American Exceptionalism, the Cold War, and The Last Dance

Olympian Dreams

Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., <i>Olimpismo</i>

<i>Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace</i> by Georgia Cervin

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done? The Rise and Fall of Russian Authority in the Olympics

<i>The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games: A Soviet-American Surrogate War</i>

This summer, as the XXX modern Olympic Games and the XIV Summer Paralympic Games were held in London, millions watched magnificent efforts from the best athletes in the world. The ability of the athletes to produce their best personal performances in the spotlight and the pressure of the Olympic Games was a testament to the human spirit. But, because the margin between winning and losing is so small, one imprecisely placed foot or hand, one moment of indecision, one gust of wind at the wrong moment, and the gold medal is gone. Behind the scenes at these Olympics—properly so— was a scientific team performing under great pressure to ensure safe and fair competition by testing urine and blood for traces of performance-enhancing prohibited substances and methods. Their efforts were crucial, because, in partnership with the clean athletes, they support the integrity and the spirit of sport. More than 1000 samples were analyzed within a few days after each event for stimulants, steroids, masking agents, recombinant proteins like erythropoietin and growth hormone (GH), and other substances on the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List (1). The List of Prohibited Substances and Methods is maintained by a committee of internationally recognized scientists and sport administrators. A revised list is released annually by the WADA. In deciding whether to add a compound or method to the list, the committee considers whether there is potential to enhance performance; a potential health risk for the athlete; or if use of the substance or method violates the spirit of sport. If two of the three criteria are met, the substance is added to the Prohibited List. The inclusion of the word “potential” recognizes that a substance may emerge for which there are no toxicological data. For example, the identification of the “designer” steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) in a drop of fluid in a syringe turned in to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) in 2003 illustrates the problem. THG had been developed by Wyeth in the 1960s and taken to clinical trials as a potential anabolic agent, but never brought to market. It was impossible to locate any records from the clinical trials 40 years after the fact. THG had been shown to have anabolic activity (2). There were no publications about toxicological studies, but as a 17 -methyl steroid, comparison to similar structures strongly suggested the potential for some degree of hepatotoxicity. Based on this information, THG was added to the Prohibited List in 2006.

The article recounts the story of the secret negotiations between the International Olympic Committee (IOC), North and South Korea, in the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The author contends that the Games offered an opportunity for the South Korean leadership to isolate and humiliate North Korea; that the head of IOC Juan Antonio Samaranch played an important – and conscious – role in the process; and that the trilateral talks in Lausanne, under the IOC auspices, were meant not so much to bring about Pyongyang's participation in the Olympiad, as to dissuade the socialist bloc from a potentially damaging boycott. Both China and the Soviet Union, however, proved all too willing to disregard the interests of their ally and did little to encourage an accommodating attitude on Seoul's part. The author concludes that the success of the Seoul Olympic Games actually contributed to the long-term instability on the Korean peninsula by humiliating North Korea into taking the stand of militant defiance.

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the governments that wished to learn from Romania's experience were those of Bolivia and Argentina. Their representatives were invited to Bucharest for official visits or specialization courses. In the case of Argentina, the collaboration also stemmed from interwar encounters at international medical congresses between physicians of the two countries.This example of early exchanges between Romania and Latin American countries signals a broader research field that has recently emerged in Cold War studies: the multiple geographies of medical exchanges, mobilities, and conceptualizations in the 1945–1989 period. The volume edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López is an essential addition to the growing literature about the relationship between health care, the bipolarity of the Cold War, and decolonization. Along with other pioneering studies, such as those by Marcos Cueto (Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 2007), Young-Sun Hong (Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime, 2015), and Dora Vargha (Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic, 2018), the collection explores the fascinating terrain determined by the relationship between Cold War politics and rhetoric, on one hand, and notions of health, disease, and welfare, on the other.Peripheral Nerve brings two new dimensions to this scholarship. First, it offers a comprehensive panorama of Latin American cases of local, regional, and transregional alignments engineered by medical experts. It goes beyond the usual focus on U.S. interventions in and hegemony over this part of the world. The contributors convincingly emphasize the agency of Latin American actors, their ability to engage with multiple partners, and their savviness in taking advantage of the ideological competition between the two camps of the Cold War.Second, Peripheral Nerve brings a new chronological perspective for discussing health care entanglements, circulations, and partisanships: ideas, choices, and affinities during the Cold War were rooted in the interwar period. They are linked to the institutional and intellectual history of medical reforms in Latin America before 1945, to international experiences such as cooperation within the League of Nations Health Organization, or to the fascination with the Soviet Union's radical experiment in state-managed health care. Moreover, many of the contributors provide suggestive connections between pre-1989 policies and phenomena that unfolded after the end of the Cold War.The overarching theme of Peripheral Nerve is that of local agency and, consequently, of revising the history of the Cold War from its margins. Such an approach brings Latin America back into the global history of the period, a task flagged by other recent publications as well. For instance, in the introduction to the impressive volume Latin America and the Global Cold War, Thomas Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà affirm that they compiled the book to revive “the history of what were once powerful interactions between Latin America and the rest of the Global South” (p. 2).Peripheral Nerve opens with a foreword by Gilbert Joseph, who places the volume in the general trend of “remaking . . . Latin American Cold War history” (p. ix). Three sections follow, each with its own distinct vantage point. The first deals with the interplay between leftwing internationalism and U.S. pressure on Latin America during the early Cold War. Katherine Bliss examines the biography of Lini de Vries, a former U.S. antifascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who sought to elude the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation by going into exile to Mexico in the 1940s. The Mexican government welcomed her contribution to rural health care reform, despite encountering criticism from U.S. officials. Nicole Pacino shows how the shrill anti-Communism of the 1950s in Washington led to the politicization of the Rockefeller Foundation's grants to medical schools in Bolivia, a departure from the institution's more ecumenical approach before 1945. Gabriel Soto Laveaga offers a fascinating study of how U.S. pharmaceutical companies skillfully employed Cold War rhetoric to control international prices and exert pressure on the Mexican government to open up its steroid hormone industry. If in the early 1950s a Mexico City company, Syntex Laboratories, controlled much of the world's steroid trade, by the end of the decade U.S. investors had purchased Syntex and relocated its headquarters to Palo Alto, significantly diminishing Mexico's domestic pharmaceutical capacities. In these three cases one can observe the degrees to which Latin American governments were able to maneuver in the increasingly troubled waters of U.S.-Soviet competition.The second section of the volume deals with the circulation of ideas and experts within the ideological camps of the Cold War. Each contribution underlines levels of ideological adaptation and transfer in various Latin American countries. Raúl Necochea López analyses how fertility surveys in Puerto Rico were the basis for U.S. advocacy of family planning policies throughout Latin America. He insists that this process antagonized Puerto Rican nationalists who used the Cold War to consolidate their position on the island. Gilberto Hochman and Carlos Herinque Paiva present the intellectual and ideological itinerary of parasitologist Samuel Pessoa. They link his fascination with Communist states’ health care systems (from the Soviet Union or China) and his membership in the Brazilian Communist Party to his interwar advocacy for medical, social, and economic reforms in the Brazilian countryside. The chapter provides glimpses into the multifaceted Latin American engagements with “socialized medicine.” From 1956 to 1961, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek emphasized state centralization and planning of programs for the control and eradication of rural endemic diseases (p. 151). Jennifer Lambe examines the evolution of psychiatry in Cuba from the perspective of debates pitting Sigmund Freud against Nikolai Pavlov as central paradigms of the profession. She stresses the prerevolutionary roots of these discussions. She insists on the eclecticism, particularly in the 1960s, of Cuban responses to official attempts to emulate the Soviet focus on the Pavlovian tradition. She also shows how the two Soviet psychiatrists sent to Havana to advise on the revolutionary reform of the discipline had to acknowledge the diversity of local approaches (pp. 172–173).The third section is centered on the multidirectionality of Latin American medical experiences throughout the Cold War. Jadwiga Mooney focuses on two biographies—those of Salvador Allende and Benjamin Viel—when recounting Chilean attempts to create a national health service. For both men, Mooney emphasizes the pre-1945 origins of their reformist projects as well as the role of other health care models, such as the British or the Soviet, in shaping their visions of the Chilean medical system. Marco Ramos's chapter explores Argentinian psychoanalysts’ syncretic interactions and cross-fertilizations with Soviet, Western, and Third Worldist approaches in the field. These exchanges pushed some professionals to call in the 1970s for the “nationalization” of psychiatry so that it would better reflect Argentine realities. Ramos shows the shifting meaning of anti-imperialism and its embeddedness in the local context. This sometimes caused “failed encounters” (desencuentros) between strands of anticolonial medicine (p. 212). Cheasty Anderson contributes a study of Cuban medical teams’ activity in Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime. The Cuban government sought to insulate its medical workers from Nicaraguan society, beyond their medical provision tasks. Nicaraguan officials likewise safeguarded their policymaking autonomy. Anderson offers an engrossing analysis of daily contacts between Cuban personnel and the Nicaraguan population, but she does not fully explore the potential hierarchies of this interaction, particularly the Cuban superiority complex that sometimes appears between the lines of her interviewees’ accounts. Anderson could have also pursued a comparison between Cuban activities and East German doctors’ experience at the Carlos Marx hospital, created and operated by the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. Iris Borowy has written a captivating account of this medical institution in the journal História, ciências, saúde—Manguinhos (2017). Peripheral Nerve would have benefited from a more comparative exploration connecting Latin American experiences with other instances of medical entanglement and circulation in different regions during the Cold War.Peripheral Nerve ends with a conclusion by the two editors that discusses the new vistas for research on health, medicine, and the Cold War in Latin America. The linchpin for the issues they raise is the central role played by international institutions (e.g., the World Health Organization or United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) in global health care dynamics. These bodies offered world forums for various governments and their experts to pursue their interests, engage in dialogue, and imagine their positions in international political and medical hierarchies. Birn and López also explore the continuities across the 1989 threshold, underlining that the end of the Cold War did not bring “a wholesale rebooting of health philosophies and proposals in Latin America, instead hosting a mingling of the old and the new” (p. 272). They connect medical solidarities across the region during the post-2000 Pink Tide of elected left-leaning governments with programs first established during the Cold War. For instance, they show how the 2005 PAHO Declaration of Montevideo revived the primary health care principles of the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978), and they point out that the Cuban-Venezuelan Misión Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood) was an offspring of Havana's pre-1989 medical diplomacy. In this last case, they should have stressed the blatant manipulation of the program by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to ensure his and his party's reelection, as detailed for instance in extensive reporting by Nicholas Casey in The New York Times in March 2019.The volume edited by Birn and López is a trailblazing contribution to the global history of medicine during the Cold War. It presents geographies and expertise that recapture the complex connections pursued from Latin America, which equally echoed and defied ideological divides during the second half of the 20th century. Such versatile reading of international health care politics is highly topical for the present: the COVID pandemic has reopened debates about medical diplomacy, competition among health care models, and vaccine nationalism.

By means of an empirical survey, this article analyzes the decision-making process of the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in order to establish how they evaluated the bids to host the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Three bid-winning models were identified. These consisted of offers from a total of seven bid-winning subjects: the Olympic village for accommodating the athletes, transportation facilities for all the visitors to the Games, the sports arenas, the finances of the Games, telecommunications, information technology, and the media center. Offers, which had little or nothing to do with the Olympic Winter Games, were on average graded “important” by the majority of the IOC members. However, offers that referred to the performance of the Games were considered, on average, more important than other offers. The individual IOC members did not share the interest of the IOC in bids offering cultural events, environmental care (opening, closing, and prize) ceremonies, a youth camp for young athletes, and accommodation for all the athletes in a single Olympic village. No bid messenger was considered “very influential” by a majority of the IOC members in their bid choices. “The visits of the IOC members to the bid cities” was the only channel for communicating bid offers that was perceived as “very influential” by a majority of the IOC members. Every fourth IOC member stated that it was not important to their bid selection that the bidders followed IOC's bidding rules. Fifteen bid offers (17%) were evaluated differently by the IOC members due to their cultural and demographic differences.

Analysing internal documents from recently accessible Soviet archives as well as International Olympic Committee (IOC) correspondence, this article explores how Soviet sports administrators sought to gain influence and authority in international sports in order to advance Soviet state goals during the Cold War. To counter the ‘reactionary’, ‘Anglo-American’ bloc they perceived in the IOC and International Federations (IFs), members of the Soviet All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sport sought to ‘democratise’ international sports organisations by transforming them into truly international bodies that included representatives from all regions of the world, especially those sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Because of the governing culture of the IOC and the personalities of many of its members, any stance taken on by Soviet members could not overtly challenge Olympic ideals. Couching their call to expand Olympism in the principles of international cooperation, democracy and the right for everyone to participate in sports, Soviet administrators could present themselves as dedicated promoters of sport and use their clout to further Soviet interests. Through their efforts to increase Soviet influence globally, Soviet administrators challenged the insularity of the IOC and IFs and helped to transform international sports and the Olympic Games into a truly global movement.

This study employs issue ownership theory to examine the partisan dynamics surrounding the idea of American exceptionalism in presidential discourse. We conducted a content analysis of invocations of American exceptionalism in all major U.S. presidential addresses—domestic and foreign—from the end of World War II through Trump’s 1st year in office. We find that even though Republicans have traditionally claimed ownership of American exceptionalism, patterns in presidential discourse tell a very different story. Specifically, our results show (a) in domestic contexts, Republican and Democratic presidents were very similar in their invocations of American exceptionalism during the Cold War but that Democrats have held a substantial advantage over Republicans throughout the post–Cold War era, including on issue areas that Republicans are perceived to “own” (e.g. national security); (b) in foreign contexts, Democrats have been much more outspoken in their embrace of American exceptionalism throughout both the Cold War and post–Cold War; and (c) President Trump has diverged significantly, both in substance and frequency, from his Democratic and Republican predecessors in his invocation of American exceptionalism. We reflect on the implications of these findings on our broader understanding of issue—and trait—ownership, presidential discourse, and American exceptionalism in American politics.

The fight against doping in sports commenced as a result of the death of a Danish cyclist during the Rome Olympic Games in 1960. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) established a Medical Commission (IOC-MC) which had the task of designing a strategy to combat the misuse of drugs in Olympic Sport. Some International Sport Federations (IF) and National Sports Federations followed suit, but progress was modest until the world's best male sprinter was found doped with anabolic steroids at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988. Further progress was made following the cessation of the cold war in 1989 and in 1999 public authorities around the world joined the Olympic Movement in a unique partnership by creating WADA--the 'World Anti-Doping Agency'. The troubled history of the anti-doping fight from the 1960s until today is reviewed. In particular, the development of detection methods for an ever increasing number of drugs that can be used to dope is described, as are the measures that have been taken to protect the health of the athletes, including those who may need banned substances for medical reasons.

Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe