Against the Olympics 3

Part Three: Black Power, Black September, and Black Africa: the Olympics during the Cold War

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a number of political conflicts which found themselves fought out under the Olympic rings. The 1968 Games in Mexico City were marred by the shooting of anti-government student protestors, and then played host to the famous ‘Black Power’ salute of two African-American medallists. Four years later, eleven Israeli athletes were massacred by the Palestinian ‘Black September’ terrorist group. In 1976, the clash between the West and the non-aligned/post-colonial world provided the backdrop for a boycott of the Games by African countries, an action taken in response to Western sporting appeasement of apartheid South Africa (most notably the selection of all-white All Black teams for away tests against the Springboks). And in 1980 and 1984, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in tit-for-tat boycotts of each other’s Games. On each of these occasions, the response of the IOC was to reassert its apolitical character, which meant in practice that it called for the suspension of all political and social conflict which might interfere with the running of its showpiece event.

That salute.

As with its dealing with the Nazis before and during the 1936 Olympics, the IOC’s professed political apathy caused it to sacrifice any moral compass in favour of bringing as many of the world’s regimes under its banner as possible. Under Avery Brundage’s tenure as its President, the organisation brought the Soviet Union and its satellites into the Olympic fold despite their shameless flouting of the ban on professionalism, tried to please both sides of the Beijing-Taiwan conflict over Chinese sovereignty, and held off for as long as possible international pressure to exclude the racially-selected sporting teams of South Africa and Rhodesia. When the IOC voted in 1972, against the wishes of its President, to bar Rhodesia from attending the Munich Games of that year, Brundage was furious. On the day that the Israeli athletes were killed, he publicly compared the vote to the killings, and told the world that he had been on the losing side of the vote because of “naked political blackmail”. Once again, any attempt to bring up questions of morality and human rights was ‘politics’, but the IOC bestowing its blessing on all sorts of questionable regimes was apparently not.

Although the Olympic movement during this period operated in a world radically different from that which existed in the first half of the twentieth century, many of the old sporting certainties remained, and the world of Tom Brown’s School Days was still the vision of sport adhered to by the keepers of the Olympic flame. In the 1972 Winter Games at Sapporo, Austrian skier Karl Schranz was banned for professionalism after he appeared at a soccer match in a sponsor’s t-shirt. (Such heavy-handedness from the authorities was reminiscent of Jim Thorpe being stripped of his two gold medals in 1912, or of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which would send spies into soccer and rugby crowds to catch players who were breaking its rules by attending English sports.) When the Games would eventually go professional, it would not be because of the irrelevance and elitism of the Victorian amateur ethic, but because of the replacement of that system of values by the profit-seeking logic of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.

In the decades following the Second World War, the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War made the Olympics into the perfect stage for states to gain a propaganda victory for their ideology, turning every Games into a re-run of Berlin in 1936. The desire for national prestige led governments to spend public funds to develop athletes (eg. the Australian Institute of Sport was established after the country’s failure to win any gold medals at Montreal in 1976). Meanwhile, the spiralling cost of hosting the event was becoming apparent to voters and taxpayers – Denver had to relinquish its hosting of the 1976 Winter Olympics to Innsbruck after a ballot initiative to raise the necessary tax revenue was rejected. The lure of television revenue and the political rivalries which fuelled Olympic competition would inevitably lead to professionalism and commercialism. To get there, however, the IOC would renew its acquaintance with fascism, and turn to the leadership of a man from the city which fascism deprived of the opportunity to host the People’s Olympiad way back in 1936.