{"id":474,"date":"2025-09-23T11:19:45","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T10:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/?p=474"},"modified":"2025-09-23T11:19:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T10:19:45","slug":"solidarity-through-sport-the-role-of-athletes-in-central-and-eastern-european-independence-movements-and-regime-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/en\/solidarity-through-sport-the-role-of-athletes-in-central-and-eastern-european-independence-movements-and-regime-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"Solidarity through Sport: The Role of Athletes in Central and Eastern European Independence Movements and Regime Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Leslie Waters<\/strong> (University of Texas at El Paso)<\/p>\n<p>The Cold War produced numerous well-known examples of \u201cEastern bloc\u201d athletes who became political dissidents. The Hungarian Olympic men\u2019s water polo team became a symbol of resistance after the 1956 Revolution. Gold medal-winning Czechoslovak gymnast V\u011bra \u010c\u00e1slavsk\u00e1 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. \u010c\u00e1slavsk\u00e1, 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\u2019s basketball teams, meanwhile, became some of the most recognized symbols of their countries\u2019 independence movements after they participated in boycotts against Soviet and Yugoslav sporting structures. \u201cTheir countries, new to the conjugations of nations, exist only perilously and amid great hardship,\u201d a Time magazine article noted. \u201cBut on the court, Lithuania and Croatia do honor to their homelands.\u201d 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\u2019s post-Cold War reconfiguration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leslie Waters (University of Texas at El Paso) The Cold War produced numerous well-known examples of \u201cEastern bloc\u201d athletes who became political dissidents. The Hungarian Olympic men\u2019s water polo team became a symbol of resistance after the 1956 Revolution. Gold medal-winning Czechoslovak gymnast V\u011bra \u010c\u00e1slavsk\u00e1 protested the Warsaw Pact invasion of her country at the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abstracts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/begaliu-galybe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}