Participants

Sylvain Dufraisse²; Richard Mills¹; Lorenzo Venuti³;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK;  ² Nantes université, France;  ³ Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy

Discussion

Following the cultural turn in Cold War studies from the 1990s on, sports began to attract the interest of researchers. Cold War sports studies took a global turn in the wake of work by Odd Arne Westad (Westad, 2017), now going beyond a sole analysis of bilateral, USA-USSR relations (Edelman, Young, 2019). In the same way, interest in the connections, micro-level exchanges and the role of smaller countries during the Cold War have not been further extended into the sporting world (Autio-Sarasmo, Miklossy, 2011).

In this roundtable, three historians of Eastern European sport will explore the value of expanding the topic into new areas: hierarchical, territorial, and temporal. Sylvain Dufraisse, author of Une Histoire Sportive de la Guerre Froide (2023) has increasingly looked beyond athletes by turning his attention to the role of sports administrators. He has underlined how the Cold War process has contributed to the dissemination of sports throughout the world and has shed light on the convergences between the USSR and the USA, the East and the West, that sports has permitted. Richard Mills looks to the lesser-known motorcycle sports in an attempt to escape the metropoles and probe the myriad interconnections between scattered provincial settings on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Lorenzo Venuti, an expert on Hungarian sport, asks what can be learned by framing Cold War developments via a broader chronological framework.