Hamburg - Olympic boycotts were a major instrument of power as the playing fields of sports were not spared in the Cold War between the superpowers United States and Soviet Union and their allies. Confrontations like the chess world championship between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in 1972 or the 1980 Olympic ice hockey match between the US and Soviets were also clashes of ideologies.
Those who broke ranks were widely celebrated by the opposition, such as Britain and France at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow which a US-led coalition boycotted.
Four years later Romania and China received rousing welcomes in Los Angeles while the Soviet Union and most of its allies stayed away.
The Olympic Movement has always been affected by geopolitics but IOC boss Sigfrid Edstrom spoke of a new dimension when "the inclusion of the Soviet Union politicised the Olympic Movement" at the 1952 Games, 35 years after the Soviet revolution.
The Soviets garnered 22 gold medals at their Olympic debut in Helsinki to rank behind the US (40 golds). But they reversed matters four years later in Melbourne and never looked back.
According to an East German party order, its athletes were "a diplomat in a track suit" and victories highly desirable. Ideology played a lesser role in the west, but beating Eastern Bloc athletes was still a matter of national pride.
"Freedom and democracy is not only better, more human and just, but in the long run also a more successful and effctive ideology by comparison with totalitarian systems - including the area of sport," said West German politician Konrad Krake in 1970.
East Germany famously beat West Germany 1-0 at the 1974 World Cup even though Franz Beckenbauer's west team went on to win the World Cup.
Also in football, the East German secret service Stasi has been linked with the death of Lutz Eigendorf who had defected to the west to play there. Eigendorf died in a car crash in 1983.
A state-organized doping programme revealed after reunification further disgraced the East Germans.
The biggest individual confrontation was arguably the chess match between Spassky and Fischer in Reykjavic. Russian/Soviet players had completely dominated the game for decades and Spassky was to follow that tradition for himself and the fatherland.
"Spassky was carrying a burden that Fischer was not laden with: he was playing not only for himself, but also for ... the Soviet system. He represented an ideology. Soviet chess players were supreme, so the theory went, because the Soviet social, political and governmental system was so much better," said the New York Times review by Richard Roberts, Harold Schonberg, Al Horowitz and Samuel Reshevsky.
Fischer may not have been a popular figure in his home country, but that didn't stop State Secretary Henry Kissinger from phoning him up and telling him to do the best for his country. Fischer duly obliged as he won the title.
Seven years later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and US president Jimmy Carter was already considering the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in August 1980 when the US and Soviet ice hockey teams met at the Lake Placid Winter Games.
A squad of US amateurs beat Victor Tikhonov's seemingly invincible team around goalkeeper Vladislav Trekyak and attacker Sergei Makarov 4-3 en route to the gold in what was dubbed the "Miracle on Ice."
In the 1972 Olympic basketball final, a jury dismissed a US appeal over the final seconds of the Munich Games in which the US suffered its first defeat ever at the Games, 51-50 against the Soviets after a controvesial clock ruling.
The jury members from communist Poland, Hungary and Cuba said the final play will stand while those from Italy and Puerto Rico wanted the final Russian basket disallowed.
However, there were also notable exceptions as some Communist athletes were celebrated across all ideological frontiers.
Tretyak and Soviet football goalkeeper Lev Yashin were held in high esteem, while looks, charm and skill did the trick for East German figureskater Katarina Witt, compatriot sprinter/jumper Heike Drechsler or gymnasts such as Vera Caslavska (Czechoslovakia) and Nadia Comanechi (Romania).
