Against the Olympics 1

Part One: From Rugby to Berlin

The modern Olympic Games have their origins in a particular vision of the social role of sport, common among Europe’s elites in the nineteenth century, which saw sport as a part of a broader social trend towards a muscular Christianity. This vision was encapsulated in the book Tom Brown’s School Days, which celebrated the tenure of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, a prestigious private school in Warwickshire which is, of course, the origin of the eponymous football code (an Olympic sport until 1924, and again from 2016 in its seven-a-side form). The book was popular across the British Empire, but it also found an audience in France, whose education system was in the process of being democratised and secularised. It was there that the Victorian sporting culture epitomised by Thomas Arnold would combine with a streak of pacifist bourgeois internationalism to spark the revival of an ancient Greek tradition.

The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, came from a noble family but was part of a milieu of right-of-centre republicans dedicated to reforming France’s elite education system along English lines. His admiration of everything English extended to its sports: he refereed the first French rugby championship final, and wanted cricket included in the Olympics. His idealistic vision of sport was commendable: the purpose of the Olympics, he said, was “not to win but to take part; for the essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well”. He demonstrated a humanism rendered more touching by the geopolitical tension of his times – in 1912, two years before the outbreak of war, he submitted an anonymous entry in the name of Germany which earned them a gold medal in the Olympic literature competition. But the movement which he founded bore the birthmarks of the Victorian-era idea of sport as muscular Christianity, and the International Olympic Committee was dominated from the start by Europe’s aristocrats.

Baron de Coubertin: anglophile extraordinaire.

European elites at the time usually viewed sport as an activity to be enjoyed exclusively by themselves, and to this end, made use of various restrictions to prevent the working class from getting involved. The centrepiece of this class apartheid was the insistence on amateurism. When workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire began taking to rugby, for example, the sport’s rulers were hostile. They had seen what had transpired in soccer, where tolerance of professionalism had allowed northern clubs to win multiple FA Cups and then to form a professional league. When simply banning player payments didn’t work, the authorities tried banning the collection of gate takings and banning the playing of ten-a-side and twelve-a-side games until their intransigence caused the schism of 1895, which divided their sport into (amateur, southern, and elitist) union and (professional, northern, and democratic) league.

Other sports were just as prone to elite attempts at class cleansing. In mid-nineteenth-century England, industrialists and priests campaigned against traditional ‘folk football’ games, in many ways the precursors of soccer, as they distracted workers from their employment, and because they had historically often been used as methods of political protests. (Eighteenth-century land enclosures in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire had been protested by the playing of folk football games, and authorities charged some of the participants with rioting.) In addition, institutional sexism prevented women from being able to take part in sport. Spooked by the large crowds which had attended women’s soccer during the First World War (a phenomenon symbiotic with the suffragette movement), the Football Association enacted its infamous ban in 1921, locking English women out of the sport until 1969. The Olympic movement reproduced these inequalities: speaking in 1894, de Coubertin declared that his Games would be an “exultation of male athleticism…with female applause as a reward”, and women would not be permitted to compete in the Games until 1928.

Even though historians have unearthed quotes which show that Coubertin was not staunchly opposed to professionalism, his movement certainly was. After winning gold medals for the United States in pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics, Jim Thorpe was banned from future competition after it was discovered that he had played two games of professional baseball – which didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1992! (Thorpe went on to have a distinguished sporting career, however – he played in the NFL in its early seasons and led a Native American version of the Harlem Globetrotters.) During the Cold War, the ban on professionalism served the shameful purpose of forcing amateur Western teams to compete against full-strength national teams and top-class athletes from communist countries, and wasn’t lifted until the lure of television broadcast rights revenue forced the IOC to rethink its fidelity to the amateur ideals.

The Olympic movement’s self-image, and the contradictions abundant therein, were perhaps best captured in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. Released in the same year that the Olympics were opened to professional athletes, it tells the story of a group of British runners competing in the 1924 Games in Paris, and glorifies the self-sacrifice of amateur athletes (all of whom come from privileged enough backgrounds to attend Cambridge). When one of the runners receives coaching, he is subjected to the usual accusations that he has embarked on the slippery slope towards professionalism. Another refuses to compete on a Sunday, forcing him to navigate a conflict between his Christian faith and his patriotism; he later gives up sport to practice his life’s true calling: missionary work in China. His quarrels with the British Olympic authorities presage the way in which national interest (as interpreted by state-funded and state-sanctioned governing bodies) would increasingly come to overwhelm the Olympic movement’s ostensible idealism. The film’s bad guys are the American runners, whose intense training methods and will to win are the foil against which the British athletes’ gentlemanly values are contrasted. But as always with the amateur ideal, the class inequalities are passed over: the film omits the fact that the governing body for athletics in Britain historically excluded “mechanics, artisans and labourers” – that is, the working class – from its competitions.

When Baron de Coubertin established the IOC, its mode of governance (a self-appointing global committee of dignitaries) and its location in famously neutral Switzerland served to evoke comparisons with other worldwide social and cultural organisations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or the various pacifist movements. It was these features which made the Olympic movement attractive to reactionary regimes seeking to use the IOC’s political neutrality to present themselves as rule-abiding members of the international community. While Stalin initially continued the Soviet policy of self-imposed isolation from the Olympic family and entertained the idea of challenging the official Olympic movement by promoting the Red Sport International, Hitler opted to use the Games for this purpose. When the Nazis came to power the IOC expected that it would have to hold the 1936 Games elsewhere than in Berlin, but the Nazis, who had earlier denounced the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as an “infamous festival dominated by Jews”, saw the propaganda value in them.

An early example of Olympic commercialisation: “one people, one Reich, one drink”.

The Berlin Olympics (and their winter counterpart, held the same year in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen) provoked a backlash among progressive people everywhere. In the United States, future IOC President Avery Brundage blamed “misguided Jews” for spoiling the Nazis’ plans to use the Games as propaganda. (Brundage would later be instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union into the Olympics, and went into bat for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia before it was banned from the 1972 Games.) As the Olympic movement was dominated by the sort of conservative who supported appeasement of Hitler and non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and who viewed the Nazi regime as a bulwark against the communist threat supposedly facing Europe, the result was obvious, and forty-nine countries participated in the Games with only Spain and the Soviet Union dissenting. The spectacle that ensued – athletes giving Nazi salutes, the snub of Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, etc. – was made possible by the IOC’s apolitical character, and by the similarities between Nazi racial ideology and the Victorian-era muscular Christianity which so inspired de Coubertin.