Introduction

Modern sports developed in the mid-1800s, with organizations to establish rules and maintain order following shortly thereafter. As athletes in different countries sought to test their skills against each other, the need for international bodies to oversee sport arose, leading to the creation of international federations for individual sports. Coinciding with the sense of internationalism that pervaded the late 19th century, Baron Pierre de Coubertin sought to revive the ancient Olympic Games with modern sports, calling a meeting of like-minded men at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1894. They established the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and agreed to hold the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, Greece. Coubertin believed that sport and politics should be separate, an idea that persists to the present. This sentiment shaped how the US government viewed sport through the first half of the 20th century, with efforts remaining outside official policy. With the onset of the Cold War, however, the government began to incorporate sport into its formal programs to promote the United States overseas as well as improve American health in the interests of fighting the Soviet Union. In the 21st century, the government formalized the use of sport within public diplomacy efforts with the establishment of a bureaucracy focused solely on sport. Sport also provided an avenue to spread American culture overseas as a model for organizing events and the approach to marketing and sponsorship.

Promoting American Ideas Abroad

Sport became an important part of the education system in the United States (as well as Great Britain), viewed as a way to help boys develop into the men who would contribute to leading the country and its businesses. As these men went abroad in efforts to promote the United States and American ideals—as businessmen, members of the military, or missionaries—they took their sports with them. Teaching local populations how to play sports like baseball and basketball was part of the “civilizing mission” of Americans abroad. During the Meiji period (1868–1912) in Japan, when the government invited Western experts to help the country modernize, Americans brought not only their education expertise but also baseball. By the 1880s, the sport was widely popular across the country.¹ When the United States acquired the Philippines after the Spanish–American War, the colonial government established a public education system. This curriculum included physical education, which became a requirement for boys and girls by 1905 with sports such as baseball, volleyball, and basketball.² The US Navy, when in Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific locations, played baseball games first among themselves and then against local teams after having encouraged the local populations to learn the game. The general who oversaw the US military in Manila, Philippines, commented that “baseball had done more to ‘civilize’ Filipinos than anything else.”³

Missionaries also used sport within their proselytizing efforts overseas. Originally begun to provide an alternative to vice and sin in cities for young men, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) quickly adopted sport and was one of the primary organizations in support of the idea of Muscular Christianity. Leaders in the YMCA in Massachusetts created two new sports in the 1890s: basketball and volleyball. Because the YMCA’s teacher training school (which became Springfield College in 1954) taught these two sports to its students, they rapidly spread across the United States and then the world. YMCA missionaries abroad often worked closely with the military and colonial governments, who welcomed the use of sport to contribute to health and education efforts in places such as the Philippines, Cuba, and Hawai‘i.

For individuals, playing American sports also served to demonstrate one’s political support for the United States over other foreign powers. Many Latin Americans embraced baseball as early as the 1870s in the cultural and political battle against Spain. As more Cubans looked to the United States instead of Spain for their economic relationships, they went north for education, where they also played baseball. When they returned to Cuba, they expanded the sport on the island. Baseball thus symbolized progress, modernity, and associations with the United States, in contrast to bullfighting, the sport associated with inhumanity, backwardness, and Spain.⁴

American entrepreneurs also sought to use sport in their efforts to make money overseas, which simultaneously supported the efforts of American cultural imperialism. Albert G. Spalding expanded his sporting goods business beyond the United States. To help stimulate sales of American sports equipment, he sponsored foreign tours of baseball teams. Spalding viewed these tours as marketing both his company and American values. Even though these tours lost money and, in some cases, did not lead to the local populations taking up baseball, they created a market for the sporting goods his company sold.⁵

In addition to using sport to promote American ideals overseas, the country engaged in early public diplomacy during the first two times the Olympic Games took place outside Europe. The 1904 Olympics took place in St. Louis to coincide with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the World’s Fair that celebrated the centennial (albeit one year late) of the US acquisition of a large tract of land from France. The 1900 Olympics in Paris had also coincided with the World’s Fair, but the 1904 Olympics adopted the scientific emphasis on race, which was one of the major themes of the World’s Fair. Fewer international athletes competed in the 1904 Olympics, leaving 85 percent of the medals won by US competitors. However, these Games are primarily remembered for the Anthropology Days, two days of sport contests from indigenous peoples from around the world. The Anthropology Days were an attempt to prove the superiority of white people through supposed scientific research by the juxtaposition of modern technology and indigenous peoples. The Anthropology Days were a farce, both in terms of a sport competition with few spectators and poor performances by individuals who had never previously participated in these sports and as scientific research.⁶

The 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles offered a stronger opportunity to promote the United States to a foreign audience, particularly as a result of mass media advances. The city’s politicians and business leaders wanted rapidly growing Los Angeles to be a global city. To promote Los Angeles to the IOC, the city’s bid committee “packaged the allure of Hollywood, the promise that Los Angeles was a dazzling modern metropolis, and the image of California as the leader in American lifestyle trends.”⁷ With Hollywood executives and the owner of the Los Angeles Times part of the organizing committee, the 1932 Olympic Games utilized a large-scale public relations campaign to broadcast images of Los Angeles across the globe prior to the Games. During the Olympics themselves, more than nine hundred journalists covered the event, sending news stories, images, and radio coverage around the world.⁸

Four years later, Nazi Germany organized the 1936 Olympic Games, hoping to replicate the benefits Los Angeles had gained. The US team participated in both Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin for the Winter and Summer Olympics, overcoming domestic calls to boycott Nazi Germany over its racist policies.⁹ The inclusion of Jewish and Black athletes on the US team was not a concerted effort to promote American ideals abroad in an affront to the Nazis but, rather, the basic mentality of sending the best possible team to win as many medals as possible.

After the Second World War, the United States, along with Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, occupied Germany, and sport was one of the areas of life where the quadripartite powers believed Germans could develop democratic practices because of its broad appeal to boys and girls and adult men and women. As Nazism had been so thoroughly implemented across German society, the Allies established policies not only to denazify and demilitarize the country but also to foster democracy. After passing Allied Control Directive 23 on the Limitation and Demilitarization of Sport in Germany in December 1945, the Americans promoted efforts to foster democracy through sport club structures with elected officers and foreign exchanges of coaches, athletes, and physical education teachers.¹⁰ The State Department, in consultation with the country’s IOC members, also helped Germany return to the international community after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 as these efforts within international sport aligned with the American position regarding the formerly defeated state.¹¹

These various efforts of promoting American ideals overseas, in many cases taken by nongovernment entities, accumulated by the middle of the 20th century. The men of the US Navy contributed to this process in many places but only in an unofficial capacity and not under government instructions. The active role taken by the military government and later diplomats in occupied Germany, one of the first direct and formal actions by the US government, demonstrated to officials in Washington the value of incorporating sport more formally within foreign relations.

The Cold War

The Cold War prompted the US government to take a greater interest in sport. The rivalry with the Soviet Union led to the introduction of domestic programs in an effort to bolster the general fitness of the population with the hope that it would also lead to greater success at the international level—and primarily the Olympic Games. International tensions and crises also impacted sporting events, often in the form of which states could or did participate. Although the Soviet Union worked with its wartime allies to defeat Nazi Germany and plan for the postwar occupation, within a few years, the division of Europe between the communist East, under Soviet guidance, and the democratic West, was firmly entrenched. The threat of nuclear war prevented any actual wars directly between the world’s two postwar superpowers, but sport provided the opportunity for the two states to battle head-to-head without the fear of nuclear destruction. Imperial Russia had competed in the early Olympic Games, but once the communists established the Soviet Union, the country withdrew from international sport, considering it bourgeois. The onset of the Cold War, however, prompted the Soviet Union to join the IOC and international sport federations. The country’s bold return at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, coming second in the medal table in terms of total medals and gold medals (both behind the United States), led to the start of the Cold War in sport.

Olympic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the Soviet Union surpassed the United States as the top medal winner at both the Summer and Winter Olympics in 1956, 1960, 1972, and 1976, as well as the 1964 Winter Games. The expansion of television broadcasts of sport in the 1950s and then live satellite television in the 1960s further emphasized the importance of the Olympic Games to the Cold War, as US television networks drastically increased the money they paid for the right to air these US–Soviet contests. The unscripted nature of sport, elevated by the Cold War tensions, made Olympic viewership a prize for the networks, whose profiles of American athletes contributed to the importance of the Olympic Games within the Cold War.¹² Each side claimed that sporting victories demonstrated the superiority of their political and economic system. American television framed these competitions as good versus evil.¹³

Spurred by the excitement of the US–Soviet Olympic contests, the Amateur Athletic Union, one of the leading sport organizations in the United States, wanted to organize bilateral track and field competitions. World championships did not yet exist for track and field, so the creation of a US–Soviet competition outside of the Olympic Games would promote the sport, generating revenue through ticket sales and television broadcasts. However, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran Act) required fingerprinting for all Soviet citizens entering the United States. The Soviet Union refused to subject its citizens—and especially its athletes and other cultural representatives—to this process, hindering any direct exchanges until after changes to this law in 1957. Once athletes no longer had to be fingerprinted to enter the United States, the two countries negotiated exchanges in a variety of sports: track and field, basketball, weightlifting, and wrestling. The track-and-field dual meets garnered the most global interest in amateur sport outside of the Olympic Games. American decathlete Rafer Johnson said these contests were “not just man-on-man for the unofficial title of World’s Greatest Athlete, it was Communism vs. the Free World.”¹⁴

Losing on the Olympic stage to the Soviet Union prompted a crisis inside the United States and changes to national sport policies during the Cold War. Following the publication of a 1955 Sports Illustrated article about the poor physical fitness of American youth, President Dwight Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. The goal was to combat poor physical fitness not just among American youth but also for the military, as many draftees during the Korean War had also not been fit enough to serve. The goal of the President’s Council on Youth Fitness was to “Win at home” not “Win in Rome”—alluding to the upcoming 1960 Olympic Games—but, as the council’s executive director commented, “If we succeed in getting our country off its seat and on its feet, the victories in the field of international competition will inevitably follow.”¹⁵ President-elect John F. Kennedy also expressed concerns over the decline of American fitness, writing a Sports Illustrated article himself in December 1960. He claimed that the “increasing lack of physical fitness is a menace to our security” and that only with a physically fit population could the country rise to the challenges presented by the Soviet Union.¹⁶ Even with these efforts the Soviet Union continued its dominant position at the Olympic Games, including winning more gold medals (but not total medals) at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. In December 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson therefore established the Presidential Physical Fitness Award Program. He stated that “[s]ports and other forms of active play promote good health and help provide our country with sturdy young citizens equal to the challenges of the future.”¹⁷ The implementation of these fitness programs within physical education classes from elementary school through high school was, for decades, just a series of activities forced on American youth without teachers ever expressing any connection to the Cold War to students.

Simultaneous to the efforts to change domestic sport policies in an effort to improve its performance at the Olympic Games, the government consciously sought to use those athletes who were successful at their sports as a form of soft power to promote the United States overseas, especially to the Third World. The State Department viewed sport’s broad appeal, especially to youth, as valuable for shaping foreign populations’ views before they had a chance to become hostile and anti-American.¹⁸ Sport thus became an important tool for the US government’s fight to win allegiance from newly emergent and independent states over the Soviet Union. For example, they sent a series of athletes and coaches to Iran in the late 1950s, such as Olympic medalist and Tuskegee Airman Mal Whitfield, double-gold-medalist decathlete Bob Mathias, numerous Olympic and world champion weightlifters, and track-and-field coach and Olympic medalist David Albritton.¹⁹ The inclusion of Black athletes, such as tennis star Althea Gibson and basketball star Bill Russell, on State Department–sponsored foreign tours helped refute the Soviet claims about racism and inequality in the segregated United States. The State Department specifically sent Gibson abroad after Emmett Till’s murder to demonstrate the opportunities available to African Americans. The US Information Agency (USIA) also made a ten-minute biographical film about Gibson, which they showed around the world and created other materials about Black athletes.²⁰

The US government also attempted to counter the “Soviet sports offensive” in the 1950s and 1960s through a series of state-private actions, primarily funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). With that money these private organizations set up venues in Olympic host cities “to distribute propaganda materials, to show pro-U.S. movies, to organize exhibitions, to make contact with Soviet bloc tourists, and to help Eastern European athletes defect.”²¹ Following the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which happened while the Hungarian and Soviet teams sailed to the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, the CIA covertly supported the efforts by Sports Illustrated, a magazine under anti-communist Henry Luce’s Time, Inc., media empire, to assist dozens of Hungarian athletes to defect.²²

Not all of the sporting events held in the United States bolstered diplomatic relations, in part because local civic and sport leaders and not the federal government organized these events. Chicago hosted the third Pan-American Games in 1959. Instead of strengthening relations between Latin America and the United States during a period of increased Cold War tensions and a growing movement within Latin America to find a third way between the United States and the Soviet Union, poor attendance and media coverage demonstrated public disinterest in the event. The organizers did not plan an athletes’ village, leaving teams spread out across the city and losing the opportunity for grassroots diplomacy that results from teams socializing in the village when not competing. Instead, many foreign teams received rude service from hotel staff alongside poor accommodations.²³

Meanwhile, other international events affected the country’s position with respect to sport. The McCarran Act threatened to disrupt the 1959 Modern Pentathlon World Championships, held in Hershey, Pennsylvania. As US modern pentathlon officials prepared a bid for the event in July 1957, retired Major General William C. Rose, a longtime Olympic and modern pentathlon official in the United States, had a series of conversations with State Department officials to discuss any problems that might arise with the event, particularly as active military members from around the world comprised almost all the competitors. The State Department explained the fingerprint requirement, still in place when Hershey sought the event, but expressed a hope that this policy would be lifted soon. Its rescinding in October 1957 paved the way for the Soviet bloc athletes to participate in the World Championships. However, Hershey fell within the restricted zone surrounding the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, so Soviet nationals could not obtain visas to go to Hershey, adding an additional complication for organizers of the event.²⁴

The State Department eventually granted visas for the 1959 Modern Pentathlon World Championships in Hershey for the Soviet team, who won both individual and team gold, but the East German team could not travel to the United States to participate. When the Federal Republic of Germany joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955, the alliance agreed to uphold Germany’s non-recognition of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). This non-recognition included symbols of state, including passports, the flag, and the national anthem—all important parts of international sport. The 1959 Modern Pentathlon World Championships marked the first major international sporting event in the United States to which East German athletes, as representatives of the state, could not attend.²⁵

These broader policies regarding other states increasingly involved the government and, especially, the State Department as American sport leaders wanted to bring international competitions to US cities. When East Germany erected the Berlin Wall the night of August 12–13, 1961, NATO reimposed a stricter travel ban on East German athletes representing the state, which disrupted the 1962 world championships in Alpine skiing in Chamonix, France, in February and in ice hockey in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in March. In response the other communist bloc states withdrew their teams shortly before the events began, disrupting these two world championships in NATO member states. East German athletes also could not receive visas for the wrestling world championships in Toledo, Ohio, in July 1962. Although the State Department tried to shift the blame for this policy onto NATO, the disrupted events led international sport federations to relocate future events from US cities to neutral or Soviet bloc states as well as selecting non-NATO states from hosting events. Hershey lost the chance to host another world championship when the International Weightlifting Federation moved its 1962 world championships, scheduled for September, to Budapest, Hungary, once its president realized that East German athletes would not be able to participate. After NATO removed this policy and détente between East and West Germany became the policy later in the 1960s could US cities resume the ability to promote themselves to a global audience through hosting world championships.²⁶

As the Cold War spread beyond the two superpowers, the global tensions spilled over to the US sporting relations with those other countries as well. The Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s rise to power led to a break in relations between the United States and Cuba, including in sport. Baseball’s popularity in Cuba since the late 19th century had made the island a frequent place for American teams, including for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ spring training in 1947 so that the team could avoid Florida’s segregation with Jackie Robinson on the team. The Havana Sugar Kings even played in US-based minor league baseball from 1946 until 1959.²⁷ After the revolution, Cuba adopted the same Cold War mentality as the Soviet Union with respect to the United States in sport, primarily within hemispheric sport competitions. The country’s athletes frequently had their visas denied for international competitions held in Guatemala, Colombia, and Curaçao, but the 1966 Central American and Caribbean Games, held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, presented the biggest challenge because of Puerto Rico’s position as US territory with separate national recognition within international sport. Following the previous experiences with the exclusion of East German athletes, sporting events had been moved out of the United States or not allocated to the country. The possibility of a Cuban ship entering US waters around Puerto Rico raised diplomatic concerns, but Secretary of State Dean Rusk ensured that the Cuban team received visas to attend the event.²⁸ The economic impact of the decades-long embargo with Cuba has led to numerous athletes defecting during international competitions. Cuba, on the other hand, celebrated it victories over US athletes with headlines such as “Cuba: 7.5 medals per million inhabitants, USA 0.70” after the 1987 Pan-American Games.²⁹

Events in 1971 demonstrated the potential of sports to be not just a source of rivalry but also bridge-building. The accidental presence of a US table tennis player on a bus with the Chinese team at the 1971 Table Tennis World Championships in Japan provided the opening for the United States to re-establish diplomatic relations with China, which had ended with the communist takeover in 1949. The US team, knowing other Western teams had been invited to China following the championships, inquired whether they, too, could visit. Receiving a positive response from the Chinese government, the team then traveled to China. When they met Chinese premier Zhau Enlai, he said: “You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people. I am confident that this new beginning of our friendship will certainly meet with majority support of our two peoples. We welcome you.”³⁰ Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, used these actions to visit the People’s Republic of China secretly in July 1971. Kissinger and Zhou discussed a formal summit between Nixon and Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, which took place the following year, as well as cultural and sport exchanges between China and the United States. These events became known as “ping-pong” diplomacy and marked a new era of Sino-American relations.³¹

Just as the United States had used hosting the Olympic Games to promote a vision of itself to the world, the Soviet Union hoped to do the same when Moscow became the first city in a communist state to host the Olympic Games in 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, however, derailed those plans when President Jimmy Carter threatened an American boycott of the Moscow Olympics if the Soviet Union did not leave Afghanistan. The deadline for withdrawing fell during the 1980 Winter Olympics, taking place in Lake Placid, New York. The victory by the US ice hockey team, composed of college athletes, over the “shamateur” Soviet team whose athletes were, in essence, professional players, thus became even more important. Carter’s government sought a global boycott of the Moscow Games and even considered offering an alternative sporting event for athletes. Approximately sixty countries ultimately chose not to send teams to Moscow, although another sixteen participated under the flags of the IOC or their national Olympic committee. The Carter administration’s plans to organize a counter-Olympics failed, in part from a lack of international support but also because of a lack of understanding about the years-long preparation needed to organize such an event.³²

In retaliation for the US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the Soviet Union led a reciprocal boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Political and security problems from the three previous Summer Olympics left Los Angeles as the lone bidder for the 1984 Games. As such, the city was able to propose organizing the Games entirely with private funding (although security aspects still received tax funding). The 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles created a new model of sponsorship for the Olympics, one which emphasized neoliberal practices and promotion of the Games on a global scale.³³ The State Department worked closely with the organizing committee to address all of the concerns raised by the Soviet Union to ensure its participation in Los Angeles, but the Soviet bloc (except for Romania) ultimately boycotted the 1984 Games, blaming the decision on security even though it was really retaliation for the US boycotting Moscow four years earlier.³⁴ Even without the Eastern bloc athletes, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games showcased the United States and its commercialized sports economy to a global audience.

The Post–Cold War World and American Sports Culture

The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not end the sport rivalry with the United States, with Russia maintaining its position as a global sporting power. China’s ascendency to the international stage, both politically and within sport, has kept the Olympic Games and other international sporting events as an important place for diplomacy and foreign relations. The US government not only continued many of its actions from the Cold War but formalized them with the creation of an entire division within the State Department. Outside of official government efforts, the country’s professional sports and hosting of mega-events contributed to a second wave of spreading American sport culture around the world.

Footwear company Nike and its contract with professional basketball player Michael Jordan to produce the Air Jordan sneaker symbolized American cultural capitalism at the end of the 20th century. In his first year as a professional athlete, Jordan became a global superstar while his sneakers became one of the hottest commodities around the world.³⁵ The decision by the IOC to allow professional athletes to participate in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics enabled Jordan, along with his fellow National Basketball Association (NBA) superstars, to compete as the “Dream Team” for a global audience and further cement his status. Nike and Jordan’s eponymous sneaker became the model that numerous athletes and athletic apparel companies based in the United States and abroad have added athlete signature lines to compete with Nike.

In addition to elevating Nike and Michael Jordan, global media in the late 20th and 21st centuries have allowed professional teams to have worldwide fans. American professional teams began capitalizing on their global interest by holding exhibition and regular-season games overseas. The leagues have complete oversight of the organization of these events, which bring the complete American sport experience to an international audience while simultaneously expanding the leagues’ and teams’ marketing opportunities. The NBA began its almost annual games in 1991, baseball in 1996, and the National Football League in England in 2007. The National Hockey League, with its strong Canadian identity, role in Cold War ice hockey, and relations with the Soviet Union, played numerous games against Russian teams at the end of the Cold War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, later expanding its presence to other countries in the northern hemisphere in the early 2000s. All four leagues have opened offices on other continents to facilitate these efforts. The NBA’s continued programs in China and Yao Ming’s career with the Houston Rockets has, as Fuhua Huang has demonstrated, “reshaped Chinese basketball culture and modernised the conception of Chinese sport industry and entertaining sport.”³⁶ These efforts reflect an emphasis by American professional sport leagues on globalization while their continued success also demonstrates the international demand for American sport culture.

Building on the legacy of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the United States hosted several international sporting events in the years after the end of the Cold War: FIFA’s Men’s World Cup in 1994 and Women’s World Cup in 1999, the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. These events all expanded sponsorship in sport while showcasing the United States to the world. Soccer had never been as prominent as the other four major American sports (baseball, American football, basketball, ice hockey), yet the FIFA men’s tournament in 1994 broke spectatorship records and had never been as financially lucrative for the organization before coming to the United States. The power of American multinational companies was evident when Atlanta won the 1996 Olympic Games. The city was the hometown of two of the IOC’s sponsors, Coca-Cola and UPS, and only one of the IOC’s ten sponsors was not a US-headquartered company. American capitalism was on display for the world to such an extent in Atlanta that both the global media and the IOC considered the 1996 Olympic Games over-commercialized; the IOC even enacted changes to their marketing policies to prevent future Olympics from appearing as commercialized as Atlanta.³⁷

At the end of the 20th century, sport provided opportunities to renew diplomatic relations with two of the US’ enemies: Iran and Cuba. With the help of the nonprofit Search for Common Ground, a team of US wrestlers participated in Takhti Cup in Tehran in February 1998. A more-than-capacity arena of thirteen thousand spectators cheered for both Iranian and American athletes, including when two athletes hugged each other after their match.³⁸ That summer the US and Iranian soccer teams faced each other in the group stage at the FIFA World Cup in France. The Iranian players gave the Americans white roses, a symbol of peace, before the game alongside the standard banner exchange. President Bill Clinton had recorded a message that aired before the broadcast, expressing “the hope that the game would be a ‘step toward ending the estrangement between our nations.’”³⁹ Iran won the game 2–1, and afterward, American defender Jeff Agoos said, “We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years.”⁴⁰ FIFA even awarded the two teams the Fair Play Award for their actions that day. These direct people-to-people encounters with US and Iranian athletes, however, did not fundamentally alter official diplomatic relations between the two states.⁴¹

Whereas ping-pong diplomacy had allowed the United States and China to resume diplomatic relations and exchanges, similar efforts in the 1970s with Cuba through baseball failed to produce similar results.⁴² Only in 1999 when the State Department announced the ability for people-to-people exchanges with Cuba to take place did formal high-level baseball competition between the two countries resume. Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles played two games against the Cuban national team in Havana in March and at their home stadium, Camden Yards, in May. Baltimore’s poor performance in the series and the Cubans’ celebrations, however, led to a negative public reaction to the games, diminishing hopes for baseball diplomacy with Cuba to continue.⁴³

Sport assumed an even greater importance for the government following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics were not only the first major international sporting event following 9/11 but were also held on US soil. The event afforded the country an opportunity to demonstrate its strength and resilience to a global audience. The flag from the World Trade Center appeared during the opening ceremony. US broadcaster NBC aired an interview with President George W. Bush, who emphasized that the Olympics were “a statement of peace and unity” and that “if the Games weren’t held it would be a victory for the terrorists,” which the United States would not allow.⁴⁴

The terrorist attacks signaled to the US government a need to change the views of foreign citizens to be more favorable to the country. As part of these expanded public diplomacy efforts, the State Department in 2002 established the SportsUnited division, later renamed the Sports Diplomacy Division, within the Educational and Cultural Affairs branch. President Bush and others viewed sport as one way to help prevent future terrorist attacks against the country. The Sports Diplomacy Division supports the State Department’s diplomatic endeavors through a variety of programs. The one-way Sports Envoy program sends elite athletes from the United States to foreign countries to run sports camps “to reach underserved communities, inspiring youth and coaches alike, with stories of resilience, teamwork, and education.” Running in the opposite direction, the Sports Visitors programs bring young non-elite athletes and coaches to the United States for short-duration sports-themed programs that not only benefit the foreign participants but also allow “Americans an opportunity to interact firsthand with people from every region of the world.” Originally known as Sports Grants, the International Sports Programming Initiative enables two-way exchanges, often thematically oriented, where participants from the United States and another country both visit the other’s communities.⁴⁵

The State Department believed that sport could help promote gender equity as well. In conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the passing of Title IX, the 1972 legislation that required equal opportunity within education and that has had the biggest impact in providing expanded opportunities for girls in sport, the State Department and television network ESPN launched the Empowering Women and Girls through Sports program. This program has been expanded to become the Global Sports Mentoring Program, which has two strands: one focused on women’s rights and the other on disability rights. The program description states that participants “develop in-depth action plans aimed at leveling the playing field for women and girls and increasing sports access and opportunities for people with disabilities.”⁴⁶ These people-to-people exchanges supported by the State Department take place across the world and are promoted via social media platforms. The establishment of SportsUnited drew on earlier, smaller efforts by the government to use sport in its efforts to win the hearts and minds of foreign populations. The formalization of these actions into specific programs run by a State Department division marked another shift in the United States’ use of sport to serve its diplomatic aims while also attempting to support efforts known as sport for development and peace to improve the lives of others through sport.

Twentieth-century global political issues have continued to impact sport, with the United States, along with other countries, shifting to political boycotts of sporting events instead of full-scale athlete boycotts. When host countries of sport mega-events have domestic policies that restrict the rights of its residents and infringe human rights, global movements protesting those actions arise, which have often led to calls to boycott those sporting events, primarily the Olympic Games but also the FIFA World Cup. Instead of hurting the athletes and their ability to compete at the highest levels, US presidents have chosen not to attend these events, nor have they sent high-level government representatives. These political boycotts diminish the prestige that the host countries had hoped to acquire by hosting a mega-event. Following Russia’s introduction of anti-LGBT laws, President Barack Obama selected three openly gay individuals—tennis legend Billy Jean King, ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow, and figure skater Brian Boitano—to lead the US delegations at the opening and closing ceremonies instead of any government officials.⁴⁷ In December 2021 the White House announced that the United States would not send any government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing because of China’s “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang.”⁴⁸

US political confrontations around the world have historically played out in sport, and they continue to do so in the 21st century. The United States has increasingly incorporated human rights in its approach to sports and foreign relations in the 21st century as a way to reiterate its position as a great power and global influence.

Discussion of the Literature

Historical scholarship on sport and foreign relations is a relatively recent field compared to other aspects of foreign relations and diplomatic history. The literature has grown tremendously in the 21st century, reflecting a more general recognition that sport and politics are not separate. As more government archival materials are declassified, they reveal the closer attention paid to sport. Research reflects both the spread of American ideals abroad and the use of major international sporting events.

Baseball has received the most attention from scholars, in part from its status as the oldest of the four American sports. The countries that play the sport primarily include those areas that fell under American imperialism. Thomas Zeiler’s Ambassadors in Pinstripes argues Spalding’s world baseball tour in 1888–1889 was the start of the American empire. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu demonstrates how baseball was not merely adopted by Japan but, in fact, became an active part of both US and Japanese efforts across the entire Pacific region. Baseball factors extensively in US–Latin American relations, perhaps unsurprising when they comprise a substantial portion of players in both Major League Baseball as well as the minor leagues.⁴⁹ The most comprehensive work on promoting American ideals abroad, using both baseball and other sports, is Gerald Gems’s The Athletic Crusade, which considers US actions across Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

The Olympic Games are one of the most researched areas within sport history and continue to draw significant attention. Aside from the focus on the Anthropology Days, the 1904 St. Louis Games are widely forgotten. Susan Brownell’s edited book addresses the role of race and American imperialism at the event.⁵⁰ Los Angeles has played an important role in transforming the Olympic movement after each of its first two Olympic Games. Mark Dyreson and Matthew Llewellyn, individually and in collaboration, have published numerous articles on the 1932 Games, while Barbara Keys has placed the Americanization of the Olympics in Los Angeles within broader developments in international sport in the 1930s.⁵¹ The transformation of Olympic sponsorship and funding following the 1984 Los Angeles Games—the second wave of Americanization of the Olympics—has been covered extensively. Robert Edelman and Bradley Congelio have focused on the Soviet boycott of the Games, while Harold Wilson has shown how Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, sought to use participation in Los Angeles as a way to bolster his own status within and outside of the communist bloc.⁵²

US–Soviet relations have formed the bulk of the Cold War scholarship surrounding sport, which is unsurprising because of the important role sport played in the contest between the two superpowers as well as the reciprocal boycotts in 1980 and 1984. Kevin Witherspoon has examined both men’s and women’s basketball in this relationship, while John Soares has focused on ice hockey.⁵³ Scholars have investigated other countries or regions that have factored into broader US foreign relations: Heather Dichter on divided Germany, Brenda Elsey for Latin America, and Antonio Sotomayor for Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. For ping-pong diplomacy, Fan Hong has co-authored several articles and book chapters, and Pete Millwood has placed the role of the table tennis interactions within a broader cast of individuals who all worked toward reshaping US–Chinese relations.⁵⁴

Scholarship on the State Department’s use of sport has grown as the broader public diplomacy research has expanded. Some publications focus on efforts toward a specific country, particularly during the Cold War.⁵⁵ Toby Rider’s Cold War Games details the extensive efforts, often covertly funded by the government, to use the Olympic movement and events overseas to promote the United States at the expense of the Soviet bloc as the Cold War intensified. Several authors have examined the State Department’s use of Black athletes during the Cold War, with Damion Thomas’s monograph the most comprehensive.⁵⁶ Research on SportsUnited/the Sports Diplomacy Division has largely been published in the form of results from the individuals who have led the various exchange programs.⁵⁷ Bence Garamvölgyi, Mariann Bardocz-Bencsik, and Tamás Dóczi have included American efforts within a broader consideration of sport within grassroots diplomacy.⁵⁸ No complete history of the Sports Diplomacy Division has yet been written.

The majority of scholarship on sport and foreign relations focuses on a relationship with a single country. These works have largely considered the major adversaries of the United States (the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Iran). Some work has taken a multilateral or international approach, such as Heather Dichter’s examination of the role of NATO within international sport in the 1960s, which has enriched the understanding of the role of sport in diplomacy.⁵⁹