Some of the ideas in this book were first aired in the Guardian, New Left Review, the New York Times, Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, Contemporary Social Science, Human Geography, Sport in Society, Al Jazeera America, Red Pepper, Extra!, CounterPunch, Street Roots, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent Magazine, and The Nation. Many thanks to the editors I had the good fortune of working with at those publications for their support. And a huge thank you to the many co-authors I have worked with on Olympic politics. This research was supported by a Fulbright research fellowship and a Story-Dondero award from Pacific University in Oregon.
This book would not have possible without the love, support, wit, curiosity, and moxie of Kaia Sand and Jessi Wahnetah. Your ethical metric and inimitable vim buoy my spirit, give me hope, and make everything so much more fun.
Introduction: “Operation Olympic Games”
Soon after President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Pentagon unleashed a covert cyber-sabotage attack on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities aimed at disabling centrifuges designed to purify uranium. Because of a programming error, the operation’s cyber-worm slithered errantly out of Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant and slinked around the Internet for all to see. Computer security gurus named the cyber-weapon “Stuxnet,” but the Pentagon had chosen a different code name for the attack: “Operation Olympic Games.”1 The choice was apt. After all, the process was orchestrated by political elites behind closed doors; it wreaked havoc on the local host; and it cost a bundle, in terms of both political and actual capital. In a nutshell, that describes the state of the Olympics in the twenty-first century: a largely clandestine, elite-driven process with significant impacts on host cities, and all of it coming with an exorbitant price tag. But this has not always been the case. In Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, I chart the evolution of the Olympic Games, from the quixotic dream of a quirky French baron to the domineering colossus it is today. Tracing the political history of the Olympics helps us understand how sport has evolved from pastime to profession, from the ambit of the few to the spectacle of the many. And engaging the history of the Olympics provides an exceptionally useful foundation for comprehending larger cultural, social, and political processes of the last 120 years—and in particular, for understanding class privilege, indigenous repression, activist strategy, and capitalist power.
These are all topics that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has actively tried to avoid addressing, often by forwarding the notion that the Olympics are not to be politicized. When, for example, IOC president Jacques Rogge was asked about the death of Osama bin Laden, Rogge replied, “What happened to Mr. bin Laden is a political issue on which I do not wish to comment.”2 Throughout his twelve-year tenure as head of the IOC, Rogge—a former orthopedic surgeon, avid yachtsman, and Belgian count—reliably asserted that the Olympic Games could and should sidestep politics, as has every IOC president before and since. But their supposed aversion to politics has always brimmed with hypocrisy. Theirs is “an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political,” as the philosopher Theodor Adorno would have put it.3
In reality the Olympics are political through and through. The marching, the flags, the national anthems, the alliances with corporate sponsors, the labor exploitation behind the athletic-apparel labels, the treatment of indigenous peoples, the marginalization of the poor and working class, the selection of Olympic host cities—all political. To say the Olympics transcend politics is to conjure fantasy.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who revived the modern Olympics at the end of the nineteenth century, built the Games on a bedrock of contradiction. While he publicly rejected injecting politics into the Olympics, behind the scenes he mobilized political power brokers to help establish and nurture the Games. Coubertin’s biographer deems his disavowal of politics “disingenuous in the extreme.”4 From the start, the IOC marinated in politics.
Much later, IOC president Avery Brundage advanced his own brand of Coubertin’s duplicitous philosophy. “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement and are adamant against the use of the Olympic Games as a tool or as a weapon by any organization,”5 he asserted. Brundage pushed this narrative even as South Africa’s apartheid system led the IOC to withdraw the country’s invitation to the 1964 Tokyo Games and to ultimately expel South Africa from the Olympic Movement in 1970, only to reinstate it in 1992. The IOC, in its role as a supranational sports organization, has also inserted itself into matters of war and peace by hosting meetings between the National Olympic Committees from Israel and Palestine.6 In the 1990s the IOC began working with the United Nations to institute an “Olympic Truce” before each staging of the Games, whereby countries agree to cease hostilities for the duration of the Olympic competition. This intervention into geopolitics, though unanimously supported, is routinely ignored, as when Russia invaded Crimea in the immediate wake of hosting the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.7
Politics were once again at the forefront with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The city’s bid team explicitly claimed the Games would create a groundswell of democracy in China. Liu Jingmin, the deputy mayor of Beijing, said, “By applying for the Olympics, we want to promote not just the city’s development, but the development of society, including democracy and human rights.” Liu went still further: “If people have a target like the Olympics to strive for, it will help us establish a more just and harmonious society, a more democratic society, and help integrate China into the world.”8 While in retrospect these claims appear preposterously extravagant, they appealed to the willfully gullible “Olympic family.” According to the former IOC vice president Richard Pound, the suggestion that bestowing the Games to China would hasten human-rights progress in the country “was an all-but-irresistible prospect for the IOC.”9 The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing over Toronto, Paris, and Istanbul.
But does hosting the Olympics really help improve living conditions for residents of the host city? Evidence supporting the claim is scant. Just look at Beijing. Predictions of Olympics-induced human-rights progress in China, it turns out, were greatly exaggerated. When Beijing hosted the Summer Games in 2008 the country ranked 167th on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. In 2014 the country dropped to 175th. “The reality is that the Chinese government’s hosting of the Games has been a catalyst for abuses,” said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.10 This grim record didn’t stop the IOC from selecting Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will make the city the first to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.
The IOC’s plea for apoliticism partly arises from the need to safeguard its biggest capital generator, the Games themselves. The Olympic Games have become a cash cow that the IOC and its corporate partners milk feverishly every two years, since the staggering of the Summer and Winter Olympics began in 1994. For the IOC, acknowledging politics might jeopardize their lucre.
In Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, Marc Perelman offers a blistering demolition