How athletes competed for medals in the midst of the Cold War.
Few things capture the spirit of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics quite like 'Rocketman' Bill Suitor soaring into the opening ceremony on a jetpack.
His dramatic entrance was followed by a celebration of American music and culture, including a performance of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' (played on 84 grand pianos), a 300-strong gospel choir singing 'When the Saints Go Marching In', and a modern medley including Irene Cara's 'Fame' and Michael Jackson's 'Beat It'. The opening ceremony of the Olympics typically brims with cultural references that tie it to the year of the ceremony and the host country. The spectacle of the opening ceremony made it one of the most memorable in Olympic history, and the three three-hour extravaganza encompassed all things 1980s.
President Ronald Reagan officially opened the games, and he told American athletes before the opening ceremony, 'There is a new patriotism spreading across our country. It's an affection for our way of life.' Of course, the reverberations of the Cold War were felt throughout the games. Following the United States' boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, 14 countries boycotted the 1984 games, led by the Soviet Union. Despite efforts to keep politics out of the Olympics, these games, as with many others, became part of a complex geopolitical struggle between capitalism and communism.
Since 1952 Los Angeles bid to host every summer Olympics, and eventually, in 1978, they were provisionally awarded the chance to host the 1984 games. The Montreal Olympics in 1976 had cost the city approximately $1.6 billion, and the planners of the Los Angeles Olympics were keen to avoid incurring such eye-watering costs. Their budget was a mere $12 million.
By using existing sporting arenas spread across the city, rather than building an Olympic village from scratch, the Olympics truly became part of Los Angeles that summer. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was built to host the 1932 Olympics and the opening ceremony returned there in 1984, another cost-cutting measure. Intent on adding a modern and American twist to the games, the organisers decided that, rather than hand Olympians a traditional bouquet of roses, athletes were given bunches of traditional Californian flowers. The games ultimately generated $223 million in profit, in part due to savvy commercial deals with the stations that broadcast the games to billions of viewers worldwide. Prior to the 1984 games fewer and fewer cities were volunteering to host the Olympics, in part due to the costs involved with staging such a massive sporting event. However, the success of 1984 led to a renewed demand for the games, and helped countries to see the benefits that it could bring to the local economy of the host city. However, not everyone was as quick to see the apparent commercialisation of the Olympics as a positive development.
Though a record 140 countries participated in the 1984 Olympics, these games are nevertheless often remembered because of the absence of 14 communist countries. In 1980 a record 65 countries boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow, led by the United States and in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The USSR claimed it was boycotting the 1984 games, and encouraging others to do so, because of concerns over its increasing commercialisation, which they felt was a 'gross flouting' of the ideals of the Olympics. The Soviet statement also said of the United States:
'Chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the country […] Extremist organizations and groupings of all sorts, openly aiming to create 'unbearable conditions' for the stay of the Soviet delegation and for the performance by Soviet sportsmen, have sharply stepped up their activity with direct connivance of the American authorities' (quoted New York Times, 9 May 1984)'
The statement also accused the Reagan administration of hosting the games in Los Angeles for 'political aims', which some people interpreted as Moscow attempting to damage Reagan's re-election campaign, which was due to kick off in August of that same year.
the USSR instead organised its own international sporting competition
There is some debate over why exactly the USSR boycotted the LA Olympics. Philip D'Agati's study 'The Cold War and the 1984 Olympics: A Soviet-American Surrogate War' seeks to challenge the assumption that the Soviet Union's boycott of the 1984 Olympics was simply a retaliation to the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. New evidence suggests that Soviet athletes were in fact training intensively for the 1984 games, with a view to asserting their superiority through sporting triumphs. It is unclear precisely why they opted to withdraw from the games less than three months before the games started, but it seems that there were more immediate concerns at play than simply retaliating to the USA's apparent snub of the Moscow games four years previously.
Rather than prevent their athletes from competing in any events that summer, the USSR instead organised its own international sporting competition: the 'Friendship Games' or 'Friendship-84'. Though they were careful to ensure that the dates of Friendship-84 did not overlap, by starting the competition before the Olympics and resuming after the Olympic closing ceremony, this was nevertheless a clear attempt to rival the Olympic Games. The name 'Friendship Games' reflected the USSR's accusation that the United States was commercialising the Olympics at the expense of the true values of the original games. Similar 'alternative' games had been arranged in 1980 for the athletes whose countries were boycotting the Moscow Olympics, so this strategy was not unique to 1984. However, it does offer us a reflection of the extent to which politics and sports became entangled during the 1980s, in part due to Cold War political rivalries.
1984 was a milestone year in Olympic history. The first women were permitted to run a marathon, with Joan Benoit bringing home the first women's Olympic marathon gold medal for Team USA. LA 1984 also saw China attend its first summer Olympics since 1952, and 140 countries were represented in total.
The United States athletes' performance in 1984 was unprecedented, winning a record 83 gold medals and 174 overall. Following the conclusion of the Friendship Games, the Soviet Union was quick to point out how many Eastern Bloc athletes had apparently out-performed their Los Angeles counterparts, arguing that the United States' triumph was only down to an absence of competition. Though few would dispute that the inclusion of the Eastern Bloc countries would have shaken up the medal table, American athletes and coaches were understandably riled by the attitude of their counterparts across the Atlantic.
By the time the world's sporting stars reconvened in Seoul for the 1988 Games games, international politics was drastically different. The Soviet Union topped the medal table (the United States placed second). Meanwhile, Cold War tensions were beginning to thaw, and Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had developed an unlikely but productive working relationship. Perhaps most shockingly, these would be the final Games for the Soviet Union and East Germany, both of which ceased to exist before the next Summer Olympics in Barcelona in 1992.
When 'Rocketman' landed in the Olympic stadium in 1984 his appearance was supposed to offer the world a glimpse into the future. However, few could have predicted the changes the world was about to see in the second half of the 1980s, as the Cold War wound to a close and the Berlin Wall came crashing down.
