Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott and the Cold War by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes (review)

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes has written a well-researched, engaging, and forcefully argued book about a fascinating episode in Cold War sports diplomacy. The subject is President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to organize a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the book also deals with the efforts of Denver and Los Angeles to host Olympics, the awarding of the 1980 Games to Moscow, and Olympic competition at Lake Placid and Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984. Sarantakes argues that the collision between Carter and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Lord Killanin should have been a mismatch in Carter’s favor because Washington had so much more power at its disposal. But as the book demonstrates, political, diplomatic, and military strength was sometimes trumped by soft power. IOC members and National Olympic Committees (NOCs) were required to be independent of their governments, and U.S. allies could not simply dictate what “their” NOCs and IOC members did; sports officials in several countries allied with the United States sent Olympic teams to Moscow despite Carter’s efforts.

Sarantakes might have made more of the fact that in Communist countries IOC members and NOCs were not independent, a point demonstrated when all Warsaw Pact members except Romania joined the Soviet-led boycott of Los Angeles—without any provocation comparable to the invasion of Afghanistan. IOC officials endlessly proclaimed their desire to ensure “that sport or sportsmen are not used for political purposes” (p. 31), but Communist regimes routinely did just that—except on occasions when it served their purposes to mouth platitudes about keeping sport and politics separate. IOC officials knew that East-bloc NOCs and IOC members were not and could not be independent of their governments. Once accepted into the Olympic movement on their own terms, the Communist states had no reason to alter their practices, and they did not. Instead the IOC accepted wholesale departures from its rules rather than risk appearing to take sides in the Cold War. As part of their politicization of sport, Communist regimes touted Olympic victories as proof of their superiority. Although Sarantakes downplays the political importance the Soviet regime attached to the Moscow games, Soviet authorities stressed the political dimension: “By awarding the organisation of the Games to Moscow the world sports leaders basically approved the peace-loving foreign political course of the Soviet government” (statement of USSR Committee for Physical Culture and Sport, quoted in Evelyn Mertin, “The Soviet Union and the Olympic Games of 1980 and 1984: Explaining the Boycotts to Their Own People,” in Stephen Wagg and David L. Andrews, eds., East Plays West: Sport and the Cold War London: Routledge, 2007, p. 238).

Given the realities of international sport, organizing a crippling Olympic boycott would have been difficult. Sarantakes argues that the idea of a boycott was misguided. For political impact on sport, he is impressed by Jesse Owens’s multiple gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Owens made a mockery of Nazi racial ideology, but his heroics also demonstrated the limits of soft power. His achievements did not trigger a rethinking of Nazi racial policy, nor did they stiffen European resistance to Adolf Hitler. Even a West German diplomat in 1980 “remarked that a boycott of the Berlin Games in 1936 might have altered history” (p. 80).

Still, a more competent diplomatist in the White House might have done a better job of using the Olympics to make his point. Sarantakes is justifiably scathing in his assessment of Carter in this case, with reference to Carter’s foreign policy more generally. Sarantakes shows Carter immersed in detail but missing the bigger strategic picture. He treated allies with contempt. He cost himself diplomatic flexibility by imposing an early deadline for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. He targeted his diplomacy toward governments rather than the sports officials actually making decisions about...