Rewarding the Maverick: Cold War Logics and Romania’s Special Treatment at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics

• In Event: Sporting Histories of East Central Europe II: Re-Assessing Eastern European Narratives of Sport Under State Socialism

Abstract

For their refusal to follow Moscow’s lead in boycotting the XXIII Olympiad, the US lavishly rewarded the Romanian Olympic team and the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Following Chomsky’s and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, this paper analyzes the US media’s narratives about Romania’s defiance and their heroization of Romanian athletes, a newly retired Nadia Comăneci as well as Nadia’s former coach, the recently defected Béla Károlyi. His new protégé, Mary Lou Retton, won individual gold, a first for the US, and initiated a gymnastic frenzy that soon emulated structures once demonized as Communist and un-American. Archival documents, TV reports, magazine and newspaper articles reveal how the LA Olympic Organizing Committee’s single-minded focus on delivering a perfect spectacle and the media’s glorification of the LA Olympics took previous US policies rewarding Bucharest for its maverick role in the Eastern bloc to the extreme and uniquely overshadowed the dire realities of Ceaușescu’s Romania.

Author

• Victoria Elisabeth Harms, Johns Hopkins U