Soviet - Sports / Doping
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union assigned to the sport organizations, after the Second World War, the task of raising the level of sport mastery and emphasizing those sports with which Soviet athletes would rise to dominance in world and international competition. The Soviets were firm believers in the "triangle theory," in that the larger the base of mass participation the more logical that outstanding performers will emerge at the top of the triangle.
The success of Soviet athletic programs led to charges of unfair practices but, because of secrecy surrounding Soviet research in exercise biochemistry, it has been difficult to substantiate these charges. Early work by Olexander Palladin established the role of creatine in muscle function. In the 1970s, Soviet scientists showed that oral creatine supplements improved athletic performance in short, intense activities such as sprints. Subsequent studies in the West substantiated these investigations and have led to the widespread acceptance and use of creatine supplements to enhance muscle function and athletic performance. In addition, however, the Soviet government supported the development of blood doping, which is banned by the International Olympic Committee. Blood doping was pervasive in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, and was used by many Soviet athletes in the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games.
Sports and physical education held a minor place in Russian society prior to 1917, but with the onset of communism, the fundamental credo became that sports and physical education were for the masses and not solely for the elite. Since 1917, sports and physical education have had a powerful organizational nucleus with the rights and priveleges of a ministry in the Soviet government. Although sports organizations or committees under the control of the Community party have changed names, they have basically remained the same as far as goals, administration, and organization. The functions of these committees are stated as being to (a) perfect the scientific system of bringing sports within the reach of the whole population, (b) build and operate sports facilities, (c) train coaches and instructors, (d) manufacture sports goods and equipment, (e) stage country-wide competitions, and (f) maintain international contacts and cooperate with other state agencies as well as the trade unions and Young Communist League organizations. The promotion and administration of sports is to be carried out by the party, government, trade unions, Young Communist League, and sports organizations.
In 1989 the Soviet Union had thirty-six sports societies, consisting of an urban and rural society for each of the fifteen union republics and six all-union societies. All but two of these organizations were operated by the trade unions, with the most popular being Spartak (Producer's Co-operative), Dynamo (Security Police), Burevestnik (University Students), Locomotiv (Transportation Workers) and Trud (Labor). The State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports served as the umbrella organization for these societies. Each society built its own sports facilities, secured equipment for its members, and hired a permanent staff of coaches and other personnel. Each held local and allunion championships for various sports, and each society's teams played against the teams of other societies. Although in theory the Soviet Union had no professional sports, each society supported athletes who played sports full time. Furthermore, the best, or "master sportsmen," received additional pay from the State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports.
In 1967, there were 201,876 physical culture kollektivs with 50,528,200 members. These kollektivs were formed in factories, offices, collective and state farms, various enterprises and at schools and high education institutions so that people were athletically organized at their place of work, study or residence. A nominal fee of approximately 30 kopecks (about 32 cents) is charged to membership per year, but the instruction provided and the use of the facilities were free. Each of the kollektivs belongs to one of thirty-six voluntary sport societies.
Sport schools were formed by the ministries of education in cooperation with the voluntary sport societies throughout the fifteen republics in order to provide athletic training for the physically gifted athletes. At these schools, two to five days a week, children received excellent instruction, free, from specialized coaches and were able to train on good equipment and in excellent facilities. The children's sport school was for children aged seven to seventeen. Those who ranked in the first three sport categories for the particular age group, and who were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, could be admitted to a youth sport school.
Sport in the USSR was distinct from physical education, but it was seen as playing an important role in the development of the "new Soviet man" who was to he physically and morally trained in Communist ideals. After the 1917 Revolution, the main emphasis in sport was to be on physically preparing the population for defense and laboring for the socialist state. Moreover, it was believed that participation in sport had to he made available for all citizens and was not to be restricted to the elite, as it had been during the Tsarist regimes or was supposedly in the capitalist world.
Tsarist Russia was involved in the Olympic movement from its earliest days: a Russian was one of the 12 founding members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and Tsarist athletes competed in several Olympiads between 1896 and 1912. Revolutionary Russia withdrew from the movement after the Great War and organized its own Spartakiad (USSR Peoples’ Games) and Red Sport International as alternative sport contests. The Soviets rejoined the Olympic movement following World War II when, after competing in several regional European championships, they sent athletes to the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki.
The 1960 Olympics in Rome saw the first doping scandal [the Danish cyclist K. Jensen died due to an abuse of amphetamines], the first commercially televised Summer Games, the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand. In the heat of the Cold War, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections, and every move was judged for propaganda value. While East and West Germans competed as a unified team, less than a year before the Berlin Wall went up, there was a dispute over the two Chinas. There was a deeper meaning to those days at the dawn of the sixties. Change was everywhere. Old-boy notions of Olympic amateurism were crumbling.
Although Khrushchev expressed interest in hosting the Olympic games as early as 1957, the first serious bid came in 1970 when the USSR competed against Los Angeles (which wanted the games as a capstone for the bicentennial celebration) and Montreal, the eventual winner for the 1976 games. Four years later Moscow won the bid for the 1980 Summer Games over Los Angeles because of (a) Soviet guarantees to finance requisite sport and tourist facilities and (b) a general feeling among the IOC membership that the time had come to hold the games in a Communist country.
The Soviet Union worked hard to obtain the right to host the 1980 Summer Olympics and undoubtedly considered it a showcase event of the first order. It is engaged in a massive effort to build and renovate 99 facilities, most of them in the capital area. Moscow probably spent the equivalent of about $3 billion, making the Summer Olympics the costliest to date. Foreign participation was a key element in Olympic preparations in spite of Moscow’s desire to keep the Olympics a Soviet show. In areas such as electronic support equipment and accommodations for tourists, the Soviets simply lacked the expertise to meet Western standards.
In 1980, the United States led a boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the late 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In total, 65 nations refused to participate in the games, whereas 80 countries sent athletes to compete.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, the international community broadly condemned the action. Advisors to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev claimed that the intervention would be quick and uncontested and suggested that U.S. President Jimmy Carter was too engrossed in the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran to respond to the situation in Kabul. In reality, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan led to an extended conflict in Central Asia, and Carter reacted with a series of measures designed to place pressure on the Soviets to withdraw. These measures included the threat of a grain embargo, the withdrawal of the SALT II agreement from Senate consideration, and a possible boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, scheduled to be hosted by Moscow.
In early 1980, the movement toward either boycotting the games altogether or moving them out of the Soviet Union gained momentum. Calls for boycotts of Olympic events were not uncommon; just four years prior, most of the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa boycotted the Summer Games in Montreal to protest the attendance of New Zealand after the latter sent its rugby team to play against the team from apartheid South Africa. In 1956, several Western European governments boycotted the games in Melbourne over the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year. Although the Olympic ideal was to place sport above politics, in reality there were often political goals and messages promoted through the games.
Western governments first considered the idea of boycotting the Moscow Olympics in response to the situation in Afghanistan at the December 20, 1979 meeting of NATO representatives, although at that time, not many of the governments were interested in the proposal. The idea gained popularity, however, when Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov called for a boycott in early January. On January 14, 1980, the Carter Administration joined Sakharov by setting a deadline by which the Soviet Union must pull out of Afghanistan or face consequences including an international boycott of the games. When the deadline passed a month later without any change to the situation in Central Asia, Carter pushed U.S. allies to pull their Olympic teams from the upcoming games.
International support for the boycott varied. Great Britain and Australia were the strongest allies to join the United States in calling for the boycott, although in the end both countries ended up sending athletes to the games. To try to build support for the boycott in Africa, Carter sent American boxer Mohammad Ali on a goodwill tour through the continent to persuade African governments to join. The trip backfired, however, when Ali himself was talked out of his support of the boycott during the course of his meetings. In the end, the closest U.S. allies to join the movement against the Moscow games were Canada, West Germany and Israel. Most of the Islamic nations also joined the boycott, although Afghanistan itself sent eleven athletes to compete. Other nations refusing to send teams to Moscow included Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, South Korea, and the People's Republic of China. Some nations that did not attend the games in Moscow did so for reasons other than the boycott, such as financial constraints.
Within the United States, there was public support for the boycott. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution approving the decision to stay away from Moscow with a vote of 386 in favor and 12 opposed; the U.S. Senate passed a similar measure with a vote of 88 to 4. Technically, the decision of whether or not to send athletes to the Olympic Games does not actually rest with either the President or the Congress, however; it is the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) that makes the final determination in such a situation. In the face of such broad support, however, the USOC expressed its willingness to respect the decision of the U.S. Government with regard to the games. While some nations chose to express their displeasure with Soviet military actions by not sending formal teams to compete, but also not preventing individual athletes from attending and competing under the Olympic flag, athletes in the United States were warned that travel to Moscow for the games would result in them being stripped of their passports. In protest, a group of 25 American athletes sued the U.S. Government over the boycott seeking permission to compete, but they lost their case.
In organizing the boycott and rallying support behind it, the Carter Administration had wanted to express the extent of international displeasure with the invasion of Afghanistan, and to pressure the Soviets to pull their armies out of the conflict. In actuality, the Soviet-Afghan War continued and did not end until 1989, and the Soviets reacted to the boycott by retaliating and leading a communist-bloc boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. These Olympic boycotts were just one manifestation of the cooling relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s.
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