In 1894, French historian and educator Count Pierre De Coubertin conceived of an inclusive worldwide youth movement and great sports festival. It would emulate the pre-Christian tradition of Ancient Greece but be rooted in universal fundamental Enlightenment principles. The ethos was to be an alternative to the aristocratic British imperialist sporting ethos of “muscular Christianity” that dominated elite British and American prep schools. Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympiad and the Olympic President from 1896 to 1925, offered a philosophy of life balancing body, will, and mind—blending culture and sport. His utopian ideal was “all sports for all people.” The goal was to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sports practice in accordance with Olympism and its values of political neutrality and antidiscrimination, sportsmanship, sense of fair play, and respect for fellow athletes. In this romantic vein, the primary aim was to be placed on participation—not on winning.
Because its principles and rituals revived the Greek tradition and rituals of the Olympic Games that took place from 900 BCE to 393 CE, the first Games took place in Athens in 1896. This event established the ritual of kindling the Olympic Flame at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia and runners taking torches to the stadium. The Olympic Truce, the Ekecheiria, was declared, which guaranteed total safety to all participants to travel to and from the event. All competitors were obliged to take the Olympic Oath and reside in harmony in the Olympic village. The Olympics had its Latin motto meaning swifter – higher – stronger, its own anthem, and from 1914 its own five-ringed flag representing the five continents. Officially, according to its charter, the games were a “competition between athletes in individual or team events, not between countries.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) established its “capital” in Lausanne in neutral Switzerland. Symbolic of the Western domination of the movement was that the two official languages were set (and remain) as French and English.
The first principle to be undermined was the Olympic Truce. The nationalism of the twentieth century was a powerful negative force that produced international conflicts. The 1916 games were postponed during World War I and resumed in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium. Again, due to World War II, there was a gap between Berlin in 1936 and the resumption of the Games in London in 1948. Politicians increasingly began to intervene to promote national rivalries in sporting competition and a focus on unofficial national medal tables. This is best illustrated in the British movie Chariots of Fire (1981) about the struggle for national sporting prestige at the 1924 Paris Games. In Italy, Mussolini viewed the Olympic Games as a prime venue for showing the benefits and superiority of Fascism, a movement whose own anthem was Giovinizza—youth. Political controversies plagued many subsequent Summer Olympics. The most serious occasion was the 1936 Berlin Games opened by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi Government’s racial policies and persecution of Jews included the banning of Jewish athletes from the German team. An international boycott campaign failed, mainly due to a United States veto because of the report of its Olympic representative, Avery Brundage. Brundage, a Chicago construction magnate and 1912 Olympian, traveled to Nazi Germany but failed to find evidence of a major problem. He casually informed Nazi Party officials that his own club in Chicago excluded Jews. The Berlin Games attended by forty-nine nations formed a great propaganda platform for the Nazi Party, assisted by the cinematographic triumph Olympia, directed by Hitler’s protege Loni Riefenstahl. Brundage’s antisemitism resurfaced again in Germany after he became International Olympic President (1952–1972) at the 1972 Munich Games. The incident was the attack on the “sacred” Olympic village by Palestinian terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes. In an insensitive reaction, Brundage ordered a short delay for a day and insisted “the games must go on.” It was only in Tokyo in 2021 that for the first time a minute’s silence at an Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was observed for the murdered Israelis.
Politics intruded into the Olympics again during the Cold War after the Soviet Union joined the movement in 1952. Like the Fascists, the Communist states saw the Olympics as a natural field for propaganda extolling the virtues to youth of their socio-economic system. This was most epitomized by the local rivalry for medals from 1960 to 1988 between capitalist West Germany and socialist East Germany. The wider international ideological conflict forcefully intruded when the United States organized a boycott by sixty-five nations of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In return, the Eastern Communist bloc of thirteen nations retaliated by boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Games. The Cold War rivalries spread into controversies about doping and performance-enhancing drugs, but above all into the issue of preserving amateurism and the exclusion of professional athletes.
The contradictions and challenges posed by amateurism led to controversies. Famously, in 1912, the Native American Jim Thorpe had been stripped of his medals for involvement in paid sports. Extreme amateurism, an ideal of the Western European and North American upper classes, was a barrier to the ideal of “sports for all people,” because it favored the independently wealthy and denied support for training as well as compensation for time off work for competition. Ironically, or perhaps hypocritically, Brundage, who was the strongest advocate of the “amateur code” and the goal of keeping politics out of sport, was instrumental in accepting Stalin’s Soviet Union into the Olympic movement in 1952 even though it was clear that the state-supported Soviet athletes were de facto full-time professional athletes. His motivation was to broaden the global reach of the movement.
Slowly, amateurism was undermined as each member sports federation began to adjust its rules on prize money, sponsorship, and trust funds to support training, competition, and travel. In 1971, athlete compensation was accepted by the IOC, but the United States only adopted this approach in 1978. Finally, for the Barcelona Games of 1992, amateur restrictions were removed for all sports. The current emphasis on superstars was an inevitable result.
The end of amateurism heralded the Olympic Movement’s emergence as a commercially driven entertainment organization based upon ever-increasing global television revenues. The cities chosen for the Games have undertaken massive infrastructural investment in stadiums, facilities, and transportation to stage the ever-growing event. Despite major government funding, the Games of the twenty-first century became increasingly dominated by corporate sponsorship, to the extent that Japanese companies collectively kicked in more than $3 billion for the Tokyo Olympics, the largest contribution from a host nation ever. This occurred even though under the IOC’s “clean field of play” policy companies cannot plaster their names on stadium surfaces or athletes’ uniforms. But they can use the Olympic logo in their advertising and product labels. In fact, fourteen global companies have contracts with the IOC to sponsor multiple Olympics. Thus, there was a financial imperative for the IOC to stage the Tokyo event, despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the lack of live spectators and overseas tourists. So after a year’s delay, 50,000 athletes, officials, reporters, and others converged on Tokyo for the largest international gathering since the pandemic began.
Despite its trials and tribulations over the past century, the Olympic extravaganza obviously has a continuing, well-marketed appeal to a worldwide public. Yet beyond the spectacle, one wonders if Coubertin would recognize his original goals and ideals in what has become a major industry and a tool of prestige-seeking national governments. It is probably the Paralympics for the disabled, which have run alongside the Summer Games since 1960, where the original spirit and ethos remain, particularly the emphasis on participation rather than victory.