Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter dies at 100 - ESPN

Former President Jimmy Carter died Sunday afternoon at the age of 100.

The Carter Center confirmed that Carter died peacefully and surrounded by his family at his home in Plains, Georgia. At 100, Carter was the longest-living president in U.S. history.

A lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, he was the first president to welcome a Super Bowl champion to the White House (the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1980, who visited alongside the World Series champion Pittsburgh Pirates).

Carter also was president in 1980 when he announced that the United States would boycott the Olympic Summer Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. More than 60 nations ultimately boycotted the Games, including West Germany, Japan and China. Writing in his 2010 book, «White House Diary,» Carter observed that in hindsight, with respect to the U.S. team, «one of my most difficult decisions was supporting the boycott of the Summer Olympics.»

In his presidential memoir, «Keeping Faith,» Carter also discussed the choice not to send a U.S. team to Moscow. The boycott of the Moscow Olympics led to a retaliatory Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics that included more than a dozen countries.

«For the Soviet Union, the Moscow Olympics was much more than a sporting event,» Carter wrote. «They saw it as a triumph for communism and a vivid demonstration to other nations of the world that the Soviets represented the true spirit of the ancient Olympics.»

After the boycott was formalized with a vote by the U.S. Olympic Committee, Carter invited the entire American team to the White House, where each athlete got a brief handshake, posed for a picture with the president, and received the Congressional Gold Medal.

In a statement from the