The American humorist and novelist, Mark Twain, once observed: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Like many famous quotations, its attribution is sometimes contested. We can be sure, however, that in the mid-1980s, successive and debilitating boycotts of the Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games had everybody talking about the potential demise of the Olympic Games.
Ted Turner did something about it. He created the Goodwill Games. Turner, the billionaire media proprietor, philanthropist, and founder of the Cable News Network (CNN), proclaimed the lofty goal of easing the tensions between the capitalist West (read the USA) and communist East (Russia and its post-war Eastern Bloc) nations which had culminated in tit-for-tat boycotts of the two Olympics… read more >
