Olympic Games

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Olympic Games are an international sporting event held quadrennially in different venues. The date of inception remains a point of conjecture among historians, but it is generally accepted that the Olympic Games found their genesis in Olympia, Greece, in 776 BCE and survived in attenuated form until 393 BCE. Inspired by the ancient Greek festival, the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman who envisaged that the Games would foster a religion of patriotism by directing the new power of national identity into constructive and peaceful channels. Initially, only amateur athletes were permitted to compete in the Olympics; professional athletes were not allowed to compete until the 1970s when the amateurism requirements were extracted from the Olympic Charter. The revival of the Olympic Games was held in Athens, Greece. The Games attracted a relatively small competitive field, with about 240 athletes competing in 43 events.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the International Olympic Committee encountered an array of difficulties with the hosting of the Games. The subsequent two celebrations that followed the Athens Games failed to command popular support, partly because they were crossed with, and effectively eclipsed by, the World’s Fair Exhibitions in Paris (1900) and Saint Louis (1904). The 1908 Games, though originally awarded to Rome, were held in London. The majority of the competing countries selected national teams to participate in the London Games, and the athletes were paraded by nation at the opening ceremony. The Olympic Games had institutionalized the “nation” in international athletics. After the 1912 Olympic Games, held in Stockholm, the Olympic movement entered a period of upheaval. De Coubertin may have seen the Olympics as an agent of international peace in a world moving inexorably toward war, but the ideal of the Olympics as an event that could prevent war proved ill-founded. The Games scheduled for Berlin in 1916 were abandoned because of World War I, and two other Olympiads passed without Games in 1940 and 1944 as a result of World War II.

In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920 Games were awarded to Antwerp as a mark of respect for the Belgian people after the anguish that had been inflicted on them during the war. The 1920 opening ceremony was notable for the introduction of the Olympic flag, the release of doves as a symbol of peace, and the presentation of the athletes’ oath. The introduction of the flag, representing the unity of the five continents, and the symbolic release of doves also reflected the idyllic vision of the Olympic movement as standing for international peace and unity.

However, it was also in the interwar period that Olympic sport became symbolic of national struggle, with participants as representatives of their national groups. Throughout the twentieth century, John MacAloon argues, “a nascent athletic nationalism was already undermining the Olympic ideal” (1981, pp. 258–259). A notable instance of this was Adolf Hitler’s use of the 1936 Olympic Games to enhance his control over the German populace and legitimize Nazi culture. The opening ceremony designed for those games was a shrewdly propagandistic and brilliantly conceived charade that reinforced and mobilized the hysterical patriotism of the German masses. The Berlin Games have also become closely associated in the popular imagination with the African American athlete Jesse Owens. Against a background of Nazi efforts to manipulate the Games to demonstrate the racial and athletic superiority of the Aryan race, Owens won four gold medals at the first Olympic Games to be broadcast on a form of television. The Berlin Games demonstrated how the hosting of the Olympic Games could be manipulated to provide a benign and uncritical backdrop for the parade of national identity.

Another political incident involving African American athletes occurred at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Two African American track-and-field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved power salute on the victory podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” USA Olympics officials asserted that the athletes should not have used the Games as a platform to air their political grievances, and the two athletes were immediately suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic Village. Politics was also to cast its shadow over the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September. The terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes and one German police officer in an event that is conventionally referred to as the Munich Massacre.

The 1980 Olympics in Moscow were arguably the most political in the history of the Games and reflected the extremes of nationalism that had emerged as a result of the renewed cold war struggle. In 1980 the United States and sixty-four other Western nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics that year because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The boycott reduced the number of nations participating to only eighty, including only sixteen Western nations—the lowest number of nations to compete since 1956. The Soviet Union and fourteen Eastern bloc countries (Romania was the exception) retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

In the Olympic arena, encircled by flags of various nations, the political symbolism of sport is most evident. Young nations make use of the nationalist symbolism of sport to gain recognition on the world stage; established nations do so to demonstrate their strength and prowess. The media make use of sport to construct a “battle” among nations, giving individuals a public spectacle at which they can cheer on their compatriots. The central role of the Olympics as a forum where new nations can gain acceptance is also clear from the number of nations taking part. In Antwerp in 1920, twenty-nine nations competed; by the Athens Olympics of 2004, that number had risen spectacularly to 201. The importance of the Olympic Games to cultural unity and national identity lies not only within the event as staged but in the sporting occasion as an international spectacle. Beyond the demonstration of physical strength and skill, Olympic sport as collective ritual, highlighting concepts of leadership and heroism, has become part of the language of nationalism.

SEE ALSO Aryans; Black September; Entertainment Industry; Hitler, Adolf; Nationalism and Nationality; Nazism; Racism; Sports; Sports Industry; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coakley, Jay, and Eric Dunning, eds. 2000. Handbook of Sports Studies. London: Sage.

Cronin, Mike. 1999. Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer, and Irish Identity since 1884. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press.

Guttmann, Allen. 1984. The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.

Guttmann, Allen. 2002. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, 2nd edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hill, Christopher R. 1996. Olympic Politics. Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press.

Holt, Richard. 1993. Sport and the British: A Modern History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Houlihan, Barrie. 1994. Sport and International Politics. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

MacAloon, John J. 1981. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, David. 2003. Athens to Athens: The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, 1896–2004. Edinburgh: Mainstream.

David M. Doyle