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Soviet dancers and gymnasts rehearse for the opening ceremony of the twenty-second Olympic Summer Games, at Moscow’s Lenin Stadium. The Games officially opened on July 19, 1980. Photograph by AP.
As the 2014 Olympics officially open in Sochi, we look back at the last time the Russians played host to the world’s top athletes, the 1980 Summer Games, in Moscow. Vladimir Putin certainly remembers. Boycotted by sixty-five countries, including the United States, the Moscow Games were as much about politics as they were about athletics. As David Remnick writes from Sochi, “Putin, it is safe to say, does not want the Winter Games in Sochi to resemble the fraught events of Moscow in the summer of 1980.”
[#image: /photos/590950f8c14b3c606c103604]See more of The New Yorker’s coverage of the Sochi Games.
