510 JUTTA BRAUN
ernment.^49 Sport journalists had also complained about a “spiral of si-
lence” that seemed to be working in favor of the boycott.^50 In fact, silence
reigned in many places—for instance, on television. West German televi-
sion, which was still dominated by the monopoly of the public television
stations, reduced its coverage of the Olympics to a minimum. As a result
of a joint decision by the ARD and ZDF public television channels, only
fi fteen minutes of the Olympic Games in Moscow were broadcast on each
channel daily instead of the usual ten to twelve hours of programming.
Only six minutes of the three-hour-long opening ceremony were aired
on German TV. Some smart entrepreneurs recorded the GDR coverage
on video cassettes and then sold them on the domestic market in West
Germany. Likewise, the DSB had the entirety of the GDR’s television cov-
erage of the Olympic Games archived on video cassettes in the Rhön
region near the border.^51
Similar to Willi Daume, albeit under the conditions of a completely dif-
ferent system, the East German sports director Manfred Ewald protested
against a revenge boycott against the Games in Los Angeles that was
being mandated by the Soviet Union, and which the GDR was expected
to follow. As Ewald remembered it, he did have a disagreement with Erich
Honecker about the decision, but he had no chance but to comply in
the end because Honecker had pointed out the economic diffi culties that
the country would face if it marched out of tune with the boycott of the
socialist front.^52 At its session on 10 May 1984 in East Berlin, the NOC of
the GDR reluctantly bowed to solidarity with its big brother and withdrew
from the Olympics under the pretense that adequate security precautions
had not been taken.^53 Just as four years earlier, the ones who suff ered
most from the boycott were the athletes themselves. Not surprisingly,
some of their expressions of displeasure reached the ears of the Western
media. The shot put athlete Udo Beyer, for example, spoke of a “hard
decision,” while the swimmer Roland Matthes stressed “how painful” it
was not to be able to participate.^54
The trend toward using the participation or even the hosting of sports
events to make a symbolic political statement that had emerged in the
East as well as the West also reappeared as the 1988 Olympic Games
approached. The Seoul Olympics had also been in danger of a boycott
because South Korea did not maintain diplomatic relations with the so-
cialist countries. This led to some strange bedfellows in the run-up to
the Games because the “class enemies” Willi Daume and Manfred Ewald
both had a vested interest in ensuring that the “Games would continue.”
At a confi dential meeting of the two in East Berlin in June 1984, Ewald
proposed that they should suggest to the IOC president Antonio Sama-
ranch that the city of Munich could be an alternative host. Daume, who