Browsing by Author "Dichter, Heather L."

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    Animalympics, Or How I Became a Sport Scholar
    (Routledge, 2017-10-16) Dichter, Heather L.
    While at first unintentional, the author’s path to becoming a sport historian has incorporated her academic trajectory of sport and German/European history along with working in the sport industry. These experiences have benefited both her scholarly research and her teaching and experiential learning opportunities for students in sport management programs.
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    Aspiration and Reflection: Sport Historians on Sport History
    (2017-11-06) Dichter, Heather L.; Vamplew, Wray
    Following the series of Presidential Forum conversation pieces instigated by Kevin Wamsley on the NASSH website, this piece places the context of the collection of comments and criticisms by 29 contributors to this special issue on sport historians reflecting on the field of sport history. This is the introduction to the special issue.
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    Aspirational Reflections: The Future of Sport History
    (Taylor and Francis, 2017-10-30) Dichter, Heather L.; Vamplew, Wray
    This article provides a scrambled form of SWOT analysis of the ideas contained in the various contributions to this special issue on sport historians and the field of sport history. The market for sport history, pure and simple, is not in good shape in many places. Yet we must be careful not to confuse trends in employment prospects with shorter term fluctuations in demand. Nor should we conflate national issues with the international situation. One thing is certain: worldwide academia is expanding; surely, there must be opportunities somewhere for sport history. Sport historians may have to be prepared to move geographically or to get a job. Nonetheless, the field of sport history also has many strengths highlighted, and opportunities abound for collaborations, public engagement, and supporting our fellow sport historians across the globe. Instead of allowing the external threats and weaknesses to continue to grow, sport historians should draw on the encouraging aspects contained herein and take advantage of our field’s strengths and opportunities to develop new and creative initiatives which demonstrate the vibrancy and breadth of sport history.
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    Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recretion, and Media in Germany's Metropolis
    (University of Arkansas Press, 2024-10) Dichter, Heather L.; Johnson, Molly Wilkinson
    Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis is an edited collection about sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. This volume places sport in Berlin within the wider contexts of sport history, urban history, and German history. From football (soccer) through tennis, equestrianism, and skateboarding, as well as Olympic trials and the European Maccabi Games, this book demonstrates the importance of sport to culture, society, memory, and politics in Berlin.
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    Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO
    (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021-10) Dichter, Heather L.
    During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics. In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
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    Canadian Government Involvement in Calgary’s Failed 1968 Winter Olympic Bid
    (Routledge, 2021) Dichter, Heather L.
    In the early 1960s the Canadian government in Ottawa saw international events, including major sporting events, as a way to bolster Canada’s position globally. To support Calgary’s bid for the 1968 Olympic Winter Games, the Canadian federal government formed an interdepartmental committee to work with the Calgary Olympic Development Association to try to improve the Canadian city’s chance of winning the Olympic Games. The inclusion of sites within Banff National Park for some of the proposed competition venues required federal government involvement, but John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson’s governments became even more involved in the bid process than was typical at the time because of the importance with which they viewed the Olympic Games to their broader public diplomacy efforts. The extensive work to support Calgary’s (ultimately unsuccessful) 1968 Olympic Winter Games bid foreshadowed the importance of federal government involvement in the bidding stages and not just their involvement in the organizing of the Olympic Games themselves.
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    Denazification, Democratization, and the Cold War: Diplomatic Manipulation of the German Olympic Committee
    (University of Arkansas Press, 2018) Dichter, Heather L.
    The western Allies paid careful attention to the re-formation of athletic clubs in occupied Germany as part of the policies of using sport as a way to help with the democratization process after the Second World War. The High Commissioners and their respective governments – particularly the Americans – became intimately involved with the composition of the German Olympic Committee in 1949, the year Allied occupation of Western Germany ended and the Federal Republic of Germany came into existence. Allied interest in the German Olympic Committee persisted through 1951, when the International Olympic Committee formally readmitted Germany. Germany's reintroduction into the Olympic movement was thus marked by political involvement not only by its Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, but in particular by foreign intervention. The Allies pushed for international acceptance of Germany, but the Nazi pasts of many German sport leaders created problems. This chapter will examine these meddling actions on the part of State Department, HICOG, and Foreign Office officials into Germany return to the Olympic movement and international sport in general, and how the moral aims of denazification and democratization ultimately were subverted to the politics of the Cold War as the Soviet bloc pushed for a separate recognition of East Germany. These actions reveal a clear and concerted effort by foreign ministries, and especially the U.S. State Department, to use international sport to meet their needs. The eagerness with which IOC members – including future IOC president Brundage, perhaps the biggest public advocate for the separation of sport and politics – corresponded with their governments left a legacy of government positions influencing, via correspondence and in-person meetings, the actions of international sport leaders.
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    Diplomatic and International History: Athletes and Ambassadors
    (Routledge, 2015-12) Dichter, Heather L.
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    The Diplomatic Campaign Against the Short-Lived 1968 Berlin Olympic Bid
    (Cambridge University Press, 2022-09-26) Dichter, Heather L.
    In 1963 the West Berlin mayor proposed a joint bid from West and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games. West Germany’s closest allies sought to persuade the West German and Berlin governments to stop the bid, which both supported but had largely kept secret from their allies. This episode demonstrates not only the significance which foreign ministries have long attributed to international sport, but also their clear involvement to actively end another country’s Olympic aspirations because of the diplomatic ramifications, particularly the potential to challenge the four-power control of Berlin, and their own self-serving interests in hosting the same event.
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    Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft and International Relations since 1945
    (University Press of Kentucky, 2014) Dichter, Heather L.; Johns, Andrew L.
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    The Diplomatic Turn: The New Relationship between Sport and Politics
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-03-23) Dichter, Heather L.
    With an increasing amount of diplomatic archival material being declassified, scholars are now finding not only more instances of governments, and especially diplomats, involved in sport matters, but also different ways in which sport and politics have been intertwined historically. The past two decades have thus seen what can be called a diplomatic turn in sport history. This type of research has led to the development of a new strand of sport and politics research encompassing the diplomatic use of sport, through sport diplomacy and sport-as-diplomacy. Through mutual coordination, sporting representatives and government diplomats shared valuable information with each other so that sport could serve diplomatic ends, and for diplomats to support sporting endeavours. While the relationships between government members and sport organizations have traditionally been considered in terms of national sport politics, their reach goes far beyond a domestic audience, as demonstrated by several examples during the Cold War, often involving Germany. Bringing together files from sport organizations and their representatives with foreign ministry and government records provides new insight into not only international sport and diplomacy during the decades of the Cold War but also how their practitioners engaged with and influenced one another.
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    “Football more important than Berlin”: East German Football vs. NATO, 1960-64
    (University Press of Kentucky, 2020-08) Dichter, Heather L.
    In the early 1960s Portugal and the Netherlands confronted the problem of East German participation in the UEFA Junior Tournament and Olympic qualification. Although not very important tournaments, domestic governments feared they would cause a public backlash against themselves and NATO should the East Germans not be allowed to participate. These games became tied up with debates over NATO policies, national interest, and public opinion. The popularity of football prompted some states to attempt to use the national interest exception to the East German travel ban. These football matches brought the Cold War into the smaller NATO member states’ national boundaries. By hosting sporting events the Netherlands and Portugal engaged directly with their NATO allies over Cold War policies with which they did not fully agree or which they believed would cause public opinion problems at home and abroad. NATO diplomats, foreign ministries, and the leaders of national and international football federations spent months in protracted negotiations over whether minor football matches involving the German Democratic Republic would even take place during the height of the Cold War as each group attempted to appear blameless in the court of public opinion.
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    Game Plan for Democracy: Sport and Youth in Occupied West Germany
    (Bloomsbury, 2018) Dichter, Heather L.
    Although the Allies created Directive 23 to control sport in occupied Germany, they also realized that sport could be utilized to introduce democratic ideas to the German population broadly. Falling under the guidelines of reeducation and democratization, programs to foster democratic ideals in youth involved the meeting of Germans with citizens of the victorious powers, often through exchanges of athletes, leaders, and experts. The simultaneous development across the three western zones for programs exchanging athletes and sport leaders demonstrate the importance placed on the inculcation of democratic ideas and the benefits of cultural interaction and learning through experience. These exchanges demonstrate the central role of sport within the occupation of Germany and how the western Allies used these programs within their efforts to help achieve occupation aims. The sport policies of the western Allies and the ways in which they implemented these programs at the local level in Germany reveal extensive interactions between the occupation powers and regular Germans with respect to everyday activities.
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    Grassroots Diplomacy through Coach Education: Americans, Jordanians and Tajiks
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019-11-10) Blom, Lindsey; Magat, Paz; Dichter, Heather L.
    Two coach-to-coach sport diplomacy exchange programmes run between 2012 and 2015 in Jordan Tajikistan, funded by U.S. State Department’s International Sports Programming Initiative, used soccer to promote grassroots diplomacy. These programmes focused on leadership, tolerance, diversity, and citizenship, as well as training coaches to design sport for development and peace programmes in their local communities while learning more about other cultures and building relationships in the process. These two case studies demonstrate how grassroots diplomacy attempts have both succeeded and struggled in the mission to build relationships among people, empower young people and their mentors to be local agents of social change, and strengthen community-based social institutions.
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    Introduction
    (University Press of Kentucky, 2020-08) Dichter, Heather L.
    Sport and diplomacy have been mutually intertwined in transnational networks of governance and competition – not just on the field of play – and the non-governmental bodies controlling the sport play an important role within the relationship between soccer and diplomacy. The repeated uses of the game of soccer by so many states across the globe, spanning every continent reveals how integral the sport is to international relations. As soccer has pursued a goal of global engagement to consolidate its position as the world’s preeminent sport in the past century, it has increasingly had to reckon or negotiate with the nation-state. Simultaneously, as state sovereignty has been challenged by the constituent and much debated forces of globalization so have longstanding characteristics of soccer’s operation – most notably in a contested relationship between the national, regional and international level. This introduction addresses those aspects and provides an overview of the book.
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    New Dimensions of Sport in Modern Europe: Perspectives from the ‘Long Twentieth Century’
    (Taylor & Francis, 2019-09-16) Dichter, Heather L.; Lake, Robert; Dyreson, Mark
    This collection offers new perspectives on European sport history in the ‘long twentieth century’ designed to challenge and deconstruct what might be considered ‘traditional’ or more familiar Euro-centric conceptions and geographies of sport and leisure—especially those deriving from the leading hotbeds of European sport history. This special issue introduction adds to the growing corpus of explorations of sport and leisure in late-modern European history from a variety of countries: France, Spain, Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovenia. With topics ranging from sport during empire to mega-events, sport literature to women’s sport attire, and several different sports, the insight provided by this new research demonstrates a greater understanding of the connections between sport and society in the long twentieth century in Europe.
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    Obtenir les Jeux olympiques d'hiver de 1968 : Conflit entre alliés de l'OTAN
    (ACAPS, 2025) Dichter, Heather L.
    Sept villes se sont portées candidates pour les Jeux olympiques d'hiver de 1968, dont quatre appartenant à des États membres de l'OTAN : Lake Placid (États-Unis), Grenoble (France), Calgary (Canada) et Oslo (Norvège). Dans les années 1960, le sport international a dû faire face à la politique de la guerre froide qui a eu un impact sur la possibilité d'organiser des événements sportifs. Le Comité international olympique (CIO) a demandé à chaque ville candidate aux Jeux olympiques de 1968 de fournir une garantie gouvernementale que tous les participants seraient autorisés à entrer dans le pays s'il était choisi comme hôte. Les quatre États membres de l'OTAN ont compris qu'ils devaient travailler ensemble pour s'assurer que chacune de leurs réponses en faveur de leurs villes candidates respectives satisfasse le CIO tout en ne violant pas les accords de l'OTAN. Aucun de ces États ne voulait que les réponses de sa ville l'excluent inutilement de la sélection de l'hôte olympique. La demande du CIO d'une garantie gouvernementale au nom des villes hôtes des Jeux olympiques de 1968 a impliqué les gouvernements. Les actions des diplomates de l'OTAN et de leurs ministères des affaires étrangères ont finalement influencé la sélection de l'hôte olympique.