Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!
By Tim Harte (2020)
1. In 2022, the 15-year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva led the Russian team to Olympic gold, only to test positive for a banned substance. After her mistake-riddled solo program her coach demanded, “Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why?” Tim Harte’s comprehensive history of Russia’s relationship to sports places the skating coach’s admonition into cultural context. In the late 19th century, Russia celebrated the strength, speed, health and discipline implicit in sports. Leading up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, athletics were perceived as an important extension of art and culture. A physically vigorous approach to life seemed valuable for the social transformation that many saw looming. Although the revolution wiped out much of Imperial Russia’s culture, modern sports provided an important bridge for both art and life. “Russia and early Soviet art fused modern sports with innovation, revolution, and the widespread belief that such creativity could help bring about not only a better human physique, but also a better society,” Mr. Harte writes. But with Stalin, sports became a vehicle to advance the regime’s heroic ethos and ideology, a change that would endure.
My Story
By Olga Korbut with Ellen Emerson-White (1992)
2. Forty-five years after dazzling the world at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the gymnast Olga Korbut sold her medals at auction with an unapologetic shrug. It’s not surprising given her memoir, where she comes across as quirky, brash and gutsy. She recounts a childhood spent in poverty in Grodno, Belarus, her tormented relationship with her mercurial and abusive coach Renald Knysh—“both a father and demon”—and the aftermath of her storied gymnastics career. Ms. Korbut bristled under the heavy Soviet hand: “Everyone is supposed to be like everyone else, like a country full of little broiler chickens.” She came of age when Soviet gymnastics leadership favored taller, older gymnasts, and femininity and expressiveness were more important than skills. “My style, too, was deliberately defiant,” she writes. “It was fast, sharp and brisk.” Despite being snubbed by the U.S.S.R. Sports Committee, Ms. Korbut’s talent was hard to ignore. Perhaps more memorable than her medals—three golds and a silver in Munich, and another gold and silver in Montreal in 1976—was that the pig-tailed sprite broke the mold of stone-faced Soviet stoicism while heralding the beginning of much-heightened difficulty in women’s gymnastics.
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The Whole World Was Watching
Edited by Robert Edelman and Christopher Young (2020)
3. This collection of essays examines how Cold War culture can’t be fully understood without looking at sports. Toby C. Rider’s “In the ‘Twilight Warzone,’ ” argues that while the Soviets turned sports into a tool of state politics and propaganda, they were not alone. “Even if the U.S. public collectively disapproved of Communist states mixing politics with sports, their own government was engaging in much the same thing.” The U.S. sought to present America as a land of sports far more vibrant, diverse and free than that under communism. In “Action in the Era of Stagnation,” Mikhail Prozumenshikov examines how, unlike Nikita Khrushchev, who considered sports frivolous, Leonid Brezhnev ushered in a new era of sports as political tool. Mr. Prozumenshikov writes: “The main task of elite Soviet sport, to advertise the Soviet way of life with the help of victories and medals, continued.” By 1972, the U.S.S.R. was the top-ranked nation at both the Winter
Letter to young gymnast By Nadia Comaneci (2004)
4. Nadia Comaneci was the first woman to earn a perfect score in Olympic gymnastics. Her memoir begins with her childhood as a “wild, strange scrap of a girl” in the Romanian village of Onești. She recounts training with Béla and Márta Károlyi, her glory at the 1976 and 1980 Olympics, and her defection to the United States. Romania, then a satellite Soviet country under Communist rule, poured money into its Olympic programs because officials believed that athletes represented the government and validated a way of life. While admitting that everything she knew came from what she was told by her coach and government, Ms. Comaneci is set on portraying a self-determined life. “Don’t be fooled,” she writes. “I have always looked after myself.” Like many great athletes, humble Ms. Comaneci is not, observing, “Not every child is meant to be a Nadia.” She is clear about not wanting to be like everyone else: “Today, I’d be a forty-something nobody if I hadn’t been a gymnast.” She seems intent on etching her myth as a heroic narrative, which may reveal more Soviet influence than she’d like to admit.
Dropping the Torch
By Nicholas Evan Sarantakes (2011)
5. After years of détente, by 1979 relations between the Soviet Union and United States were already in decline when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. President Carter believed that a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow would make him look strong on foreign policy. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes argues that it was the political theater of the Olympic boycott, rather than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that reinvigorated the Cold War. With Americans-are-good-Soviets-are-bad rhetoric, there was soon broad public support for a boycott. The sportswriter Red Smith wrote: “It is unthinkable that in existing circumstances we could go play games with Ivan in Ivan’s yard and participate in a great lawn party showing off Russian splendors to the world.” Other allies felt compelled to join the U.S., but the boycott was hardly a smashing success. In the end, “No one in Moscow . . . really missed the boycotters.” It may have been humiliating for the Soviet leaders, but a boycott didn’t damage the Communist Party within the Soviet Union, nor did it have the power to end the Soviet-Afghan War, which dragged on into 1989.
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