The Cambridge alumni community is warmly invited to join St Edmund’s College for a special event with new and old friends at The Harvard Faculty Club on Tuesday 9 December. You will be joined by the Master of St Edmund’s College, Professor Chris Young, and the Development Director, Ms Kate Glennie.
If you have any questions, please contact Kate Glennie, St Edmund’s College Development Director and Fellow, at kg386@cam.ac.uk. We hope to see you there!
Boycotting Montreal, Moscow, and Los Angeles – the Olympics after Détente
This talk gives the wider context to the boycott Olympics of 1980 and 1984 and their precursor in 1976. It sets the Moscow and Los Angeles Games within the complex transition between a fading détente and the coming of the so-called second Cold War, arguing that while some elements of the two sports events fit patterns defined in mainstream historiography, others equally do not. It will show that 1980 and 1984 were both unlike and like other boycotts: unlike, because of their scale and superpower dimensions; like, because they were ultimately as ineffective as almost all that went before them. If boycotts were normally weak tools in the hands of the weak, in Moscow and Los Angeles, they were weak tools in the hands of the powerful – or more accurately, weak tools that rendered strong actors weak.