The 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games have become known as the ‘friendly games’, but East-West rivalry ensured that they were anything but friendly. The bloody semi-final water polo match between the USSR and Hungary provides just one example of how sport and politics mixed during the Cold War.

Cold War Games shows vividly how the USSR and US exploited the Melbourne Olympic Games for propaganda, turning athletic fields, swimming pools and other sporting venues into battlefields in which each fought for supremacy.

The Melbourne Olympics also marked a turning point. For the first time, the USSR beat the United States by winning the most medals, which Khrushchev hailed as a major victory in the Cold War. The Melbourne Olympics were held in the shadow of the Hungarian revolution, which broke out a month earlier. Eisenhower’s former Cold War advisor, CD Jackson, directed a clandestine operation in Melbourne to encourage communist athletes to defect. A total of 46 athletes defected, despite the efforts by secret agents attached to the teams from the communist bloc. Many of the defectors went to the US and participated in the Freedom Tour, which the State Department exploited for propaganda.

Cold War Games also tells the love story between Czechoslovak discus thrower, Olga Fikotová and American hammer thrower, Hal Connolly, and their struggle to overcome Cold War politics to marry. New information from ASIO files and newly discovered documents from archives in the USSR, US and Hungary reveal other secret operations in Melbourne that confirm that the 1956 Olympics were undoubtedly the first Cold War Olympics.

Harry Blutstein

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