Social Movements, Politics, and Patriotism at the Olympics Since the Second World War

Summary

The Olympics emerged from the Second World War at the 1948 games in London. Celebrated initially as a return to honoring the human spirit after an epoch of death and destruction, the Olympics reasserted themselves as the world’s most important sporting event. New nations freed from colonialism by the war mustered Olympic expeditions to announce their entrance onto the world stage, as the Olympic “family” grew to contain more nations than even the United Nations. Italy, Japan, and Germany hosted Olympics designed to atone for wartime transgressions—Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964), and Munich (1972). Other nations staged Olympics to announce themselves as global powers—Australia (1956), Mexico (1968), South Korea (1988), China (2008), and Brazil (2016). The Olympics continued as the primary global arena for expressing patriotic nationhood, highlighting international political disputes, and promoting the social power of sports. The Soviet Union, which originally denounced the Olympics as bourgeois propaganda, sent its first team to Helsinki (1952). Soviet entry made the Olympics a central Cold War proxy conflict in the enduring struggle between the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc and the United States–led Western bloc. U.S. domination of Olympic medal counts eroded as Soviet triumphs grew in these Cold War battles played out on global television screens. When the Soviet empire collapsed in the early 1990s, China became the new American Olympic rival. The rise of television as a global communication system in the second half of the 20th century transformed the Olympics into the world’s most popular television show, the largest shared experience on the planet.