It is an irony of fate that the Olympic boycott pitted two principled men against each other. Like Lord Killanin, Jimmy Carter had taken a strong, moral stand against the shortcomings of his society and in the end profited from his convictions. The two men came from backgrounds that, while not diametrically opposite, were still significantly different.

Carter grew up on a farm in Georgia. “My most persistent impression as a farm boy was of the earth,” he recalled many years later. “There was a closeness, almost an immersion, in the sand, loam, and red clay that seemed natural, and constant.” Neighbors in the countryside were few and far between, and Carter described his life as “isolated but not lonely.” Much like Killanin’s Ireland, Carter’s Georgia still harbored grievances about history and particularly toward the nation’s capital. In the case of Georgia, the festering wound was the defeat in the U.S. Civil War. “Although I was born more than half a century after the war was over, it was a living reality in my life,” Carter recalled. “I grew up in one of the families whose people could not forget that we had been conquered.”