Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 7.00pm to 9.00pm EST
The Cambridge alumni community is warmly invited to join St Edmund's College for a special event with new and old friends at The Harvard Faculty Club on December 9. You will be joined by the Master of St Edmund’s College, Professor Chris Young, and the Development Director, Ms Kate Glennie.
If you have any questions about this event, please contact Kate Glennie, St Edmund's College Development Director & Fellow, at kg386@cam.ac.uk. We hope to see you there!
Boycotting Montreal, Moscow, and Los Angeles – the Olympics after Détente
This talk gives the wider context to the boycott Olympics of 1980 and 1984 and their precursor in 1976. It sets the Moscow and Los Angeles Games within the complex transition between a fading détente and the coming of the so-called second Cold War, arguing that while some elements of the two sports events fit patterns defined in mainstream historiography, others equally do not. It will show that 1980 and 1984 were both unlike and like other boycotts: unlike, because of their scale and superpower dimensions; like, because they were ultimately as ineffective as almost all that went before them. If boycotts were normally weak tools in the hands of the weak, in Moscow and Los Angeles, they were weak tools in the hands of the powerful – or more accurately, weak tools that rendered strong actors weak.
Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Location: The Harvard Club, 20 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Time: 7:00pm-9:00pm ET
Speaker
Chris Young is a Professor of Modern and Medieval German Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to his appointment as Master of St Edmund's College, he served as Head of the School of Arts and Humanities. A trained Germanist, Professor Young is also the Director of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies and the founder and Director of the Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership, Cambridge’s first institution-wide partnership between Cambridge and any other university.
His primary teaching and research interests focus on medieval German literature and language, as well as the history of European sport, with a particular emphasis on German sport. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Cologne), a Permanent Visiting Fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien der FU Berlin (2010-12), a Visiting Fellow of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich (2018) and an Honorary Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg Munich (2018). His monograph ‘The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany’ (UC Press, 2010, with Kay Schiller) was the first book to win the prizes of both the British and North American Societies for sports history. In 2021, his ‘The Whole World was Watching. Sport in the Cold War’ (Stanford University Press, 2020) also won the latter’s anthology prize. He curated a major exhibition this summer at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the 1924 Paris Olympics (best known through the film ‘Chariots of Fire’) and serves on the German government’s Historical Commission on the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Booking information
Booking for this event is now closed.
