Sport at the World Festival of Youth and Students: Between Olympic Ideals and Socialist Internationalism.

Lidia Lesnykh

doi:10.3389/fspor.2020.567095

Abstract

During the first decade of the Cold War, the communist-sponsored World Festivals of Youth and Students included a program of international sports events that provided elite athletes with a self-standing arena of international competition. They also encouraged mass participation in sports, without social, racial, or political discrimination, thereby implicitly questioning elitism in sport. The present paper argues that through the World Festivals of Youth and Students, the Soviet Union harnessed the universal language of sport as a tool of cultural diplomacy with which to expand develop an international socialist sports youth network. The Festival sporting events represented an alternative model of international sport, run in parallel to the Olympics, whose ideals of peace, friendship, and mutual understanding they shared.

Highlights

“Regardless of the size of the teams, whether they have won or not, the athletes form a big family under the Olympic motto: ‘Friendship between athletes strengthens the friendship of peoples1.”’ these lines could be mistaken for an extract from Pierre de Coubertin’s writings, they had a very different origin
The Festival and its associated sporting events, both of which fit the definition of a “mega-event2,” pursued an original set of goals that combined the aims of Soviet cultural diplomacy and Coubertin’s Olympic ideal
The World Festival of Youth and Students positioned itself as a champion of the values of peace, friendship and solidarity

Summary

INTRODUCTION

“Regardless of the size of the teams, whether they have won or not, the athletes form a big family under the Olympic motto: ‘Friendship between athletes strengthens the friendship of peoples1.”’ these lines could be mistaken for an extract from Pierre de Coubertin’s writings, they had a very different origin. Schiller (2019) shed the light on the institutional and national specificities of the X Festival in Berlin and the political use made of its sports events, and Parks (2013) attributed the rise of Soviet sport and its international integration to the efforts of a “bureaucratic” element and its relations with the IOC and sport federations17 She argued that this task became easier in the context of peaceful coexistence and détente, because peace and friendship were a central part of this discourse. Despite the extensive scholarship, very few studies have focused on sport at the World Festival of Youth and Students

MATERIALS AND METHODS

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION