When America broke the Olympics

The boycott was an existential threat to the Olympics. How did it happen?

How this video happened

I cast about for a few different Olympic topics: the Olympic Village; breakdancing; the alternative games GANEFO (more on that below).

I was drawn to the broader topic of an Olympic boycott because I thought the tick-tock had never been covered well before, and the wealth of available archive made it seem like an opportunity. I understand diplomacy, the Olympic movement, and cheesecake a little better — hopefully, you do too.

Now, with the clarity of having already uploaded the file and having no ability to revise it, I do have a bit of an idea what the crux of the video is. Obviously, nobody wanted the Cold War to turn hot, and some believed the Afghanistan invasion risked further escalation. Diplomacy often involves random face-saving sacrifices of relatively meaningless stuff.

So, the question becomes: is American participation in the Olympics "meaningless stuff?" Or, to you, does the Olympic ideal matter? I was surprised to learn that for even a non-Sports guy like myself, the Olympics matters and the boycott still feels like an error.

The Cheesecake

I'd never used a spring form pan, I'd never made a cheesecake, and I'd never spent so much money on a butter cookie crust. Enjoy and lemme know if you tried it out.

Check out more

Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers).

Stealing the rings: the alternatives to the Olympics

44 years ago, the Olympic games weren't just in Moscow: they were in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sort of. The Liberty Bell Classic  was the alternative track meet organized and funded, at least in part, by the United States government. Conceived of as an alternative to the Olympics, it became a footnote.

History is full of Olympics imitators and competitors like these — imagine an Olympic ring but corroded, in the sand, maybe with a little trash around the edge. Many of them have little, if any, visual documentation (which is, in part, a reason why I didn't include them in my video about the Moscow boycott). However, they roughly tracked the political and economic trends of the times.

Before the USSR decided to participate in the Olympics in 1952, they tried to create a parallel sports universe, chiefly with the Spartakiad. Held in the 1920s and 1930s, these games sought to reconcile Soviet ambivalence about global competition and bourgeois sports with the fact that strong fast people are cool. These were followed by intra-Soviet competitions later on.

This sort of coy attitude toward the West — "I'm not invited to your Olympics? Fine, I'll make my own!" — was common in Asia as well. The Far Eastern Championship games popped up in the 1910s and the fist match included a list of countries that, today, have changed a lot: they included the Republic of China, the Empire of Japan, the British East Indies (Malaysia), the Kingdom of Thailand and the the British crown colony Hong Kong.

As some of these larger powers joined the Olympic fold, developing nations were next in the political-sports queue. From 1962-1967, GANEFO was a big messy mix of dictatorial propaganda, self-described "third world" pride, and geopolitical puppetry. It's a fascinating reverse image of the Olympics, and if I'd been able to find more visuals of it I would have happily covered it in a video. Instead, you'll have to enjoy the logo alone.

Led by Indonesia's Sukarno who, like Cher, used one name and, unlike Cher, was pretty close to a dictator, GANEFO was explicitly anti-IOC. The IOC was for the developing world and GANEFO was intended to represent the vanguard. They built a big big big stadium (this article gets into all of it, including pictures of the architectural largesse), but the event ultimately fizzled. Listen, let me give you some armchair analysis: GANEFO, not a great acronym. Full name? Games of the New Emerging Forces: pretty awesome. Sometimes the acronym is a mistake.

The next major anti-Olympics sporting events took place in the height of the Cold War. The aforementioned Liberty Games were held in 1980 in Philadelphia — some of the races actually had strong times, but others criticized them as falling short of a decent track meet. In 1984, the Olympics were held in Los Angeles and the USSR led their own boycott this time. Their alternative? The extremely Care Bears-coded Friendship Games, in which 50 states competed and stuck their thumbs at the IOC at the same time.

It's fitting that the last major Olympics alternative came shortly thereafter and was driven by tech, globalization, and the explosion of money into sports. The Goodwill Games ran from 1986 to 2001 and they were basically the XFL to the Olympics' NFL. Created by media tycoon Ted Turner (who was a lot more famous in the 80s), they were nominally an attempt to recapture the peace on earth vibes of the Olympics but, based on my cursory knowledge of "MEDIA," were also an attempt to chomp a slice of the Olympic financial pie. They didn't catch on enough, however, and ended in 2001.

The Olympics had to compete a lot more than I ever realized, but we live, improbably, in a period of relative stability, even though wars rage. Or, if it's not a symbol of overall stability, the Olympics have paddled out and built a little sports island, thanks to a combination of history, money, and, least cynically, the Olympic Movement's ideal that sports could bring the world together.

The Olympics remain a source of controversy, but they also have achieved the improbable ambition set out by Pierre de Coubertin so many years ago — and I think that's worth celebrating even more in light of the menagerie of competitors that have tried, and failed, to displace it.

Sources for the video

• Check out Sam's channel Search Party. He's a former coworker and his work on Vox's Atlas series inspired me to try more complicated, denser stories. I watch most Search Party episodes even though I am very much "not a sports guy."

• I'm a little embarrassed, but want to be honest with you. I started research by just reading some random thesis. This is a great way to unlock other secondary sources and new primary sources, even if it does feel like cribbing notes.

• Two books guided almost all of my process collecting assets, memos, clips, and shaping the narrative: A Political History of the Olympic Games by David Kanin and Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes. The first book is an overarching history of politics at the games, and though it actually didn't make it into the video a lot, it's a good relatively neutral guide that shaped the direction of this video (I opted to create a tick tock of the boycott itself rather than a zigzagging story that included an overview of Olympic politics. This lovably shaggy newsletter confirms I made the right choice).

  Dropping the Torch was definitely a larger source for this video, though it's full of obvious disdain for Carter (which undoubtedly seeped into my video). It's a pretty niche history, but the book includes some stuff about the politics of the IOC that I didn't get into, and the sources were invaluable for me to track down and verify and/or corroborate with my own research.

• The cookbook! I think I found my used copy on Amazon.

• Here's the hearing text, though I really just read summaries and skimmed for cool stuff.

• All the memos and documents come from this declassified documents search engine — what a blast it was to discover this. There's a bit of a Dunning-Kruger risk when you find a tool like this ("I'M AN UNSTOPPABLE DETECTIVE NOW!), but it unlocked a lot of proof for assertions in the video.

• As usual, Newspaper articles come via Newspapers.com. I'm still figuring out the best way to use these clips to tell a story, but I find it intoxicating (yes I'm a dork) to have clear visual proof of the narrative I'm putting forward, so it's hard to rip myself away from these clips. And it was really fun to find clips of George and Miji, two legends of cycling that I just stumbled onto.

• Obviously there's a lot of video — here's Carter's speech to the representatives (has multiple angles, which made my life easy as an editor). If you need any other clips — most are just found via YouTube searches, but let me know.

• I checked out this site about the Design of the Olympics for inspiration and pics of Misha the bear that I ended up not using.