Against the Olympics 2

Part Two: Homage to Barcelona

In the early twentieth century, working-class people around the world often controlled their own cultural institutions – schools, theatres, libraries, clubs, etc. Sport was no exception, and there existed thousands of autonomous working-class sports clubs which existed outside of the official, IOC-affiliated national and international sporting bodies. This movement organised its own governing bodies, federations, and tournaments, and at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, its multi-sport festivals attracted more participants than the Olympic Games. These events superficially resembled the Olympics, but with a few key differences – national flags and anthems were replaced by the red flag and ‘The Internationale’, and ‘national’ teams didn’t always conform to actual state boundaries (eg., Catalans, Basques, Alsatians, and the Jewish diaspora competed under their own identities). Moreover, they welcomed the nations which had lost the First World War, whom the IOC excluded from the official Olympics of 1920 (and also from those of 1924, in the case of Germany).

(The Soviet Union, whose leaders shared the priggish yet hypocritical hostility to professionalism of Rugby schoolmasters, also set up a parallel sporting structure [the Red Sport International] with its own counter-Olympics [the Spartakiads], but made its peace with the Olympic movement after the Second World War.)

The workers’ sports movement faced hostility from governments, who diverted funds into mainstream sport, yet its reach was still impressive. In 1929, the governing body for workers’ sports clubs in Germany (which was linked with the non-communist left) boasted 1.2 million members, while another quarter of a million belonged to a separate, communist-aligned body. The combined state funding received by both bodies from the Weimar government was less than one-sixth of that received by mainstream sporting bodies. When the two federations were liquidated by the Nazis in 1933, the IOC, despite its rhetoric about placing participation over politics, remained silent.

When the Popular Front government came to power in Spain in early 1936, it launched one of only two official boycotts of the Berlin Olympics, and set about organising an alternative event in concert with the Catalan government. Building on the strength and size of the workers’ sports movement, it invited competitors from clubs run by unions and leftist political parties to Barcelona (the runner-up to Berlin in the IOC’s bidding process for 1936) for the People’s Olympiad, pencilled in for the 19^th through 26^th of July. Athletes from twenty-two countries arrived in the city, including German and Italian exiles, members of Jewish sporting clubs, representatives of Spain’s autonomous communities, and athletes from French and Spanish colonies in North Africa. Only the Spanish government officially endorsed its delegation to the Olympiad, though the French Popular Front government (whose Socialist and Radical members had been split on the question of boycotting Berlin) contributed funds. In an attempt to move beyond the inter-state character of the Olympic movement, events were to be contested in three separate categories: national, regional, and city teams, the latter sort intended to evoke the competition between city-states which took place in the ancient Greek Olympics.

A poster for the 1936 People’s Olympiad.

The People’s Olympiad never took place, as General Franco’s coup d’etat forced it to be cancelled. Apart from one more Workers’ Olympiad to be held in Antwerp in 1937, it would be the last attempt at organising an autonomous working-class multi-sport festival. Deprived of the chance to compete on the sporting field, many of the athletes took up arms for the republican cause in the ensuing Civil War.

Today, the official narrative of the Olympic movement omits any mention of the pre-WWII workers’ sports movement. Nevertheless, its existence serves as reminder that large swathes of humanity once rejected the Olympic ethic, grounded in the elitist sporting culture of nineteenth century English private schools and masked by an apolitical, bourgeois internationalism coupled with a ridiculous can’t-we-all-just-get-along pacifism. Instead, socialists, communists, anarchists, and other leftists organised their own sporting clubs and bodies, and competed in the spirit of a different set of values.