Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare, 1948-1956

The political tension of the Cold War bled into the Olympic Games when each side engaged in psychological warfare. In the first three post-war Olympiads, this rivalry set the course for subsequent games, in which both sides ruthlessly exploited sport for political ends. At its first games in Helsinki, the Soviet Union nearly overtook the United States in the medal count. Caught off guard, the United States hastened to respond, certain that the Soviets would use a victory at the next Olympics to broadcast their superiority over the Western world. Following the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a Soviet athlete struck a Hungarian opponent in the Melbourne water polo semifinals, turning the pool red. The United States covertly encouraged Eastern Bloc athletes to defect, communist Chinese agents nearly succeeded in goading their government into withdrawing from the games, and a forbidden romance between an American and Czech athlete resulted in a politically complex marriage. This history describes those stories and more that resulted from the complicated relationship between Cold War politics and the Olympics.