Jimmy Carter Announces The 1980 Olympics Boycott

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The opening ceremony of the 1980 Olympics. (RIA Novosti archive, image #487025 / Sergey Guneev / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

This summer's Olympic Games in Tokyo are currently in limbo because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it's not the first time that the United States did not participate in the Summer Olympics. In 1980, then-President Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. would not send any teams to that year's Summer Olympics, held in Moscow, in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Let's take a look back at the 1980 Olympics boycott, how it started, and how it all shook out.