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    "headline": "Ted Turner launched the Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986 after the US and Soviet Olympic boycotts",
    "description": "Ted Turner launched the Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986, a rival multisport event born out of the 1980 and 1984 Olympic boycotts.",
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    "articleSection": "History",
    "keywords": "Cold War, Goodwill Games, Olympic boycott, Sports history, Ted Turner",
    "articleBody": "Ted Turner answered two Olympic boycotts by starting his own Olympics. The cable TV founder staged the first Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986, bringing more than 3,000 athletes from 79 countries together after the United States skipped the 1980 Moscow Games and the Soviet bloc skipped Los Angeles in 1984. The bill for the first edition alone ran past $11 million, money Turner put up himself. The event ran for 15 years, set world records, gave beach volleyball its first major international stage, and then vanished after a run of low TV ratings. Why the boycotts pushed him The trigger was the Cold War. After Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in 1979, the US and a number of Western countries stayed away from the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Four years later the Soviet Union and its allies returned the favor and skipped the 1984 Los Angeles Games, with Romania the one Eastern Bloc exception. According to the history of the Goodwill Games, Turner got the idea on a 1984 trip to Moscow. He saw the boycotts as a loss for both sides and believed there was room for a top-level event that could take some of the Olympic spotlight. He founded the Games in 1985 through Turner Broadcasting System, with the stated aim of putting American and Soviet athletes in the same arenas. What happened in Moscow The 1986 program had 182 events. Sergey Bubka set a pole vault world record, Jackie Joyner-Kersee set one in the heptathlon, and two track cyclists, Michael Hübner of East Germany and Erika Salumäe of the Soviet Union, each set a 200-meter record. Unlike the Olympics, the summer edition mixed in sports normally kept for winter, such as figure skating and ice hockey in later years. Every edition, and how the field shrank 1986, Moscow: about 3,000 athletes from 79 countries. 1990, Seattle: about 2,300 athletes from 54 countries. Mike Barrowman broke the 200 m breaststroke world record. 1994, Saint Petersburg: about 2,000 athletes from 59 countries, the first edition after the Soviet Union dissolved, and the first major international event with beach volleyball, two years before its Olympic debut. 1998, New York City: about 1,300 athletes from 60 countries. Joyner-Kersee won her fourth straight heptathlon title. It was Turner’s last Games. 2000, Lake Placid: the only Winter Goodwill Games ever held. 2001, Brisbane: about 1,300 athletes from 58 countries. Australia topped the medal table with 75. Put those figures side by side and the slide is plain. From roughly 3,000 athletes in 1986 to roughly 1,300 in 2001 is a drop of about 1,700, or close to 57 percent, across 15 years. Who ended it Turner lost control of the event in October 1996, when Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner. The new owner staged Brisbane in 2001, then announced it would be the last. Phoenix lost the 2005 summer edition and Calgary the 2005 winter one. Turner never accepted the decision. Speaking live at the SportAccord conference in Denver in 2009, he said: “If I’d have stayed there the Goodwill Games would not have been canceled.” He also restated why he started it. As long as the Olympics run without boycotts, he argued, “it’s virtually impossible to have a world war,” because countries “wouldn’t want a war to mess up their chances.” The planned 2005 Games in Phoenix would have been the sixth summer edition. They were never held, and Brisbane 2001 remains the final Goodwill Games on the books. More stories like this one are collected in the Badiyaa History section. Further reading Wikipedia: Goodwill Games Illustrative image. Image: Joe Mabel, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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