When the International Olympic Committee awarded Beijing the 2008 Summer Games, the decision was widely publicized as a move that would promote reforms in China, improve its human rights situation and eventually open China to the world. This is not unlike the rationale for awarding the 1980 Summer Games to Moscow.
Interestingly enough, in case of the Soviet Union, this logic seems to have worked: The oppressive regime disintegrated just 11 years after Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev presided over the Olympics opening ceremony in Moscow in July 1980. If the connection is there, we should see the dictatorship in China collapse in 2019. I would like to live long enough to see the 1.3 billion-person nation become finally free, but I doubt I will. First, I am a smoker, and second, the 2008 Summer Games may actually strengthen totalitarianism in China.
For starters, I am not sure the 1980 Olympics directly contributed to the demise of the hammer and sickle. While these infamous tools were dumped only 11 years later, the proximity of event A to event B does not necessarily mean the former has caused the latter. I will allow myself a short 1976-1980 memoir to illustrate the point.