Resistance through Participation: International Sport and Colonial Defiance in Puerto Rico

Description

At the end of December 1965, the weary American leader of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage penned a letter to the head of the Olympic Committee of the USSR, Konstantin Andrianov, lamenting the toll the Cold War had taken on international sport. He sorrowfully mused, “When are we going to be able to concentrate on sport and not be bothered with these unsolvable political problems that do not concern us?” At issue facing the two exasperated leaders were the actions surrounding the Olympic Committees of their respective territory and ally in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico and Cuba. Despite protests, accusations of colonial governance, and broader Cold War tensions, Puerto Rico hosted the Cuban delegation along with other nations comprising the Atlantic equatorial states at the tenth Central American and Caribbean Games. Fourteen years later, the small island colony, one-hundred miles southeast of Miami, would again defy United States foreign policy by sending three boxers – as American citizens – to compete at the boycotted Moscow Olympics.
This presentation will discuss the above two acts of sportive resistance in Puerto Rico concerning concurrent global post-colonial movements. From hosting the 1966 Central American and Caribbean Games to participating in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Puerto Rico’s actions will be examined through a neocolonial framework, focused on modalities of freedom and human actualization, as expressed by Ben Carrington in 2010. Research for this presentation stems from archives and interviews with staff at the Comité Olímpico de Puerto Rico, documents from the CIA archives, and prolific secondary books and articles from Antonio Sotomayor and Roberta Park. The inclusion of existing neocolonial states in the sportive nationalism discourse is crucial to our field as a reminder that sport may challenge political hegemony but is often insufficient.

Period	2021
Event title	North American Society for Sport History
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International