Читать книгу Power Games - Jules Boykoff - Страница 13

The Games of the Cold War era may well have best approximated Orwell’s sport-induced “orgies of hatred,” with chauvinistic spittle spraying in every direction.¹ Although revolutionary Russia had ditched the Olympics as “bourgeois,” by the 1940s the Soviet Union wanted back in. The 1952 Helsinki Games marked the return of the Soviets to the fivering fold for the first time since Lenin’s revolution. During the Cold War, the Olympics emerged as a prominent venue for rival systems to assert their superiority. As one journalist put it years later, “Our nukes are fueled by better steroids than your nukes.”² The Games became a platform for the press to assess who was winning the wider war. The “Free World” or the Communists? Capitalism or socialism?