An Olympic-Size Mistake: The Carter Administration and the 1980 Moscow Games

Abstract

R a growing sensitivity to cultural matters in the study of international affairs, the literature on sport and diplomacy grew substantially in both number and analytical complexity over the last decade.1 Nevertheless, significant gaps remained within this scholarship on many subjects, including one concerning the most prominent use of sport in the diplomacy of a national government: the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. Happily, the publication of Nicholas Evan Sarantakes’ excellent new book Dropping the Torch goes a considerable way towards resolving this historiographical weakness. Among those who have conducted research on the history of international sport, Sarantakes holds a somewhat unique educational and professional background. A diplomatic historian by training and the author of several fine studies on U.S. foreign and military affairs, he also teaches courses on strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College.2 The product of painstaking research in multiple languages on both sides of the Atlantic, Dropping the Torch makes the central argument that the Carter administration made a colossal mistake in reacting to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with the boycott. In making this case, Sarantakes first reasons that the boycott was unlikely to trigger a policy reversal by the Soviet leadership. Moreover, it forfeited an important symbolic opportunity for America—one in which the country’s best athletes competed on the very soil of its superpower rival. Sadly, Sarantakes remarks, the episode resulted in the collapse of detente rather than contributing to the more peaceful international situation that Carter entered office hoping to build. In the first of two very minor weaknesses, the work comes close to exhibiting an exaggerated idealism towards the role played by sport in international affairs. “While it is true that the Olympics fuel nationalism,” Sarantakes admits,