Book Review: The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. By David Goldblatt. W.W. Norton; 516 pages; $29.95. Macmillan; £20.

[avinash shahi]

IN 1892, Baron de Coubertin, a French educator and historian, called
for the restoration of the Olympic games, hoping that they would
promote peace and also help achieve his decidedly conservative
political aims. De Coubertin considered the games a way to promote
ideals of manliness. He argued that women’s sport was “the most
unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate” and that the games
should be reserved for men.
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21702736-sobering-history-how-olympic-games-evolved-fanfare
s David Goldblatt shows in an elegant and ambitious new study. The
International Olympic Committee (IOC) has never wavered from its
underlying conservatism. Taiwan preserved its place in the Olympics
far longer than it did in the United Nations. Ludicrously, the IOC
maintained the “hypocritical and ultimately forlorn” pretence of
amateurism until 1988—even as Soviet athletes were amateurs in name
only. And from 1928 until 1968, there were no women’s races of more
than 200 metres because it made them look too tired. It took until
1984 for women to make up one-fifth of competing athletes.

If the Olympics have been a force for wider good, this has often been
in spite of the IOC rather than because of it. In Mexico City in 1968,
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-American athletes who had
just won medals in the 200 metres, gave the Black Power salute. Avery
Brundage, the American president of the IOC, ordered the delegation to
expel the athletes. They did. South Africa had been excluded from the
Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policy, but in 1968 the IOC
at first gave the nation the all-clear, before protests forced it to
back down.

At every turn, the Olympics has allowed itself to be manipulated by
governments, including appalling regimes. Ahead of the 1936 games in
Berlin, the chairman of the American Olympic Committee concluded that
there was no case for a boycott as there was no discrimination in
German sport. Nazi Germany, which had initially been reluctant to play
host, soon realised the huge potential benefits: it is estimated that
more was spent on the Berlin games than all the previous Olympics
combined. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi entourage attended every day. More
recently, the IOC has allowed governments to hide their problems from
view during the games—after Atlanta submitted its bid for the 1996
games, homeless people were even locked up—and to trample over the
rights of their citizens. Construction before the Beijing games in
2008 forced more than 1m people out of their homes.

In crude financial terms, hosting is a disaster: the 2004 games in
Athens cost the Greek government about $16 billion (about 5% of the
government’s total debt) and the swimming complex remains unused. Mr
Goldblatt reckons that, of the 17 Olympic tournaments held between the
second world war and 2012, only the one in Los Angeles, in 1984,
actually made a profit. Moreover, the idea that the games makes a host
nation more athletic has no foundation. In Britain, fewer people do
sport now than did before the Olympics in 2012. Little wonder, then,
that a “Nolympics” movement has built up, made of protesters against
hosting the games.

Another dark side of the sport can be seen in the way athletes, often
at the behest of their national Olympic committees, have used
performance-enhancing drugs. This kind of cheating began in the 1930s,
if not earlier, though the IOC did not introduce drug testing until
1968. As the recent Russian doping scandal highlights, drug use
remains all too prevalent. So far, this has not undermined the
popularity of the games. In 1912 de Coubertin created a poetry contest
and chose as the winner a poem he had written himself, which included
the words, “O sport you are justice!” His view of the Olympics was
never accurate; now the games seem more imperilled than ever.


--
Avinash Shahi
Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU