ABSTRACT
The Cold War spanned some five decades from the devastation that remained after World War Two until the fall of the Berlin wall, and for much of that time the perception was that only on the Eastern side were politics and sport inextricably linked. However, this assumption underestimates the extent to which sport was an important symbol for both power blocs in their ongoing ideological struggle.
This collection of essays from leading international authorities on sport, culture and ideology brings together an impressive body of work organized around key political themes and outstanding moments in sport, and is at once a political history of sport and an illuminating new perspective on the forces that shaped this unsettled time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |16 pages
Totalitarian regimes and Cold War sport
Steroid “Übermenschen” and “ball-bearing females”
chapter |18 pages
Verbal gymnastics
Sports, bureacracy, and the Soviet Union's entrance into the Olympic Games, 1946–1952
chapter |19 pages
Cold War expatriot sport 1
Symbolic resistance and international response in Hungarian water polo at the Melbourne Olympics, 1956
chapter |23 pages
“If you want the girl next door …”
Olympic sport and the popular press in early Cold War Britain
chapter |26 pages
The “muscle gap”
Physical education and US fears of a depleted masculinity, 1954–1963
chapter |24 pages
The Cold War and the (re)articulation of Canadian national identity
The 1972 Canada–USSR Summit Series
1
chapter |13 pages
“Miraculous” masculinity meets militarization
Narrating the 1980 USSR-US men's Olympic ice hockey match and Cold War politics
chapter |18 pages
The Soviet Union and the Olympic Games of 1980 and 1984
Explaining the boycotts to their own people
chapter |19 pages
“Sport and politics don't mix”
China's relationship with the IOC during the Cold War
1
