Thread by @RetroReport

A #LessonsFromHistory thread!

1/ The #Olympics are postponed, but athletes around the world have trained for 4 years to perform at their peak this July. In 10 tweets, a history of times Olympic athletes couldn’t compete:

2/ Summer 1916: The Berlin Games are canceled due to WW1. (The next time Berlin is picked as Olympic host is 1936, the Games overseen by Adolf Hitler just before the outbreak of WW2.)

3/ Summer and Winter, 1940-1944: Four Games are canceled because of WW2. The 1940 Games, set for Japan, would have been the first time a country outside Europe and the US was the host.

4/ Summer 1956:
-Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon withdraw over the Suez Crisis.
-Spain, Switzerland, Netherlands don’t go in protest of the Soviet Union crushing the Hungarian revolution.
-China starts boycott over Taiwan’s inclusion that would last until 1980.

5/ Summer 1964: Indonesia and North Korea back out of Tokyo Games after officials banned their athletes who’d participated in the Games of the New Emerging Forces, a competing event in Jakarta mounted largely by decolonizing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

6/ Summer 1972: 8 Palestinian terrorists break into the Olympic Village in Munich, killing 11 Israeli team members and a police officer in a hostage standoff. The Games are suspended for 34 hours. The Israeli team and athletes from other nations withdraw.

7/ Summer 1976: Nearly all African countries boycott after the IOC allows New Zealand to compete. Earlier that year, in defiance of the UN, New Zealand’s national rugby team had toured South Africa, which was banned from the Olympics over its apartheid policy.

8/ Summer 1980: The US leads a boycott of the Moscow Games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The boycott includes Japan, which had planned to honor those athletes this summer.

9/ Summer 1984: With US-USSR relations still tense, the Soviet Union and its allies back out of the Games in Los Angeles. The concurrent Friendship Games is held across the Eastern Bloc for the boycotting countries and others.

10/ Summer 1988: Ahead of the Seoul Games, N. Korea blows up a S. Korean plane, killing 115 people, in an alleged attempt to derail the event. Cuba joins N. Korea in skipping the Games, the last countrywide boycotts until the withdrawals from Tokyo due to #COVID19.