The fifth IOC president, Avery Brundage, once described the Olympics as the greatest social force in the world. His reasoning: Where else can you see communists, capitalists, royalists, and socialists marching together, if not at the Olympic Games? However, in 1980 in Moscow, it was different. At the first Olympic Games of the modern era held in a socialist country, communists, capitalists, royalists, and socialists did not march united into the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. The Games were boycotted, not by the majority of Western countries, but by leading industrial and sports nations such as the United States, West Germany, and Japan. In this book, the author examines the discussions and developments that led to the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics by 65 countries, using three German newspapers as sources.