The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Boycott

Abstract After successive political boycotts of the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the 1980 Moscow Olympics, many observers feared that the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics would mark the end of the Olympian project. Paradoxically, LA84 rejuvenated the Olympic Movement and inspired a new paradigm for staging what had become a cost-prohibitive mega-event. Relying on corporate sponsors and television contracts, and enjoying an infrastructure already in place in Los Angeles, the 1984 Olympics turned a profit and restored international interest in hosting. A global television audience in the billions transformed the Olympics into the world's biggest “shared experience,” an electronic spectacle that no nation in the future would risk avoiding. The 1984 Los Angeles Games created a new template that shifted international political and cultural equations and extinguished Olympic boycotts as foreign policy tools.