La Guerra fredda alle Olimpiadi: la diplomazia sportiva americana negli anni Cinquanta

During the Fifties, the Eisenhower administration gave a high priority to sport in its propaganda and cultural diplomacy activities. To cope with the Soviet cultural offensive, the United States developed three kinds of actions: a propaganda effort to highlight the problems of Soviet sport (in particular its professional and ideological bias) and the strength of sports in the United States; American sportsmen’s goodwill tours abroad and, finally, foreigners’ sports tours in the United States. In all these activities, a central theme, which represented also a contradiction, was the absence of any U.S. government interference in American sports.