East Plays West Sport and the Cold War [Paperback]

The Cold War spanned some five decades from the devastation that remained after World War Two until the fall of the Berlin wall, and for much of that time the perception was that only on the Eastern side were politics and sport inextricably linked. However, this assumption underestimates the extent to which sport was an important symbol for both power blocs in their ongoing ideological struggle.

This collection of essays from leading international authorities on sport, culture and ideology brings together an impressive body of work organized around key political themes and outstanding moments in sport, and is at once a political history of sport and an illuminating new perspective on the forces that shaped this unsettled time.

Introduction  1. Totalitarian Regimes and Cold War Sport: Steroid ?bermenschen and Ball Bearing Females  2. Verbal Gymnastics: The Soviet Sports Administration and the Decision to Enter the Olympic Games, 1947-1952  3. Cold War Expatriot Sport: Symbolic Resistance - and International Response - in Hungarian Water Polo at the Melbourne Olympics, 1956  4. Cold War Football: British-European Encounters in the 1940s and 50s  5. Oscillating Antagonism: Soviet-British Athletics Relations, 1945-1960  6. If You Want the Girl Next Door&. Olympic Sport and the Popular Press in Early Cold War Britain  7. The Muscle Gap: Physical Education and U.S. Fears of a Depleted Masculinity 1954-63  8. Good Versus Evil? Drugs, Sport and the Cold War  9. The Cold War and the (Re) Articulation of Canadian National Identity: The 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series  10. One Day When the Yankees&. Cuban Baseball, the United States and the Cold War  11. Playing the Race Card: US Foreign Policy and the Integration of Sports  12. Miraculous Masculinity Meets Militarization: Narrating the 1980 USSR-US Menl3: