Professor Chris Young was co-organizer of a major international conference which was held from 21-23 May in collaboration with the German Historical Institute at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The event, entitled 'Spanning and Spinning the Globe', was the first in a series of three (with similar conferences scheduled to take place in New York in October 2015 and Cambridge 2016), and forms part of 'The Global History of Sport in the Cold War' project, which he is running along with Professor Bob Edelman (UC San Diego) and the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington. The conference attracted leading experts from across Europe and North America, and sought to pose critical challenges to the history of sport by moving away from supposed stereotypical binaries and following Odd Arne Westad's general model of the Cold War as a set of competing globalization projects with different ideological and geopolitical interests.

Copies of the programme are available in English and Russian.