The Olympic Games, a series of athletic events hosted by a different country each year, is an outlet for international and neighboring countries to compete with one another while also practicing international cooperation and peace. For years, the Olympic Games has been a competitive yet innocent way for each country to challenge each other. However, many politicians also rightly believe that the games have a political dimension in that it provides a way for each country to promote their culture, an ideal alternative to war. In the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, for example, Germany promoted its own culture and beliefs by making the game participant pool strictly "Aryans only"; this was Adolf Hitler's strategy to introduce and kickstart his foreboding World War II opposition to the Jewish population. Hitler also nationalized the Berlin games by having an extravagant and elaborate sports complex built, covered in German swastikas and German propaganda promoting the "aryan" image. Expectedly, the German athletes were awarded the most medals, and Germany distinguished itself in newspapers as "back in the fold of nations"_.
The Games have been perceived as a healthy way to express competition with other countries while also avoiding a greater-scale war or international crisis. However, the 1980 Olympic Games served to exhibit a head to head struggle between the United States' and the Soviet Union's political ideals. _ The International Olympic Committee saw its' duties as the support of the sports as a universal ideal. The members included a number of well-informed elite with much access to power, who also saw themselves as the supreme mitigator of world sport._ Lord Killanin, the president of the International Olympic Committee from 1972 to 1980, explained himself that, "no one, I believe, needs less convincing than myself that politics are 'in' sport and have always been. Everything in our lives is governed by political decision"_. This nationalistic idea that politics are exemplified in almost everything is exhibited in the 1980 Olympic Games, where the United States hockey game against the Soviet Union is marked as one of the most historical and monumental sports events in United States history.
|