Before the University of Washington’s winter quarter even started, Kyle Haddad-Fonda told his “Modern Olympic Games” class one of the questions that would be on the final exam: “What is something that happened in the 2026 Winter Olympics that you can understand better because of something you’ve learned in this course?”
“There is not yet an answer to that question,” said Haddad-Fonda, a part-time lecturer of history at the UW, “but there will be by the end of the quarter.”
As Haddad-Fonda’s students watch this month’s Winter Olympics in Italy, they are also learning in the classroom about the history of the Games. The course covers subjects ranging from ideology and national identity to race and the position of women in society.
UW News talked with Haddad-Fonda to learn more.
What makes sports such an effective window into history?
Kyle Haddad-Fonda: This is a 100-level course, and the majority of students taking it are first-year students aiming to fulfill a general education requirement. I see the course as a kind of sampler platter of 20th-century history. Students may not know coming in that they would be really interested in Native American history or Nazi Germany or some aspect of women’s history — but they’re going to get exposed to a little bit of everything. What ties it all together is Olympic competition. Sports are inherently about race and gender and politics.
In class, I get to tell stories about some truly wild things that have happened in the Olympics. I’ve talked already this quarter about a dehydrated marathon runner whose trainer refused him water but gave him strychnine mixed with egg white, a backstroker dubbed the prettiest girl at the Olympics who was kicked off the team for having the audacity to drink champagne, and a decathlete whose coronation as the world’s greatest athlete was upended when a teammate poisoned his orange juice. But after I tell these stories, the next step is to stop and say, “Okay, why does this matter on a deeper level? What can this one athlete’s experience tell us about the world?”
Where did the idea for this course come from?
KHF: I’ve been mulling it over for years, and now seemed like the right time to do it because the Winter Olympics are happening at the same time.
This is the seventh academic year in a row that I’ve taught the history of the Cold War. After a few years of teaching the same course, the content gets pretty well set. I started to realize that the only changes I was making to the lectures was to add short anecdotes about sports. Students responded really well. Including the occasional bit of sports content became a strategy for illustrating complicated ideas in a relatable way.
Last year, I advised a senior thesis by a history major who had previously taken my Cold War course. I had spent maybe 30 seconds in class talking about how the Catholic Church promoted soccer in Italy as part of its broader campaign against communism around the time of the 1948 Italian election. This student was a soccer fan, and she went and did a lot more reading about the role of soccer in postwar Italy. A year later, she came to me and said that just that one comment had helped her to realize that sports were something she could take seriously as an academic topic. She ended up writing her senior thesis about athletes who defected from communist countries during the very short period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This student’s enthusiasm for viewing sports as a window into deeper historical phenomena gave me that final push to decide I was ready to create this course.
What is one of your favorite topics that you cover in the class?
KHF: Just last week, we talked about the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, after which about a third of the athletes on the Hungarian team defected to the United States. Those Olympics happened in the immediate aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the Soviet crackdown. There was a 16-year-old Hungarian swimmer named Zsuzsa Ördög who had to make a decision all by herself about whether she was going to defect to the U.S. or return home to her family. She ended up moving to Mercer Island because she was taken in by the family of a 16-year-old American swimmer, Nancy Ramey, who had won silver in the butterfly.
One of the reasons I mentioned Ördög was to contrast her story with that of Hal Connolly and Olga Fikotová. Connolly was an American who won a gold medal in the hammer throw in 1956; Fikotová was a Czechoslovakian who won gold in the discus in the same Olympics. While they were competing in Melbourne, they fell in love. Three months after the Olympics, Connolly went to Prague, where he and Fikotová got married. Then they moved to the U.S. The American media was delighted by a love story that transcended the Iron Curtain. In class, I showed my students a clip of the newlyweds appearing on the game show “To Tell the Truth.”
Before the next Olympics, Fikotová wrote to the Czechslovakian Olympic Committee saying she was ready to represent Czechoslovakia a second time. She got a letter back saying that the committee no longer considered her to be Czechoslovakian. Fortunately, her U.S. citizenship came through about a week before the U.S. Olympic trials, so she showed up — as the reigning Olympic champion — and made the U.S. team. She went on to represent the U.S. at four Olympics and even carried the flag in 1972.
Fikotová’s experience of moving to the U.S. was markedly different from what happened to the Hungarians who defected at the same Olympics. For starters, by the Olympic rules at the time, athletes couldn’t change national allegiance for political reasons. The only way for somebody who had represented one country to compete for another was if a woman changed her nationality by marriage. So while Fikotová could throw the discus for the U.S., Hungarian athletes had no recourse. Ördög went on to set an American record in the breaststroke, but there was no way she could ever swim in the Olympics again. Quite a few of the Hungarians who defected to much fanfare in 1956 subsequently decided to return quietly to Hungary and resume their former lives. Their stories offer a great illustration of the hard choices that faced ordinary people who got caught up in Cold War rivalries.
Do you anticipate any crossover into the course from more recent Olympics, and even the current Olympics?
KHF: While it’s tricky to talk about the ongoing Olympics from a historical framework, I do plan to bring my course all the way into the 21st century. My students will get to evaluate whether host cities have lived up to the promises they have made about using the Olympics as a catalyst for urban transformation. And we’ll talk about the ways that the Olympics have legitimized authoritarian regimes and examine how activists have articulated calls to boycott the games.
All of these are themes that have been building over the entire quarter. I recently talked about William May Garland’s plans to use the 1932 Summer Olympics to build Los Angeles. You have to start there in order to make sense of London’s efforts to rejuvenate the East End or Paris’s campaign to restore the Seine. By the time we talk about calls to boycott the Olympics in 2014 and 2022, we will have already discussed boycott efforts — successful or unsuccessful — in 1936, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988.
All this history matters especially much right now because our own country is gearing up to be the next Olympic host. I know my students are going to watch the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — in fact, one of them has entered the lottery to buy tickets. When they do, I need them to be empowered to look beyond the headlines. I want them to understand that all the controversies that will inevitably swirl around those games spring from 130 years of contentious, messy historical precedent.
For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu.