Lincoln Allison. World Affairs. Volume 157, Issue 2, Fall 1994.
The end of the Cold War does not signal an end to the politically competitive nature of the Olympic Games. Less developed countries and burgeoning superpowers such as China will regard the Olympics as a forum to showcase the triumphs of their athletes and their societies. Furthermore, income from endorsements will ensure that cities will continue to compete for the opportunity to host the games. The decline of amateurism and the end of the US-Soviet rivalry has not made the games politically or internationally irrelevant.
Contemporary cultural theories that stress the potency of invented and selected traditions could select no better subject than the Olympic Games. The games are a kind of super-example of invented tradition because they have erected one myth on another, a fictional account of how the modern games developed on top of a set of beliefs about the ancient games, which are more than half fantasy.
The ancient games started in 1370 B.C. or 776 B.C., depending on which sources you believe, and lasted until either A.D. 261 or Theodosius’ ban in A.D. 393. They were not amateur affairs, but involved professional wrestlers and athletes. There was no ethos that taking part was of great value in itself; winning was what mattered and the “performance principle,” as it is now called, was always in evidence. The Olympiad was not particularly a sporting event, but a religious and cultural festival, the only overlap with the modern conception being athletics and wrestling. The “truce” for the Olympiad did not suspend war or political machinations, but merely allowed safe passage to the event.
The idea that the Olympiad represented something ideal and universal that could, therefore, be translated into modern terms, is mildly fantastic. It presents, for example, an obvious problem of the compatibility with Christianity, as was evident in the composition and singing of a “hymn to Apollo” at the Congress in Paris in 1894 that organized the first modern games. The general context in which all this assumed some plausibility was nineteenth century vulgar classicism, which held deeply admiring attitudes towards antiquity. Personally, I think it is quite difficult to actually read, say, Thucydides, Tacitus, or Suetonius and maintain the assumption that life in antiquity was more worthy, noble, or honest than life in modern times; for the most part it seems to be even more squalid, corrupt, and lacking in a coherent idea of worth. But clearly many people in the nineteenth century did elevate antiquity in this way. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who successfully founded the modern Olympics, was one of them, as were his predecessors (at least five of them, Greek and English) who had tried to revive the games between 1850 and 1890.
The classical heritage of the games remains something of an embarrassment in some respects and there are regular attempts to revive the place of poetry and other activities that we would now classify as the arts in the Olympiad. Sometimes they even take place, though the attempts in Los Angeles in 1984 collapsed through lack of sponsorship.
But the myth of antiquity to which Coubertin subscribed was nothing compared with the modern Olympic myth. This is a form of the “Golden Age” syndrome. It says, at any one time, that the games once represented everything that was noble in sport: the eschewing of material gain, participation for its own sake, a spirit of sportsmanship that left behind ideology and politics on a lower plane, or a belief that all people could compete equally. In fact, De Coubertin’s ideas, at least at the time the Olympics were founded, were dominated by a desire to revive France’s power and credibility, so badly damaged by defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In part, he saw the vigorous, muscular culture of the English public schools as the solution to French problems. He was an aristocratic elitist, who saw these same institutions as a defense against the egalitarianism of the age; sport was for the few, for gentlemen.
The creation of the Olympics was partly a reaction to the development of modern professional sport in Britain (and, to a lesser extent, in America) but it was an unashamedly snobbish reaction. De Coubertin never believed, nor did he say, that “the important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part”; the comment was made by an American bishop in relation to the 1908 games. Citius, Altius, Fortius was not an ancient motto, but originated with a schoolteacher friend of De Coubertin. There was always personal material gain by athletes: Spyridon Loues, for saving Greek honor by winning the marathon in Athens in 1896, was awarded, inter alia, free drinks, meals, and shoe shines for life and the hand of a magnate’s daughter in marriage. Professionals were actually included in 1900, though in separate competitions.
There was never the slightest question of either nationalistic rivalry being absent or of political interests refraining from using the games for their own purposes. The pre-1914 games were all marked by bitterness and accusations of cheating between the British and the Americans, while the “militaristic” Germans made themselves deeply unpopular. The use of the Olympics to legitimize the regime of the host country goes back to the beginning, to the enthusiasm of the Greek monarchy in 1896, and stretches, notoriously, through the “Nazi” Berlin Olympics of 1936 and on to the bolstering of a decaying and stagnant Communist regime in Moscow in 1980. In each case, the pattern is the same: the regime uses the games to show its domestic constituency how good its standing is in the rest of the world. The “bottom line” is internal legitimacy, but that can be achieved only by a demonstration of foreign acquiescence. Thus, one of the fairest and most common accusations put against the Olympics is their “moral bankruptcy” or “ideological promiscuity”: the games have faithfully and enthusiastically served the causes of Greek monarchism, German Nazism, Russian communism, and American capitalism.
Yet the myth remains potent. However frequently the fantasy of previous Olympic virtue is deconstructed by a small bank of sports scholars, their carpings are blown away in the gale of adulatory commentary that accompanies each games. And the myth is absolutely necessary; if the Olympics are not everything in sport, then really they are nothing. Consider the ten most popular sports in the world. It depends on your criteria, of course, which might include participation, desire to participate, live spectating, TV spectating, money generated, etc. But the following is a reasonable stab at the top ten, though not in order: soccer, baskeball, horse racing, boxing, tennis, cricket, golf, American football, baseball, and rugby (if you include both codes of the game). Motor racing might substitute for, say, rugby on some criteria if you are emphasizing interest or money rather than participation.
Of these ten or eleven, only three have been established Olympic sports and they (soccer, basketball and boxing) have taken place at a much lower or more junior level in the Olympics as compared with the highest established level. Synchronized swimming, weightlifting, walking, and diverse varieties of wrestling are no substitute for sport with widespread grassroots and a global following. Only if it is believed to be a higher, nobler, purer form of sport can Olympic sports even begin to compare with major professional sports. Insofar as the myth becomes tarnished, the very existence of the games must be in doubt.
That the myth is not as healthy as it was can be attributed to two related factors: the collapse of amateurism and the collapse of Soviet communism. I will take the latter as the most dramatic and significant phenomenon. (There is, of course, a third factor to tarnish the image, which I will merely assert: the relatively simple athleticism of the major Olympic sports has proved very difficult to defend from drug abuse and the consequent scandals. As they say, “If you don’t take it, you won’t make it.”)
The Olympics we know, the games of living memory, are the product of a Soviet decision to seek membership in the Olympic movement, which was granted in May 1951 in time for the Helsinki Olympics the following year. This reversed a previous policy of outright hostility to the “bourgeois” Olympic games, which were portrayed as an elitist, nationalistic opiate. The pre-war Soviet Union had, to some extent, fostered wholesale alternatives to Western sport (such as Komsomol members being taught games about smuggling revolutionary propaganda through enemy lines), but also developed its own, communist, institutions for conventional sport through the “Workers’ Olympics” and “Spartakiads” that were organized by international movements throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, the Moscow Spartakiad of 1928 was probably better attended than the Amsterdam Olympics of the same year.
Historians are mildly mysterious about the extreme Soviet volte-face. Henry Morton says that Soviet opposition to the Olympics just “melted away,” and other historians who have described Soviet sports policy offer very little more enlightenment. It was almost certainly Stalin’s personal decision, made in the post-war context, that seemed, from a Soviet perspective, to be entirely transformed from pre-war “encirclement” and was part of a strategy of Soviet participation in international organizations (like the UN). In general, Soviet military success and the highly profitable involvement (in geopolitical terms) in the alliance made participation rather than withdrawal seem more beneficial to Soviet interests. Jim Riordan has stressed that, from a Soviet point of view, given the cold war and the Western atomic bomb, there were very few outlets in which the Soviet Union could try to show the benefits of its form of society: sport was one and the space race (later) became another.
What is known is that the Soviet negotiators tried to make a number of conditions for membership. These included Russian as an official language, a guaranteed Soviet presence on important bodies, and the expulsion of “Fascist” Spain. All were refused, but they joined in any case. However, there was one condition that the Soviet Union could not meet by its very nature. National Olympic committees are required to be independent and autonomous bodies. Within the Soviet Union, that would have contradicted the fundamental doctrine, the real constitution, of the leading role of the party. In accepting the Soviets, the International Olympic Committee opted for its universalist aspirations over a fundamental principle.
In the alliance between Soviet communism and the Olympic movement, both sides were pretty loyal to each other. Soviet writing, for instance, portrayed De Coubertin—the conservative, imperialist, elitist French aristocrat—as “essentially progressive.” There are, admittedly, some Communist accounts of the Baron, especially from East Germany, and after Moscow’s failure to secure the 1976 games, that put him in a more predictable light from a Marxist-Leninist point of view. But the Russians generally portrayed him as a progressive and internationalist figure, whatever his other views.
It is true that De Coubertin’s views were complex and that they did evolve so that, for example, he regarded the Moscow Spartakiad and similar events as a triumph for the Olympic movement rather than a rival to it because they embodied the same values. The “internationalism” of De Coubertin was genuinely parallel to that of the Soviet ideologists. He extolled “patriotism,” for example, while eschewing “nationalism,” which was precisely the position outlined by Stalin in The Problem of the Nationalities.
Thus, the Soviet Union was always among the most virulent opponents of any attempt to remove the patriotic meaning (flags, medal tables, etc.) from the games and was generally (though not in relation to the Moscow games of 1980) opposed to the participation of stateless sportsmen. Similarly, although De Coubertin’s views on amateurism were relatively moderate, his dislike of “commercialism” was intense; in parallel fashion, the Soviet system regarded amateurism as something of a technicality, but purported to abhor commercialism.
What the Soviet Union got out of this alliance is something that is, ultimately, very difficult to assess. The system’s capacity to produce athletes, like its capacity to produce space rockets, cannot be doubted; it was by far the greatest medal winner in the Olympics, leading the table at every game except Helsinki (1952), Tokyo (1964), and Los Angeles (1984). In the latter, Soviet athletes did not compete. At Seoul in 1988, even its ideological little brother, East Germany, finished ahead of the United States and all other rivals. But this achievement was blatantly just a product of defining sport in Olympic terms and pouring enormous resources into it. Few Western sports fans were impressed by it: Americans saw top Soviet basketball players competing on teams on a level with college teams, while in Western Europe, where soccer is the dominant sport, the perception was of Soviet teams, drawn from the biggest pool of players in the world, failing to win as many international honors as the Dutch or the Portuguese. Indeed, there was something counterproductive about the Soviet sports image, with its hideously muscular infant gymnasts, its vast weight lifters and female shot-putters. The system never did produce a truly great performer in a sport popular in the West; there was no Pele or Garfield Sobers to show that the system allowed for individualism or charm. As rumors of drug abuse circulated and hardened, in precisely those sports on which the Soviet Union had chosen to concentrate, the image was further tarnished.
The sports system was not really designed to impress Westerners; it was principally for domestic and third world consumption. It did work domestically: even nationalists in the non-Russian Soviet republics have admitted to me that they felt a pride in the achievements of the “Soviet Motherland.” But it also created its own backlash. Sport had become a creature of the Soviet state; the system was not only elitist and discouraging to mere ordinary talents, but it cut off resources from ordinary people and allowed no grass roots to develop. Now much of the system is just eroding away, in a manner inconceivable in privately-based Western sport. Many sportsmen are reviled as over-prvilieged stooges of the regime; the coaches have retired or gone abroad. Despite its success in Barcelona in 1992, the Russian Federation can no more go on producing athletes in the present circumstances than its steel mills can go on producing their huge, costly output in market conditions.
The most fascinating figure in the Soviet-Olympic alliance was Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. Brundage was an American, a Republican, and isolationist who was wont to complain that he hadn’t had anyone to vote for since Coolidge and Hoover. But he was also an internationalist whose policy toward the Soviet Union has been described as that of a “fellow-traveler.” He played a direct part in getting the Communist countries into the Olympics and an indirect, but very real, part in getting the games to Moscow in 1980. He expressed deep admiration for the Soviet sports system, despite his fanatical opposition to professionalism and the notably “shamateur” status of Communist athletes, who received considerable material incentives for their performances and as students, service personnel, and members of the security forces, were not normally required to do anything other than sport for their salaries. He admired the “hardness” of Russian life and compared it with the “soft” United States.
Brundage’s general views can just about be made consistent: isolationism meant that America should be strong and autonomous, not interfering in the rest of the world’s affairs, while internationalism meant peaceful co-existence and support for international cultural and sporting organizations. But the real secret of his position is that, in common with other Olympic politicians, he believed that the movement was much more important, even on a higher plane, than mere ideologies and national interests. In one speech he said simply that “the Olympic movement today is perhaps the greatest social force in the world.” Brundage formed, almost personally, the bridge between the Soviet system and Western amateur values that shaped the post-war Olympics.
The Collapse of Amateurism
Successive Olympic leaders have reiterated, as an item of basic faith, that the games were about the true spirit of amateurism. But the amateur-professional distinction was always a complex question involving a great deal of hypocrisy. The Field commented in 1908: “On the whole the history of the Olympic endeavor may be taken as proof, and the new program as tantamount to a confession, that for practical purposes amateurism is indefinable….”
This comment was informed by half a century of British controversy; the issue of professionalism had been thrashed out during the development of modern sport. The sticking point had been “broken time,” the compensation of manual workers for loss of wages, but there were many other issues. What about people whose trade naturally involved an activity that was also a sport? The Thames watermen, who rowed passengers across the river, were an obvious case; the Amateur Rowing Association took the extreme view and banned all manual laborers from rowing, exposing a raw class basis for amateurism. (Jack Kelly, the father of Grace, was banned from the 1921 Henley Regatta as a former bricklayer even though he was the Olympic gold medallist.)
This problem took on a new dimension with the introduction of the Winter Olympics in 1924 because of the position of ski instructors. But what, for that matter, about the much larger class of “amateur” sportsmen who were professional teachers of physical education and coaches of games in the schools and the armed services? Or the amateur sportsmen whose success and prestige form the basis for a well paid career in another field, often, therefore, bringing them more material gain than the mere professional?
If De Coubertin was ambivalent about these issues and could see their ethical complexity, Brundage was a simple-minded fundamentalist. Professional athletes were, to him, “trained seals”; he played a part in the vendetta against Native American Jim Thorpe, who had beaten him (and everyone else) in the pentathlon at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912. He fought hard against the creeping professionalism of the Winter Olympics and its toleration by its own sports federations. Conversely, he accepted Communist “shamateurism” as an inescapable part of the way of life of their society.
Much of the politics of sport over the last century and a half can be seen as a struggle between an amateur-elite ethos and professional-commercial pressures. Brundage was one of the last great ideologues of the losing side. Communism may have undermined the credibility of amateurism, but the market destroyed it. The sheer amount of money to be made from televised sport has meant that, if the existing sports authorities were not prepared to sanction payment, the marketable competitors would simply go to those who would. The Wimbledon tennis championships, after some years of dwindling standards, acknowledged this in 1968 by becoming “open.” The post-Brundage Olympics have presented a bewildering variety of sophistry and hypocrisy: soccer players who were amateur by definition if under twenty-five years of age, ice-hockey players who qualified by not playing in the NHL, athletes who remained amateurs provided their winnings went into trust funds. As they say in Ireland, if you’re not confused, then you don’t understand it at all.
The key to understanding, at least for the basis of the complexity, is the power structure of the Olympic movement. It has two dimensions of federalism in that below the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a National Olympic Committee for each state, but also an international federation for each sport. Together with the local organizing committee for the particular games, they make up the “three legged stool” of Olympic power. The natural tendency is bound to be for the sports themselves to regulate amateurism in ways that they have found to be politically workable in other contexts. In the absence of a fundamentalist approach from the president of the IOC, that is what has happened: Juan Samaranch, president since 1980, has actively tolerated this and seems attracted by the idea of a world professional games. Thus, we get Steffi Graf and the “Dream Team”: a movement that prided itself on its amateur ethos, fostering some of the highest paid athletes in world history.
The Future of the Games
It was widely remarked that Juan Samaranch, in September 1993, announcing the choice of Sydney for the Olympic Games in the year 2000, could hardly bring himself to speak. His own preference for Beijing was well known, as was his belief that opting for the Chinese capital only four years after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, would have a liberalizing effect on China as, it was believed, allocating the games to Seoul for 1988 had on South Korea. The parallels with previous Olympic events were almost uncanny: here was yet another conservative aristocrat (with Francoist associations, this time) courting a Communist regime as his predecessors had courted Moscow and Nazi Berlin, apparently in the belief that the Olympic movement was something on a higher plane than regimes, which transcended and purified mere politics.
Yet the very purpose of the Olympic movement has now disappeared with the collapse of amateurism. Its main beneficiary, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. As a result, it lacks the drama and impetus it had in the cold war. Its mythology has been thoroughly deconstructed; it is threatened by drug scandals. It cannot reconstitute itself as a kind of World Professional Games (which Samaranch seems to favor) because the international federations of the major sports cannot fit it into their schedules and are jealous of their own power. Indeed, matters are going the other way, insofar as the one sport with a really widespread following for which the Olympics was the premier event, track and field athletics, is now holding world championships every two years. Logically, the Olympics should be on the skids.
But it probably isn’t. It is as important to the Chinese and certain Third World governments now as it used to be to the Russians. It is one of the few events, in some respects the only one, that seems to capture the spirit of a global village: Barcelona ’92 was the place to be. It has a powerful and crude symbolism to represent this status, like the torch and the eternal flame (introduced by the Nazis in 1936, in fact). There is now intense competition to get the games; Los Angeles, competing for 1984, had no competitors. The income from U.S. television for the summer games has soared: $2 million in 1964, $25 million in 1976, $225 million in 1984, though it has leveled off at around $400 million. Myths are deconstructed intellectually; the deconstructed myth may leave you muttering, “this is all nonsense, you know,” but with a tear in your eye. Olympic myth, with its universalism, historical dubiety, and claim to be on a higher plane, is in some respects parallel to that of the Roman Catholic Church. I would not bet on its decline.