Реферат: Olympic Games Essay Research Paper

the 1936 Games. The boycott movement failed because Avery Brundage, head of the

United States Olympic Committee (USOC) at the time, was convinced by German

officials that "Jewish athletes would be permitted to try out for the

German team"(Gary122). In fact, only two Jewish athletes were named to the

1936 German Olympic team, and both were of mixed religious backgrounds. There

have been several boycotts of the Olympics by various countries. In 1956 the

Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi teams boycotted the Melbourne Games to protest the

invasion of Egypt by the United Kingdom, France, and Israel that had occurred

earlier that year. Major boycotts of the Olympics occurred in 1976, 1980, and

1984. In 1976 many African nations demanded that New Zealand be excluded from

the Montreal Games because its rugby team had played against South Africa, then

under the rule of supporters of apartheid, the official policy of racial

segregation followed in that country from 1948 to the early 1990s. When the IOC

resisted the demands of the African countries with the argument that rugby was

not an Olympic sport, athletes from 28 African nations were called home by their

governments. The issue in the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games was the invasion

of Afghanistan in 1979 by the USSR. Although American President Jimmy Carter

forced the USOC to "refuse the invitation to attend the Moscow Games, many

other NOCs defied their governments’ requests that they boycott the

Games"(Gary 124). Once Carter acted to spoil the Moscow Games and after

"62 nations did boycott the Games" it became clear that the USSR and

its allies would retaliate with another boycott at the 1984 Games in Los

Angeles. Although Romania did send a team to Los Angeles, 16 of the USSR’s other

allies boycotted the Los Angeles Games. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the IOC

also had to deal with the political problems caused by divided nations. One

example was the dilemma concerning the Chinese Olympic team, which developed in

1949 after the political division of China into the People’s Republic of China

on the mainland and the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan. The issue was

whether the Chinese people would be represented by a team from the mainland or