On a hot summer night, over 140 brightly colored flags rose into the air, circling the vast track in the 1984 Olympic Torch Lighting Ceremony. Amid the waving national banners, onlookers could not easily tell that 14 flags were missing- the 14 countries that staged a boycott in retaliation to the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The absence of these participating countries marked an almost 40-year, tense military and political relationship between the US and the USSR. The unstable international relations brought forth by the Cold War’s deteriorated further in the 1980’s- the dawn of increasingly severe anti-communist policies towards the Soviets. But the spirit of the games could not be extinguished, for the city
