Commentary The politicization of sport was always considered a perversion of the virtues that made athletic endeavors special: vigorous, merit-based competition; fair play; old-school sportsmanship; and contests devoid of malign external influences. Hence, the 1936 Berlin Olympics served for decades as a teachable moment about the tragic interweaving of sports and politics. Generations of sports enthusiasts grew up appreciating that, in a stadium built to celebrate the Nazis’ Third Reich, Adolf Hitler’s leveraging of the Berlin Games to promote Aryan supremacy failed spectacularly. It failed due to 18 courageous black American athletes, led by the legendary Jesse Owens, who collectively won 14 medals. Fast forward 44 years and the International Olympic Committee’s position was that the American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a boycott protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, was an inappropriate means to achieve a political end. The IOC accurately forecast that the boycott’s victims would …