ABSTRACT
Track and field was the main sport, although the United States made one of its periodic and futile attempts at getting the world interested in baseball. Czech publicists stressed that Austro-Hungarian tyranny had denied them sporting legitimacy before the War, and that enthusiastic Czech sport teams were one manifestation of the freedom brought their people by the common fight. The International Olympic Committee went beyond the goal of aiding the moral development of individual athletes and, for the first time, accepted the idea that participants in sport might be representative of the units of international politics. The ideology of sport would then return to its concentration on the function of sport in the moral development of the youth of the world. Avery Brundage believed the Amateur Athletic Union position amounted to a capitulation of sport to "politics." Brundage went to Germany and received assurances that Jews would be allowed to compete on German teams.
