The USA boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although the US government tried to get our allies on board with the boycott, none of them went along.
In 1984, the USSR. along with their Eastern European allies (except Romania) boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
Russian athletes were banned from all sports after Putin invaded Ukraine. They should have been banned for the state sponsored doping they were found to be engaging in during the 2014 Soci Olympics, but they were only given a slap on the wrist.
Russian athletes who have been "neutral", that is to say haven't openly supported Putin's war, will be allowed to compete at the Torino Olympics in 2026.
West Germany went along with it, denying Wessinghage a shot at a medal?
this was the first large boycott so it was like breaking spades, and some resisted on that basis alone. not everyone who skipped did so for afghan invasion reasons. and it was piecemeal because some countries thought it was unfair to deny the athletes, some felt like the US was ordering them around, and some wanted to work on softer relations with the commies.
eastern bloc boycott 1984
north korea and friends boycott 1988
russia is literally banned and it was primarily for the doping. that ban is then transitioning into a ukraine based ban.
it's worth noting that at least from a world sports perspective, the political leader saying don't go, could be understood as improper political interference. in FIFA if the government starts ordering the soccer federation around, your national team can get banned.
in other words, in response to your british athletes competing despite thatcher, it could have been seen as interference if thatcher tried to override the UK OC's decision.
i mean, wasn't it the US were ordered not to go by carter? but we get away with stuff.
to give a more current example that may not get any punishment, trump apparently wants USSF to consider changing the upcoming world cup venues from cities he doesn't like that he would posture are too violent, and hand them to more red and rural venues.
i also think there is an ongoing debate, jesse owens or not, about whether 1936 was a good thing.
1980 was a voluntary version of answering no.
i personally skipped watching beijing and sochi.
russia started as a doping travesty ban -- a country deliberately undermining drug tests -- and is morphing into an afghan war style ban. i am fine with that. if we can't have honest drug tests the system breaks down. it was systematic and not just an athlete bribing an official.
and there is no legal reason to invade ukraine.
it is chuckle inducing when people try to depict godless soviets as somehow christian paragons. american church attendance is like 10x higher than russian. they just have figured out how to play the american right like a fiddle.
history kind of needs some revision at the moment. nixon's opening to china, touted in textbooks, arguably lines up with clinton letting china in the WTO, to the shenanigans of the present day. it helped get the job done to topple the USSR but now 50 years on we've loosed china on the world. you can tell history hasn't updated fully because clinton gets grief but not nixon.
it's a similar mess on the american right and the russians. the folks who gave you mccarthy and reagan now quietly like putin, who is basically a rebranded commie. the big picture on putin invading georgia and ukraine is he wants the USSR back. and again, the american right wants him out of his cage, too. but then the adept putin has rebranded his 3% church attendance country (remember, church was banned for decades) as some white christian paragon, and the american right seems to like how the dictator destroys the free press and oppresses political opponents and gays. oh, and invades neighbors. which the right never seems to correlate to all the other parts of russian existence he invades on behalf of the state and the mafia.
but anyhow, i was saying the history books are all stuck at the end of the cold war, or 9/11, or a 2008-ish response to economic crash.
I think there is some revisionist history at play here. Coe and Ovett had been dodging each other while trading world records and the 1980 Olympics offered everyone—especially Brits—a chance to see them finally race against each other. And for Britain the expectation was it would be a win-win situation. Even if your favourite lost, it would almost certainly be to a fellow Brit
There may have been political pressure on Thatcher to boycott but there was enormous popular pressure on her to let the athletes go—in no small part because of Coe and Ovett. She couldn’t bring herself to impose a boycott largely because the country wanted to see Coe and Ovett race and bring home a potential two gold and two silver. (Although no one expected Ovett to win the 800m and he wasn’t even a lock for a medal.) So she tried to be Solomon-esque by saying she wanted the athletes to stay home but she was leaving the choice up to them, knowing full well they would go and her decision might somehow score her some points for allowing the showdowns to take place.
P.S. I’m a Jimmy Carter fan but the boycott was an atrociously bad decision.
Thatcher won the effort to stay in office for a 11 years. It was not a win for the citizens of the United Kingdom. Her monetarist policies triggered high unemployment, a deep recession, and the end of the UK's manufacturing sector. She also sold off public sector services to the private sector at appallingly low cost, which wrecked important parts of the civil service that were relied upon by millions of citizens. A small portion of the upper middle class did better, but the income gap between rich and poor widened and deepened. Her legacy is a tragic list of calumnies against working people.
This sounds familiar "The Donald" is in the process of doing this and more...