Political Protection: The International Olympic Committee’s UN Diplomacy in the 1980s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the aftermath of a widespread boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics that challenged the legitimacy of the Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) began a vigorous but unsuccessful effort, lasting from 1982 to 1985, to convince the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution committing governments not to boycott the Games. Drawing on archives in Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, and Canada, this article brings to light this forgotten but important episode from the early years of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s presidency. The ambitious Samaranch and his limelight-seeking ally, Canadian Richard ‘Dick’ Pound, vastly overestimated the IOC’s global political capital in pushing governments to give up one of the most potent sport-related tools at their disposal. The IOC was at this time so weak that most governments failed even to respond to repeated entreaties about the proposal. The organization’s leaders never fully grasped the ironies of turning to what many observers considered the world’s most politicized body for a political measure to reduce political influence on the Olympic Games. Although the IOC has often claimed that it cannot force standards of behaviour on governments, the 1980s campaign was a sustained effort to do exactly that.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".