Leslie Waters (University of Texas at El Paso)
The Cold War produced numerous well-known examples of “Eastern bloc” athletes who became political dissidents. The Hungarian Olympic men’s water polo team became a symbol of resistance after the 1956 Revolution. Gold medal-winning Czechoslovak gymnast Věra Čáslavská protested the Warsaw Pact invasion of her country at the 1968 Olympics. Less explored, however, is how athletes successfully engaged in independence movements and regime changes at the end of the Cold War. This paper focuses on the 1992 Olympic Games and the athletes from Central and Eastern Europe who played a role in the political transformation of their countries in the early 1990s. Čáslavská, blacklisted by the communist government after 1968, re-emerged during the Velvet Revolution and became President of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee. Members of the Lithuanian and Croatian Olympic men’s basketball teams, meanwhile, became some of the most recognized symbols of their countries’ independence movements after they participated in boycotts against Soviet and Yugoslav sporting structures. “Their countries, new to the conjugations of nations, exist only perilously and amid great hardship,” a Time magazine article noted. “But on the court, Lithuania and Croatia do honor to their homelands.” Using contemporary media reports and the archival collections of the International Olympic Committee, this paper argues that athletes became advocates for change and key cultural ambassadors for their emerging and transformed countries. This process culminated at the 1992 Olympic Games, which were a forum for nation-building, diplomacy, and peace-keeping at the very moment of Europe’s post-Cold War reconfiguration.