TY - BOOK AU - Sarantakes,Nicholas Evan TI - Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War SN - 9780511761805 (ebook) AV - GV722 1980 .S27 2011 U1 - 796.48 22 PY - 2010/// CY - Cambridge PB - Cambridge University Press KW - Cold War N1 - Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 04 Apr 2016) N2 - Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War offers a diplomatic history of the 1980 Olympic boycott. Broad in its focus, it looks at events in Washington, D.C., as well as the opposition to the boycott and how this attempted embargo affected the athletic contests in Moscow. Jimmy Carter based his foreign policy on assumptions that had fundamental flaws and reflected a superficial familiarity with the Olympic movement. These basic mistakes led to a campaign that failed to meet its basic mission objectives but did manage to insult the Soviets just enough to destroy détente and restart the Cold War. The book also includes a military history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which provoked the boycott, and an examination of the boycott's impact four years later at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761805 ER -