Romania and the 1948 London Summer Olympics: Sport and Politics at the Dawn of the Cold War

The communist takeover in Romania in 1948 generated a comprehensive restructuring of the nation’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions, each systematically reconfigured in accordance with Soviet doctrinal and organisational paradigms. The domain of sport was no exception – it underwent radical transformations that decisively severed institutional and ideological continuity with the pre-communist era, including a thorough reorientation of the Romanian Olympic movement to serve the strategic and propagandistic imperatives of the new regime. Against this backdrop of systemic reconfiguration, the present study elucidates Romania’s boycott of the summer 1948 Olympics in London, interpreting the decision not as an isolated act but as a critical juncture where ideology, state authority, and the governance of sport converged at the outset of the Cold War. This stance is rendered even more paradoxical by Romania’s participation in the St. Moritz Olympic Winter Games earlier that year – a commitment upheld solely because it had been formalised prior to the full entrenchment of communist control.