ABSTRACT
For the first modern Olympic Games, the 1896 Games in Athens, de Coubertin inspired a meta-narrative of how the Modern Games recreated the ancient Olympics and rekindled classical ideals. Publicly received narratives of the Olympics, in essence, arise from and reflect the arrangements of power, profit, and capital identified by political economy. During the height of the Cold War from the entry of the Soviet Union into the Olympics in 1952 through the end of Soviet domination in 1990, the meta-narrative of the Games became a fundamental binary opposition, Communism versus Capitalism. The role of the Olympics in the global public sphere was growing and moving in particular directions. Conflicts between super powers and militants in the Middle East, including the later War on Terror declared by President George Bush, offered no such surrogate contests and metanarrative in the Olympics.
