Word: boycotts
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...rule the Olympics, but she did score impressively in important track events. In addition to the gold earned by Coe and Ovett, Britain's Allan Wells won the 100-meter dash and Daley Thompson took the decathlon. With 36 nations heeding President Carter's call for a boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was little else for the West to cheer about. Pietro Mennea, a flamboyant Italian, finished first in the 200-meter run, and Ethiopian Miruts Yifter, listed as 35 but rumored to be in his 40s, captured...
...likely that with or without the boycott, the Soviets and their satellites would have put on an overwhleming display of athletic prowess since they prepared their athletes with all the care taken before military adventures. Moreover, with or without the boycott, Soviet citizens would have picked up conflicting signals on relations between the Motherland and the West...
...boycott did reduce Lord Killanin and the Soviet Olympic Committee to pathetic figures, wailing about the future of the Olympics, decrying America's moral choice, denying simultaneously that the noticeable absence tarnished the games. Whether or not you support the boycott, and whether or not Soviet medal figures and the number of records established had been the same without the boycott, the Games were undermined substantially. But did we intend to undermine the games or the Soviet Union? The second is contingent on the first, and both were neatly, if insignificantly, accomplished...
Whatever their enthusiasm, many of the tourists in my group turned out to have wrestled with the problem of the U.S. boycott. Some had emotional reasons for deciding to come-a string of consecutive Olympics going back to Mexico or Japan (they wore tinkling commemorative pins on their hats to prove it) that no presidential edict (even if they thought well of it) was going to break. A trial lawyer from Washington, D.C., told me that he was in Moscow because he had never seen an Olympics and he could not bear the idea of waiting four years...
...competitive nastiness. In 1908, British officials dragged the Italian marathoner Dorando Pietri over the finish line in an attempt to withhold victory from the American Johnny Hayes. The water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary in 1956 ended with a bloody-faced Hungarian in the pool. Boycotts have been threatened before, and two actually occurred: the African boycotts of 1972 and 1976. (Many Americans sought to boycott the 1936 Olympics, but Brundage prevailed, explaining Nazi anti-Semitism as a "religious dispute.") If hard evidence of the political character of the Moscow Games were needed, there are plenty...