Olympics Dbq

The Olympics were revived in 1896 thanks to Pierre de Coubertin. Since its reemergence in 1896, the modern Olympic movement has been shaped and influenced politically through the tensions between countries, economically through financial gain opportunity, and socially by promoting women’s rights. Another document I would like to have seen would be one containing a record of third world countries that have attended the Olympics. This document would have shown how wealth effects and shapes the modern Olympics. After reading all of the documents thoroughly, I noticed that most of them had a political significance behind them. Bob Matthias, a United States competitor in the 1952 games spoke about how enjoyable it was to bead the Soviet Team (Document 4). The reasoning for such a strong opinion against one’s competitors was not merely just a competitive nature, it was more. The cold war had been going on, and Soviets were back in the games for the first time since 1912. In contrast, the information guide that was provided to the members of the press in 1980 (Document 6) talked highly of the Soviet Union; this is no surprise considering in how it was published by the Soviet Union’s Olympic Committee. The Olympics were boycotted in 1980 as a result of the Soviet’s invasion of Afghanistan. It’s interesting to see how after twenty eight years, tension between two countries can still be just as intense. Arnold Lunn, a British Olympic team official at the 1936 games held in Germany said “Germans sought to prove not that they were better skiers than other people but more importantly, that Nazism was better than democracy.” If that’s not a profound statement, then I don’t know what is. When it comes to winning the games, all in all, it was Adolf Hitler who gained the most. Except his rewards were different, instead of winning the gold, he scored propaganda success. The “Nazi Olympics” seemed to have quite a different meaning behind them than what Pierre de