AP WAS THERE: 1980 Olympics
EDITORS — With the Tokyo Olympics postponed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, The Associated Press is looking back at the history of Summer Games. This story was published in the Huntsville Times on August 7, 1980. The story is published as it appears in the newspaper.
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Life in Moscow may never be the same
Olympics May Cause Cultural Shock
By DAVID MINTHORN, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW (AP) — Life in Moscow is winding down after 16 days of Olympics euphoria, but Soviet society is likely to feel effects of the Summer Games for years to come.
Moscow was physically altered for the Olympics by construction of nine hotels and eight sports centers, and coats of bright paint on every major building.
Traffic is flowing freely again and open markets are crammed with fruits and vegetables with the lifting of domestic travel restrictions at the end of the Games last Sunday.
But there are other longterm aspects of staging the first Olympics competitions in a Communist-governed country.
The 1957 World Festival of Youth, the first mass influx of Westerners and their ideas to Moscow in the postwar era, is credited with giving a strong impetus to the post-Stalin liberalization period.
The effect could be much the same after the Moscow Olympics, some observers believe, even with significantly fewer Western teams and spectators because of the U.S.-led boycott to protest the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
At the least, many Soviet citizens are unlikely to soon forget the whiff of Western culture they got rubbing shoulders and swapping souvenirs with visitors at sports events.
Communist leaders undoubtedly breathed a collective sigh of relief after the foreigners began flowing home Sunday without causing any major incidents.
“Municipal bodies and...
