Against the Olympics 4

Part Four: Corruption, Consumerism, Doping, Repression…all brought to you by Adidas and Coca-Cola

After rising through the ranks of various national and international sporting bodies, not to mention the ruling party in General Franco’s Spain, and serving a stint as his country’s ambassador in Moscow, Juan Antonio Samaranch was elected President of the IOC in 1981. His immediate program for reforming the Olympic movement included lifting the ban on professional athletes in 1981, and the decision made two years later to open up the use of the five-rings symbol to corporate sponsorship. (An IOC official at the time called the Olympic emblem “the most valuable unexploited symbol in the world”.) At the beginning of his tenure, the IOC held assets worth less than a quarter of a million (U.S.) dollars; by 1996 it would be worth US$100 million. For the right to televise the five Games held during the 2000s, NBC would pay US$3.5 billion.

With Samaranch at the helm, the Olympic movement became a model of neo-liberalism: television rights were maximised, the efforts made by bidding city authorities to suck up to the IOC reached ridiculous proportions (resulting in various bribery scandals), and funds were diverted away from activities which didn’t earn a profit (eg. the Paralympics, which receives less funding than the IOC’s stamp collection). The IOC exploits its coubertiniste heritage to endow it with moral respectability: it likes to be seen leading the fight against performance-enhancing drugs or uniting the two Koreas under one flag at an Opening Ceremony. But under the surface, it hasn’t changed much since it acted as a useful idiot for Hitler in the 1930s.

Juan Antonio Samaranch: franquista-turned-neoliberal.

By awarding the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, the IOC completed a dubious hat-trick: it had awarded its showpiece event to the three most murderous regimes in human history (after Berlin in 1936 and Moscow in 1980). Any attempts to shed light on China’s human rights record were dismissed as attempts to politicise sport, and when Russia invaded Georgia during the event, the IOC was quick to insist that Russian and Georgian athletes show the utmost camaraderie towards one another (fearing, one would suspect, a repeat of the ‘blood in the water’ USSR-Hungary water polo match at Melbourne in 1956). Just as it did with Jews in 1936, Mexican students in 1968, and Afghans suffering under Soviet imperialism in 1980, the IOC used its neutral, apolitical guise to tell the victims of oppression to shut up for the duration of the Games, lest their protests upset the artificial atmosphere of international solidarity and lessen the value of the ‘product’ being lapped up by the television audiences.

The Olympics don’t need to be held behind the Iron Curtain or the Great Firewall to be sites of political repression. The use of force by authorities against those who disrupt their self-congratulatory carnival has become a feature of every Olympiad, and even in liberal democracies, the full force of the national security state is thrown behind the goal of protecting the Olympic brand. Prior to the Vancouver Games in 2010, Canadian authorities detained journalists who questioned the purpose of the Olympics. (Australia wasn’t immune to this either – I can still remember former Democrats’ Senator Andrew Murray’s passionate defence of civil liberties against the calls of the Howard government for the passage of ‘shoot-to-kill’ laws in the run-up to Sydney 2000.) With the reputations of entire nations on the line, the logic of neo-liberal capitalism (which, despite its free market rhetoric, is more accurately termed neo-mercantilism) allows governments to use the hosting of the Olympics as an excuse for a bit of old-fashioned authoritarian social control.

The run-up to this year’s London games has witnessed all the usual hallmarks of Olympism: the displacement of the little people whose existence gets in the way of the technocrats’ plans for all-seater state-of-the-art facilities (probably to be torn down after the Games anyway), the use of anti-terror-style legislation to prevent disruptions by protestors, and the use of the spectacle by tin-pot demagogues to make some political point or other (eg. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who threatened to boycott London because the ‘2012’ on the Games’ logo looked too much like ‘ZION’). The push for a single UK soccer team has been used to bash Scottish and Welsh nationalisms, while the continuing oil-fuelled dispute over the sovereignty of the Falklands/Malvinas has made itself felt in the controversy over an Olympics-related Argentine advertisement filmed on the islands.

When the athletes parade around in the Opening Ceremony and ‘Er Majesty proclaims ‘let the Games begin’, we would do well to remember the victims of Olympism: the People’s Olympiad participants who died in the Spanish Civil War, the Jews and others massacred because of the political capital granted to Hitler by the staging of the Berlin Games, the students killed in Mexico City in 1968, and the Georgians killed by Putin’s goons in 2008.

(Credit to British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, whose book on corruption in the IOC [The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money, and Drugs in the Modern Olympics] I first read as a teenager and which inspired my critique of the Olympic movement.)