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The chapter aims at investigating the role of the Reagan administration in organizing the Games. Contrary to previous understanding, which tend to dismiss federal government involvment in the organization of the Games, it will highlight the political and diplomatic actions undertaken by the Reagan administration to organize a perfect edition of the Olympics and to sell the world reaganism through the Los Angeles Games. Since the creation of an Olympic task force within the White House, the Los Angeles Games were perceived as a showcase on Ronald Reagan's America. The task force immediately concluded that the federal government would act behind the scenes, providing all the necessary security measures for the LAOOC and the Games, coordinating diplomatic actions and looking over consular practices. Tasks increased when the Soviets announced their boycott: the White House defined a clear damage-limiting strategy. In its conclusions, the chapter will discuss a sort of paradox: the Reagan administration was increasingly involved in the promotion of what it presented as a government-free edition of the Olympics.

This chapter begins by discussing how Munich was chosen as the host of the 1972 Olympic Games. It then explores the reasons why Germany would suggest itself as the host of the Olympics. Next, it examines Munich's economic condition. It also analyzes the economic growth in Bavaria as well as the would-be impacts of the Olympics on the land. It then discusses the stand of the Federal Government as one of the parties responsible for winning and carrying out the Games. Next, it details the bidding which made Munich the location of the 1972 Games. It also discusses problems encountered in funding the Games. It then explores the tactics employed by the public relations team for the 1972 Olympics.

This chapter examines the history of media change at the Olympic Games. It shows how how the expansion of the mega-event media industries has led to greater exclusivism over reporting privileges. In turn, this has narrowed the lens through which reporting takes place—even if the coverage volume has increased. It also explores how the Olympic Games stimulate geo-political discussions about media change on a global scale and how this can influence wider socio-political change.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new journalist communities at the Olympic Games, which articulate how its media community has grown. It argues that the expansion of the Olympic “fringe” journalist community results from the exclusive arrangements that surround sports reporting, but also the growing expansion of mega-events to become more like cultural festivals, which attract the interests of non-sports reporters. In so doing, the chapter charts the rise of the non-accredited media center and its strategic role for Olympic hosts, made possible by the extended means of reporting via digital technologies. While the chapter urges caution in claiming that this expansion reveals a trajectory toward greater media freedom at the Games, it does identify how media expansion is changing the way that traditional media organizations operate, provoking a democratization of media expertise and the re-professionalization of journalism.

This chapter focuses on how the rise of social media has transformed media events. First, it considers the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era before considerin how the Olympic industry has organized its response to this new communication architecture. Next, it explores the risks of social media to the financial base of the Games, considering how to monetize Olympic social-media content. Subsequent sections in this chapter consider the risks of open media, the expansion of the user experience by digital technology, and the parallels between open-source volunteers and the Olympic volunteer ethos. In so doing, the chapter articulates a vision for digital culture that is born out of the values of social media, as an ideological force that coheres with the Olympic vision and with a broad perspective on the potential contribution of sports in society.

This chapter examines the U.S. propaganda actions in Operation Rome. In the years following the Melbourne Olympics, the United States would cope with technological and cultural defeat at the hands of the Soviets, even as the U.S. psychological warfare apparatus would once again direct their propaganda efforts at the next Olympic Games. Rome in particular was the venue for the 1960 summer Olympics, and it would offer covert operators with another platform to destabilize and unhinge the regimes in the Soviet bloc. Adhering to the U.S. government's new direction in policy, the Free Europe Committee (FEC) sought to increase “contacts” between exiles and the people of Eastern Europe by targeting the Rome Olympic Games with a multifaceted plan that exploited the propaganda potential of the hosting city and the tourists who visited it.

This chapter examines the inter-relationship of sport and diplomacy with specific reference to the 1960 Winter Olympic Games (held in Squaw Valley, California). More specifically, it evaluates State Department involvement in the ongoing issue of the recognition of the “Two China’s” during the Cold War, with specific reference to international sport. Despite long-standing official non-involvement in international sporting matters, hosting the 1960 Games focussed US diplomatic attention on the opportunities and problems presented by the Olympics within the wider Cold War. Crucially, the State Department extended considerable behind-the-scenes efforts both before and during the Squaw Valley Games in an attempt ensure Nationalist Chinese participation. Overall, this chapter will demonstrate that despite claims of non-involvement, the State Department specifically utilised international sport – and particularly the Olympics – as a tool of diplomacy during the Cold War. This was drawn into particularly sharp focus when the Games were being hosted on American soil, as they were in Squaw Valley in 1960.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the social media activity surrounding the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics. It examines how social media platforms were instrumental in generating news content during these Games – not just distributors of the news of others - while also discussing how the organizing committee, stakeholders, and audiences contributed to generating the record breaking volume of social-media content that came out around these Games.

The chapter reevaluates the 1980 boycott of the Moscow summer games, challenging the conventional wisdom that that boycott was a failure. Historians of sport and diplomacy have usually studied the 1980 boycott through the strained efforts of US President Jimmy Carter’s Administration’s clumsy struggles to rally NATO allies, Australia, and traditional Olympic sporting powers into not going to Moscow in retaliation for the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, American sports diplomacy might be judged differently when seen from the perspectives of non-Western and non-sporting nations, particularly in Africa and Asia. Using media and governmental primary sources from a variety of nations. More precisely, engagement in the boycott suited nationalistic purpose as perceived in 1980. “Carter’s boycott” was effectively localized/nationalized, if outside Carter’s stated aim of making the Soviets pay a price for their aggression in Afghanistan. Rather than reading the 1980 boycott through the lens of the Soviet invasion and the beginnings of the Second Cold War, contemporary non-Western perspectives on the boycott showed a wide breath of positive interpretations/results from Olympic nonparticipation– ranging from public display of governmental fiscal austerity by corrupt regimes, to support for a growing pan-Islamic movement, to enforcing authoritarian rule at home.

Chapter Five focuses on the calculated and concerted steps taken by Atlanta’s white business elite and black city government to bid for the Centennial Olympic Games. A diverse cohort of private interests generated the necessary funds to give Atlanta a competitive bid for the Games was formed. This cohort included officers of Atlanta’s fortune 500 companies comprising of the Coca-Cola Company and Delta Airlines, Atlanta businessman Billy Payne, and politicians Mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young. Once awarded the Centennial Games, two movements of paramount importance commenced, representing what the author calls the “olympification” of Atlanta. “Olympification” connotes the policies where urban renewal and gentrification were implemented to get Atlanta ready for the Games. The first of these movements, a joint effort between the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and the Atlanta Organizing Committee (AOC) worked to prepare the city for the Games is of extreme importance. The second movement, the Atlanta Project, gave way to social change in Atlanta waging war against poverty within the city. Started by the former U.S. president, humanitarian and Georgia native Jimmy Carter, this project had good intentions. But in the end, it did very little for Atlanta’s poor, thus further excluding them from the popular image of Atlanta as black Mecca.

This chapter discusses the continued decline of amateurism during the late 1960s and 1970s. Soaked in the countercultural spirit of the era, movements around the world challenged social norms and social order, often through radical and subversive efforts. The sustained push for civil rights along racial, gender, and social lines powerfully exposed the system of inequality in capitalist societies. Amateur sport was not immune to emerging cultural movements that challenged exploitation and threatened the status quo. Hair gradually lengthened as athletes questioned the authority of coaches and administrators. The sociologist Harry Edwards founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights in 1967, which also protested racial discrimination in both sport and society at large. Even sportswomen mobilized in their push for greater inclusion and pay equity, particularly as television and commercial marketing transformed elite sport into lucrative commodities. The International Olympic Committee suddenly found itself caught between the pillars of tradition and modernity. Under the leadership of its aging president, Avery Brundage, it struggled to keep pace with the shifting sporting landscape.

After the Soviet Union’s successful second-place result in the 1952 Olympic Summer Games, its sports officials began to dream of hosting the great mega-event in Moscow. Able leaders like Konstantin Andrianov and Nikolai Romanov repeatedly pushed the party leadership to go along with their plans but to no avail. Joseph Stalin, who departed the world in 1953, had little interest in sport, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was hostile. Everything changed when Leonid Brezhnev came to power. He was an ardent fan of sport who had supported teams and clubs in all the localities through which he passed on the way to the top of the Soviet hierarchy in 1964. Ten years later, after numerous false starts, the Soviet capital was awarded the Games. In this case, a single individual in an authoritarian state had a profound effect.

This chapter recounts the arrival of the U.S. athletes in Berlin. The emotional intensity of Berlin's Olympic welcome stunned visitors. “Men who had been with former Olympic teams said that this was by far the greatest reception ever given an Olympic team,” one athlete remembered. As tourists from across Germany and the world descended upon the German capital, the Nazi hosts cleverly exploited every opportunity to generate much-needed foreign currency and goodwill from international travelers. The Olympic Games, it was clear, had been transformed. In 1936, they became more broadly experiential, more nationalistic, and they served new purposes unrelated to athletics. This intensification included higher emotional stakes for audiences around the world, stoked by the new level of global media attention.

This chapter considers the politics of the Olympic Games. The international sporting system, within which the Olympics reside, had emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a force of peace and goodwill. It also grew in strength and global popularity because it was built to accommodate national rivalries. That the Olympics quickly emerged as a powerful medium to promote the state and political ideology naturally lent the festival to the propaganda battles of the Cold War. Here was a stage where deeds could be trumpeted and manipulated for psychological significance. Without a doubt, the games provided a global arena for athletes from the east and west to compete head to head in a symbolic war.

This chapter details the rise of the “shamateur” during the postwar years. The steady postwar globalization and growth of the Olympic Movement necessitated that the International Olympic Committee revisit its position on amateurism. A larger, more representative Olympics, comprising athletes from North Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, exposed some of the harsh socially exclusive realities of existing amateur polices. For these new Olympic entities, the cultural nuances and ideological beliefs and practices of amateurism were simply alien. Lacking an established professional sporting structure (and thus a clear distinction between amateurism and professionalism), far removed from the chivalric, muscular Christian virtues of Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, these new Olympic nations considered class-based exclusionary policies—as well as prohibitions against travel and living expenses, broken-time payments, and financial prizes—as jejune and outdated.

This chapter details the expanding globalization and commercialization of the Olympics in the 1930s. Emerging from the economic ruins of the Great Depression, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in Europe, Asia, and Latin America spurred a substantial rise in governmental involvement in international sport. Though the British were among the first to forge the linkage between competitive sport and national interests, their Fascist and militaristic rivals fully exploited the value of physical culture by positioning sport as the centerpiece of their foreign policy. The appropriation of elite, international sport by authoritarian regimes heightened the popularity and legitimacy of the Olympic Games. After successfully defending amateurism against the threat posed by broken-time payments, International Olympic Committee chiefs embraced the support of powerful right-wing governments. However, their initial hope soon turned to despair as it grew apparent that their authoritarian “allies” had transformed the Olympics into a ruthless game of realpolitik.

This chapter focuses on International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, who defended amateurism seemingly with religious conviction throughout his bureaucratic career. His deeply conservative views and passionate defense of the amateur ideal set the tone for the IOC in the Cold War years, helping insulate the movement from the radical currents that were transforming postwar societies and global affairs. Both in his lifetime and in the years since, portrayals of Brundage depict a Quixote-esque idealist providing the Olympic Movement's only firm line of defense against professional and commercial encroachments. However, the orthodox view of Brundage as an unwavering apostle of amateurism overlooks the finer, more nuanced realities of his administration. Despite his anticommercial rhetoric and investigatory crusades, Brundage also appeased, compromised, and even spearheaded initiatives that broke with the Olympic Movement's amateur traditions.

This chapter details the radio broadcasting of the Berlin Olympic Games. The opening ceremony broadcasts primed global audiences for two weeks of Olympic experience. For U.S. network radio broadcasters, the opening of the games inaugurated a grueling work schedule. For two weeks, radio commentators covered live events daily while summarizing results nightly in résumé programs. The Olympic summaries served two functions: they provided results, and they promoted upcoming broadcasts. Radio manufacturers, retailers, CBS and NBC executives, and others in the industry hoped additional sports and global news programming in 1936 might enlarge the cumulative U.S. broadcast audience. NBC ultimately increased sports programming airtime by 34 percent in 1936 over 1935, with the Olympics and Olympic-themed programming the largest contribution to the increase. In turn, these programs created indelible memories in the minds of millions of U.S. listeners and listeners around the world.

This chapter discusses how amateurism freely evolved into an organic and malleable construct as it spread and diffused around the globe. From its institutional seedbed in Britain, amateurism would become an enduring ideology that influenced the Olympic Movement for nearly a century. Since the revival of the Olympic Movement in 1894, Coubertin and his fellow International Olympic Committee (IOC) patriarchs labored in vain to unify European and North American nations behind a consistent, workable definition of an amateur. However, the sheer breadth and malleability of the ideology of amateurism meant that it proved to be impossible for the IOC to regulate the status of an amateur on a global scale. In the age of increasing codification and standardization in sport, in part through the gradual establishment of national and international sports federations, amateurism proved resistant to consistency and strict universal regulation.

This chapter discusses the decline amateurism during the Cold War era. The Cold War realpolitik, rising global commerce, interorganizational friction, and the advent of television converged to deliver debilitating blows to the amateur ideal. Still, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage had the opportunity to position Olympic amateurism on a more favorable and defensible footing. By lifting the hermetic seals to the IOC's financial coffers, undertaking professional and jurisdictional restructuring, and adopting an uncompromising stance toward known violators, he might have given amateurism a greater chance of survival. However, Brundage's lack of administrative foresight inadvertently pushed amateurism further down the path toward dissolution and decline.