Category: Games News

The last time the U.S. boycotted an Olympic Games, China joined in—withdrawing from the 1980 Moscow Games along with at least 44 other nations, ostensibly to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Chinese leaders even sent 18 athletes to the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia, which was billed as the “alternative” to the main event in Moscow. In a Cold War tit-for-tat, the Soviet Union and its allies withheld their athletes from the next Summer Olympics, the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

Four decades later, China is now the subject of an Olympic boycott movement…