1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
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4 Sports Behind the Iron Curtain
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Russia was a founder member of the modern Olympic movement, but after the Russian Revolution of October 1917, no Soviet team took part in the Olympics until 1952. Initially, there was an explicit rejection of “bourgeois” sports: the Soviets boycotted important Western competitions.
Instead, a centrally organized government program of national fitness, “physical culture” and sport for the masses, free of charge, was designed to create in every citizen a sense of emotional identity with the aims of the Soviet state, as a way of uniting the diverse nationalities and cultures of so vast a country.
After World War II, sport assumed a focal position in Soviet foreign policy, as a way of injecting a spirit of nationalism at home and gaining international prestige abroad. The Soviet Union emerged as a world sporting power after the 1952 Olympics, the last year in which the United States won more gold medals than the Soviet Union.
Sports and the Cold War
The Soviet presence, and their unequivocal acknowledgement of the political nature of sport, exposed the contradictions between the idealist philosophy of the Olympic Charter and the postwar actuality of intense sports competition being used as a weapon of international propaganda. The Olympics, in particular, embodied the ColdWar ideological struggle between the Eastern and Western were blocs. By the late 1950s, a number of writers were lamenting the way sport had become “war without weapons”.
The Soviets used sport explicitly as a vehicle to nurture solidarity with Third World nations, providing sports buildings and equipment, free of charge, and sending experts to train gifted athletes and arrange tours, displays and teaching. The Soviet Union provided sport aid to Eastern Europe and Cuba, developing a system of mutual assistance, with friendly sports meetings, athletic scholarships, and exchanges of coaches, advisors and specialized knowledge. By comparison, Western countries persisted in a haphazard and more traditionally amateur approach to sport, Western athletes had to negotiate for opportunities and compete for finance.
The conspicuous achievements of Eastern-bloc athletes fueled controversy about the pursuit of excellence and the degree to which sociallist sports systems embodied the political interests of their governments or the individual interests of the citizens who comprise those societies. The 1950s started a process re-appraisal of Western sports policies, moving towards an increase in state intervention, with the recognition that efficient mass systems of sport must be established to maximize available talent. The Soviet insistence on free access for all to sport as the basis of a fundamentally non-elitist system was, however, much less rigorously followed. In 1953 evidence about the fitness levels of American schoolchildren provoked Cold War anxieties about the physical condition of young people. In a 1960 article “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated President-elect Kenndy proposed a national fitness system to invigorate the American nation in order to meet the Soviet challenge.
The USSR's success in using sport as a vehicle for social progress was particularly attractive to Third World countries, although lack of facilities prevented them providing comprehensive sports systems. With indigenous games traditions eroded by colonial contact, Third World nations struggling for self-identity saw modern sport as an excellent opportunity to foster patriotism through the celebration of national heroes. After the emergence into international sport of Asian and African countries, sport became a global idiom, uniting people from disparate cultures. Associations and competitions specifically for Third World countries were inaugurated to extend opportunities to Third World athletes, but all new moves - the Asian Games, the Pan American Games, the Mediterranean Games - engendered political controversy. Ironically, the more obviously politicized sport became, the more vehement were the refusals of Olympic purists to acknowledge this. In 1956, six nations withdrew from the Melbourne Olympics, for reasons connected either to the conflict in Suez or the invasion of Hungary earlier in the year.
4 Next Page: The Politicization of Sports
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