Playing Politics
Keyword(s):
Cold War
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This chapter highlights the formalization of U.S. Cold War sport foreign policy. As the Soviet Union reentered the Olympic movement in 1952, sport took on heightened meaning, and became a proxy for combat in the atomic age. Thus, this chapter highlights how the two superpowers fought for athletic supremacy, as well as how the United States developed a program of international athletic goodwill tours as a means to counteract the Soviet Union's successful implementation of its own athletic foreign policy program. Sports became a crucial Cold War weapon that deployed the notions of strength and cultural, political, and economic superiority over the Soviet Union.