truth was this, the Soviet
Union was an evil system what he famously called an
evil empire. In a nine eight three speech that he
gave to a group of American evangelical leaders in this

(20:32):
Cold War, Reagan said, one side is good and the
other side is bad. It's evil, and you do not
negotiate with evil. You confront it. You build a nuclear
arsenal to defend yourself against it. It was under Reagan
that there was a massive increase in military spending in

(20:52):
the United States, nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines. You know, even
though the United States was not actually at war in
the nineteen eighties, defense spending sword under Reagan. Though from
the Soviet perspective, this wasn't defense. This was aggression, you know,

(21:14):
aggression from an American cowboy bent on nuclear war. The
leader in the Kremlin during much of Reagan's first term
was Urien drop Off. And and drop Off he had
been the head of the KGB, the Russian secret police,
and he was a paranoid man, and now he was
head of the USSR. And Urian drop Off thought that

(21:37):
Ronald Reagan was insane. He saw all the military spending
as a sign that Reagan was bent on war. He
was convinced that Reagan was planning a surprise nuclear attack
against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military was put on
high alert. They were ordered to be extra vigilant and
be prepared for a possible attack coming from the west.

(22:03):
In September of nineteen eight three, so less than one
year before the start of the Los Angeles Games, a
South Korean passenger airplane accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace. The
plane was going from New York City to Seoul, South Korea,
via Anchorage, Alaska. The Soviets thought it might be a

(22:26):
spy plane or or a plane that was testing the
Soviet response to an invasion of their airspace, So the
Soviets sent a fighter plane and blasted it out of
the sky, killing all two hundred and sixty nine civilians
on board, sixty three of them American citizens, including the

(22:46):
US Congressman, and in response, Reagan called the Soviets bloodthirsty.
After the attack on the Korean airliner, the California State
Legislature passed a resolution calling for the exclusion of the
Soviet Union and from the upcoming Olympic Games. Now they

(23:08):
had no real power here, but this was not exactly
rolling out the welcome at for the Soviets, and then
added to this a group of California citizens. They formed
an organization called the Band the Soviets Coalition. They were
a small but very noisy group of Americans who announced

(23:29):
that if the Soviets were there, they would protest Soviet
athletes at every event, and they announced that they would
try to get as many Soviet athletes to defect as possible.
You know that the Soviets had already been complaining about
Los Angeles as a host city. They were complaining about
the smog and the and the crime in Los Angeles.

(23:51):
I lived in Los Angeles in the nineteen eighties, and
guess what, there was a lot of smog and crime
in that city. So the Soviets were already concerned about
Los Angeles. But then the California legislature said, we don't
want you. And then the Band the Soviets Coalition announced,
we are going to make your Olympic Games miserable and so.

(24:13):
On May eight, just two months before the opening ceremony,
the Soviet Olympic Committee issued the following statement, Chauvinistic sentiments
and anti Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the
United States. Extremist organizations and groups of all sorts openly

(24:34):
aiming to create unbearable conditions for the stay of the
Soviet delegation and performance by Soviet athletes have sharply stepped
up their activities in these conditions. The National Olympic Committee
of the USSR is compelled to declare that participation of
Soviet sportsmen in the Games is impossible. In other words,

(24:58):
we are not coming now. The Soviets were very careful
not to use the word boycott. A boycott, they explained,
was an attack against the Olympic movement, and that's what
the United States had done in nineteen eighty. They said,
we are simply not coming to Los Angeles in the
name of protecting our citizens. Well, let's cut through the rhetoric.

(25:23):
There were indeed some groups in the United States that
we're going to protest Soviet athletes as a way of
protesting the Soviet government. That this was going to happen,
and the Soviets were anxious about this. There's there's no doubt.
But the real reason the Soviets did not come was retaliation.
You didn't come to Moscow, so we're not coming to

(25:45):
Los Angeles. In the end, I think It's probably as
simple as that the Soviet Union and sixteen of their
communist allies stayed home, and so like the Soviets had
done in eighty, the Americans dominated these four games. Americans
want almost everything. At every event, the crowd chanted USA USA.

(26:08):
This is when that became a standard occurrence at international
sporting events involving the United States. There were many significant
stories at the Los Angeles Games, the Soviet boycott certainly
being one of them. But from the perspective of what
we've been talking about in this course, I think one
of the most significant stories here in is the dominance

(26:31):
of the American female athletes. Yes, the Soviets and other
Eastern European nations, most of them were not there, and
that's one reason for this American dominance. But another is
this in the United States, attitudes about female athletes were
finally beginning to change and catch up with the Soviets

(26:52):
and and and Eastern Europeans. Americans were actually beginning to
care about women's sports. And really that's because of Title nine.
As we discussed a couple of lectures ago, female sports
participation sward in the decade after Title nine, and now
a dozen years after its passage. This first generation of

(27:15):
Title nine athletes, they succeeded magnificently for the United States
in these four Games. Athletes like Valerie brisco Hooks. She
had developed her track skills at cow State Northridge in
Los Angeles, and now she won a gold medal in
the two hundred and four hundred meter sprints, making her

(27:35):
the first Olympian male or female to win those two events.
Athletes like Joan Benoit from North Carolina State. In four
the Olympics hosted their first women's marathon. The men had
first roun the marathon back in so it took almost

(27:55):
a full century to get gender parody in this event,
and Joan Benoit thrilled the crowd in Los Angeles when
she entered the l A Coliseum first and won the race.
Title nine has a lot to do with these stories.
That's all for now. Next time on the Untold History

(28:18):
of Sports in America, presented by One Day University. The
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