In the wake of the Games, American athletes were expected to travel through Europe competing in various exhibitions. Meanwhile, big-money offers came pouring in to Owens from the United States. Part way through the tour he decided to ditch the exhibition circuit and head home to cash in. He had the full-throated support of his college coach, Larry Snyder, who helped him to Olympic glory in Berlin. With the possibility of Owens earning $100,000, Snyder said, “Jesse has a chance to make more money now than he may earn the rest of his life through ordinary channels.” He added, “I cannot conscientiously advise Owens not to seize what may be the chance of his lifetime.” The AAU, headed by Brundage, promptly suspended Owens, prompting the athlete to lash out at the organization, calling it “one of the great rackets of the world” and accusing it of “trying to run the Olympics on strictly business lines.” He added, “Somebody’s making money somewhere” and that the AAU was “trying to grab all they can” while athletes couldn’t even afford souvenirs. Coach Snyder said the athletes were being treated “like cattle.” He was blunt: “You wouldn’t ask the poorest show troupe to work the way these boys worked immediately after the games—all without a cent of spending money with which to brighten an otherwise drab picture.”111
Unfortunately for Owens, the lucrative offers to capitalize on his Olympic glory evaporated upon his return to the United States. Most of the overtures were mere publicity ploys. Owens tried to make a living off his notoriety, starting an unsuccessful dry-cleaning chain before ultimately declaring personal bankruptcy in 1939. Later he became owner of a Negro League baseball team in Portland, Oregon—the Portland Rosebuds—which only lasted a year. He even resorted to racing horses. He reportedly stated, “People said it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? … I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.” Eventually Owens became a successful motivational speaker, but achieving financial stability was a long road. Although Owens struggled to cash in, memorabilia collectors did not—in 2013 one of Owens’s gold medals from 1936 was auctioned off for $1.47 million to a Los Angeles billionaire investor.112
At the close of the Berlin Games, Coubertin hailed them as “powerful and diverse,” and said, “I thank the German people and their leader for what they have just accomplished.”113 Most commentators also hailed the Games as a success. In an article titled “Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich,” the New York Times asserted that the Games contributed nothing less than “the undoubted improvement of world relations and general amiability.” The newspaper also reported that visitors left the Olympics with the impression that “this is a nation happy and prosperous almost beyond belief; that Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leaders in the world today, and that Germans themselves are a much maligned, hospitable, wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them.”114 Brundage echoed such high praise: “No country since ancient Greece has displayed a more truly national public interest in the Olympic spirit in general than you find in Germany.” He added: “We can learn much from Germany. We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.”115 So much for staying out of politics. In his personal notes, he even wrote: “An intelligent, beneficent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government. Observe what happened in Germany for six or seven years in the 1930’s.”116
Brundage’s key role in the Berlin Games catapulted him into a position in the IOC, where he continued to extol the virtues of separating politics and sport. In a talk he gave in Munich he explained: “The enemies of Hitler, and there were many, decided to try to spite him by boycotting and spoiling the Games. We could not tolerate such a use of the Games as a political weapon. This battle centered in the U.S.A., where I was President of the NOC [National Olympic Committee], and we led the successful struggle to save them. I was often called a Fascist and a Nazi but I have also been called on other occasions a Communist or a racist or a capitalist, which has left me, as you can see, unaffected.”117 In another speech titled “The Wondrous Flame of the Olympics” he said that the Olympic movement “should be like a protective antitoxin neutralizing the infections of future wars. It is not natural for humans to wish to fight those whom they know as friends, those whom they have found to be good sports on the field of honor.”118 Brundage’s lofty words proved untrue as the world plunged into war. The thirteenth Olympiad scheduled for Tokyo and moved to Helsinki was canceled, as were the 1944 Olympics that were tentatively scheduled for London.
Cold War Inklings
In 1948 the Olympics emerged from the ashes of war, returning to London for a second time. The Winter Games were held in St. Moritz, site of the 1928 Games. Edström, a longtime IOC insider, had taken over the IOC presidency after Baillet-Latour suffered a heart attack and died in 1942. Edström was determined to get the Games back on track, and according to the Official Report for the 1948 Olympics, the robust Swede and his colleagues faced “a herculean task,” especially with regard to the Summer Games.119 Europe was devastated by war. Resources were thin. London was still cratered from aerial bombing, and the detritus of war littered the city. Shortages in food and housing wracked the city’s residents, and rationing for basic staples was still in effect. Cash-strapped British officials saw the Games as a chance to gain hard currency from tourist expenditures and ticket sales, but accommodation for athletes was makeshift and many of them brought their own food from home. As such, the 1948 Games became known as the “Austerity Olympics.”
The Games were officially awarded to London in 1946, so Olympic officials had little time to prepare. Organizers also had to fight against what Janie Hampton describes as “defeatism of the press,” as critics charged that the Games were misspending public money while regular Londoners suffered. The Times of London questioned whether the city and the country had the gumption to pull it off: “With only a few weeks left there is little evidence that Britain is grasping this opportunity.”120 In a New York Times opinion piece, Dudley Carew wrote of the Olympics as “money-spinning gladiatorial shows which usurp the honorable title of sport.” He argued that the Games encouraged facile, false generalizations about nations and their inhabitants based on their exploits on the field, which only exacerbated stereotyping and nationalism. He concluded, “The Olympic Games are a financial proposition, and when money comes tinkling in at the turnstiles, the spirit of true sport has a way of flying out the window.”121
Others revived a charge from the 1908 London Games, that American hyper-competitiveness led to an “unpleasant atmosphere” that in turn led to an “argument over the success of the Olympic games as a builder of international good will.”122 Arthur Daley of the New York Times telegraphed his later musings on the female athlete, airing his displeasure over the increased participation of women at London. The Greeks excluded women from the ancient Olympics, he argued, but spectators have “long suffered from watching female footracers and hardware heavers burlesque a noble sport. They just haven’t the correct architecture for it. So why run counter to the obvious wishes of Mother Nature?”123
On the broadcasting front, for the first time ever a national television network—the British Broadcasting Corporation—consented to pay an organizing committee for the right to broadcast the Games. Amid the austerity, the IOC moved to tighten its grip on Olympic symbology. At the London Games, the IOC made itself the exclusive proprietor of the Olympic symbol of five interlocking rings as well as the long-used motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius.”124
One conspicuously absent participant was the Soviet Union. This would change in 1952 when Helsinki hosted the Summer Games, starting a process whereby the USSR would become a major Olympic player. The coming decades would see an absence of direct war between the world’s biggest military powers; instead, that rivalry played out in proxy wars across the Third World and in bitter competition in Olympic sport.
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