OLYMPICS: THE CONTEMPORARY VERSION

The Contemporary Olympic Era

What were called the modern Olympic Games, the phrase that referred to the revival of the Olympics in 1896, gave way to the contemporary games in 1960. The ideal, championed by International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, of international amateur competition held in an arena unaffected by worldly influences was in its death throes. The forces that undermined the ideal—politics, commercialization, and drugs—were introduced in the 1950s, and by the 1960 games their influence was inevitable.

President Brundage

In 1952 Avery Brundage was elected president of the IOC. He was a controversial choice because members of the international committee feared the power that a president from a superpower nation would wield. The cold war affected most aspects of international relations, and observers feared that an American president would use the games to promote nationalism. Brundage managed to avoid serious charges that he used his position to promote American diplomatic goals, but during the Brundage years, due to the intrusion of forces he could not control, nationalism became the underlying theme of the Olympics, and politics was played as calculatingly in the IOC boardroom as in diplomatic gathering places.

Politics of Participation

Olympic politics boiled down to the question of participation. The Soviet Union had first participated in the Olympics in 1952 with an impressive showing. By 1960 the Soviet Olympic Committee, along with the Chinese, presented challenges to the IOC based on political and social dogma. Who would be recognized as the Olympic team from China, the Nationalist Chinese, who had been driven to the island of Formosa, or the Communist Chinese People's Republic, which occupied the mainland? (The Nationalists competed under the flag of Formosa in 1960 and 1964; the People's Republic withdrew in protest of the Nationalists' participation in 1964; the Nationalists competed as the Republic of China in 1968.) Would the East Germans be allowed to participate under their own national banner or would they be required to compete alongside their bitter enemies, the West Germans? (The two Germanies competed on the same national team in 1960 and 1964; in 1968 they were on separate teams.) Did the national policy of apartheid in South Africa, in direct conflict with IOC rules, preclude that country's participation in the games? (South Africa was banned from Olympic competition beginning in 1964.) These and many other basically political disputes came before the IOC for resolution under the guise of administrative questions. Brundage directed the IOC skillfully but made enemies all along. As a result he was criticized and called a racist, an apologist for black equality, a sexist, a hypocrite, a Fascist, and a Communist toady, among other names, by members of factions who opposed his decisions.

Soldiers of Sport

As sports historians Randy Roberts and James S. Olson observed, Olympic participants from the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union acted as "national soldiers of sport" fighting for their country's honor and were encouraged by media commentators. Two statistics were followed with particular interest—the national tally of gold medals, and the national performance measured by a new system developed by the press that assigned points to the first six finishers in each event. The key rivalry was between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Soviets established their superiority during the decade, raising a fundamental question about participation that, again, had its basis in opposing social and political systems.

Blurred Amateurism

The Soviets had a different view of the role of sports in society than the Americans did. They believed that sports was a vocation, like engineering or law or coal mining, and that athletes should train and work at their vocation with the support of the state. In the West professional athletics was becoming an important source of entertainment, and the best athletes made respectable livings (but not yet huge fortunes) by playing their sports professionally. Because it still clung to the ideal of amateur competition, the IOC banned participation by professional athletes. The best Soviet athletes, who were supported by the state, were not considered professionals, largely because the president of the Soviet Olympic Committee assured the IOC that the Soviet athletes were not paid to compete; yet the best Americans and Western Europeans, who played their games for money, were unquestionably pros. When the United States began losing in the medals competition with the Soviets, the system was challenged and began gradually to erode. Throughout the 1960s Western European Olympic soccer players and bicyclists were clearly professionals in non-Olympic years; the French Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy received Fr 300,000 from the French Olympic Committee to buy his way out of an endorsement contract with an Italian manufacturer, and when he was forbidden by the IOC from displaying the logo of his new French sponsor, Killy arranged for television cameras to show him embracing a friend who brandished the logo for the world to see. American Olympians began receiving national financial support, which reached $2 million for the 1968 team, and the Western system of paying amateur athletes for appearances at meets began to blur the meaning of amateurism.

Commercial Competition

The 1960 Olympics, held in Rome for the summer competition and in Squaw Valley, California, for the winter games, was the first Olympics telecast live to American audiences. CBS paid $660,000 for the American rights to prime-time coverage of the summer games. When the games began earning significant sums of money, the amateur standard was further challenged, as the IOC found itself in the position of making money from contests staged on the principle of pure competition untainted by outside influence. By 1968 American rights to coverage brought $4.5 million, and the IOC had agreed to accept some of the profits to underwrite its operating expenses. By that time merchandisers and media analysts had been attracted to the potential for exploitation the Olympics offered. In 1968 Brundage complained, "We had Olympic butter, Olympic sugar, Olympic petrol." Sports-equipment manufacturers paid large sums for endorsements, and marketers of consumer products offered successful athletes fortunes for the use of their names in advertising. Meanwhile, press analysts and sportscasters scrambled to tell the public what the games meant, introducing and promoting layers of significance and controversy that had not occurred to many Olympics spectators.

The Drug Wars

In 1954 Dr. John Ziegler, the U.S. team physician, noted the spectacular gains Soviet weight lifters were making and wondered if there was some connection between their strength and the frequency with which young lifters had to be catheterized because they could not urinate naturally. A friendly Soviet trainer explained that the Soviets were taking raw testosterone, which gave them strength but caused enlarged prostates. Ziegler began research into an artificial testosterone that led to the development of steroids for use by athletes. Drug use was forbidden by the IOC, but prevention required a method of detection. By 1960 the race between developers of performance-enhancing drugs and developers of methods of identifying users had begun. By the end of the decade drug use had clouded even the question of gender. Soviet and Eastern European women showed up for competitions looking suspiciously masculine, and when they were subjected to chromosome tests, they had one too many to be properly called women. A Hungarian doctor called these athletes "genetic mosaics," but there was no such category for competition.

Sources:

Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, Winning is the Only Thing: Sports in America Since 1945 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

Avery Brundage , 1887–1975, American sports executive, b. Detroit, Mich. A member of the 1912 U.S. Olympic track and field team, he became a leader of the Olympic movement and an unyielding spokesperson for amateur sports. As president of the U.S. Olympic Committee (1930–52), he defeated a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As president of the International Olympic Committee (1952–72), he is remembered for continuing the 1972 Munich games after their interruption by the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes.

Bibliography: See J. Lucas, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (1980).