While I wholeheartedly agree that sport affords us insight into how capitalism shimmies and schemes—indeed that shimmying is a major leitmotif in this book—a closer look at Marx’s original “opium of the people” passage is in order. There’s a great deal of empathy embedded in Marx’s critique —more than Perelman lets on. Marx noted, “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.” He added, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”12 So, for Marx, religion—and by extension here, sport—was “the heart of a heartless world.” We need not eviscerate what provides so many with enjoyment and zest. The chants of the sports fan are not necessarily the blind yammering of monomaniacal naïfs. They can be efforts to make meaning in a cruel capitalist world rigged for the rich—and they can wedge open a path for political conversations we might not otherwise have.
To concede the terrain of sports is to unnecessarily surrender potential common ground for political understanding, and perhaps even action. With that in mind, in this book I’ll argue that critical engagement with the politics of sports has historically helped pry open space for ethical commitment and principled action, as evidenced by the Olympic athletes who have taken courageous political stands, the alternatives to the Olympics that have emerged over the years, and the activism that springs up today to challenge the five-ring juggernaut. In short, the Olympics are more than mere opiate.
Sports are remarkably popular. Pope Francis is a lifelong soccer fan from Argentina whose favorite club, San Lorenzo, catapulted in 2013 from the brink of relegation to the league title—divine intervention?13 Sports can also be the last refuge of the scoundrel. Osama bin Laden marveled at the passion soccer could generate, and he knew it well; in 1994 in London he attended Arsenal Football Club matches on numerous occasions, even purchasing souvenirs for his sons from the club’s gift shop.14 The kind of passion sports generate can be channeled in countless directions, from the radical to the reactionary, from reverence to treachery.
I should acknowledge up front that I come to this book not as some grumpy academic with a penchant for spurning sport, but as someone who dedicated a big part of my life to competitive, high-level soccer. In the late 1980s I earned a slot on the Under-23 National Team—also known as the US Olympic Team—alongside stalwarts like Brad Friedel, Cobi Jones, Joe-Max Moore, Manny Lagos, and Yari Allnutt. My first international match with the Olympic Team took place in France in 1990. Our opponent? The Brazilian Olympic Team, which featured stars like Cafu and Marcelinho. In that same tournament I also suited up against Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The following year I captained the north squad to a gold medal at the US Olympic Festival in Los Angeles, with teammates Brian McBride, Todd Yeagley, Brian Dawson, and Brian Kamler. In short, I am a fan of sport. My personal history is entwined with the political history of the Games.
In his masterful book Beyond a Boundary, the West Indian cricketer and essayist C. L. R. James described a pivotal moment in his life. “I was in the toils of greater forces than I knew,” he wrote. “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.”15 Soccer plunged me into politics, but I still had a ton to learn. As the avant-garde poet and union organizer Rodrigo Toscano once wrote, “there’s enormous gaps in my education.”16 After my experience playing for the US Olympic Soccer Team in France, where we were roundly booed whether we were playing Brazil (understandable), Czechoslovakia (plausible), Yugoslavia (questionable), or the Soviet Union (quizzical), I was eager to start filling in the gaps in my education. In many ways this book is the outcome of that journey.
In April 2015 IOC president Thomas Bach spoke at the United Nations about the Olympic movement’s relationship to politics. He evoked a “universal law of sport” that could be threatened by “political interference” undermining “the core principles of fair play, tolerance, and non-discrimination”—traditional IOC language. However, Bach also said: “Sport has to be politically neutral, but it is not apolitical. Sport is not an isolated island in the sea of society.”17 The modern IOC has updated its rhetoric, adding a dose of nuance.
Today the International Olympic Committee is a well-oiled machine, with slick PR, palatial accommodations in Lausanne, Switzerland, and around $1 billion in reserves. National Olympic Committees now outnumber United Nations member states, 206 to 193.18 The US government references the Games in code names for covert missions. The Olympics are a force to be reckoned with. Let the reckoning begin.
Coubertin and the Revival of the Olympic Games
In the early history of the modern Olympic Games medals were awarded not only for feats of athletic prowess, but also for feats of artistic prowess. A “Pentathlon of the Muses” ran astride the athletic events, consisting of competition in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. The idea was to capture the spirit of the Greeks, who in the ancient Olympics blended physical with artistic aptitude, all to honor the gods.1
So it was that at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the literary jury awarded the gold medal in literature to a pair of writers, Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach, for their stirring poem, “Ode to Sport.” The poets, one hailing from France and the other from Germany, seemed to embrace the universalist ambitions of the Olympics by transcending geopolitical rivalry with amity through sport.2 On the road to literary gold they beat out a gaggle of other poets, including the roguish Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom many critics viewed as the greatest Italian poet since Dante. D’Annunzio went on to become a proto-fascist who inspired Benito Mussolini.3 But the author of the poem “Ode to Sport” inspired something else entirely: the Olympic Games themselves. Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach, it turned out, were a collective pseudonym for Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics.
Coubertin’s award-winning verse, which was submitted to the jury in both French and German, is essentially a love poem to sport. “O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life,” the poem begins. “You appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled.” For the Baron, sport was Beauty, Audacity, Honor, Joy, Fecundity, Progress, and Peace—in short, pretty much everything, a divine nectar of righteousness, rectitude, and benevolent possibility: “O Sport, you are Beauty!” he gushed. “O Sport, you are Justice! The perfect equity for which men strive in vain in their social institutions is your constant companion.”
Coubertin concluded his panegyric with sweeping optimism, ascribing to the object of his adoration the ability to heal the wounds of war—even prevent it outright: “You promote happy relations between peoples, bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength which is controlled, organized, and self-disciplined. From you, the young world-wide learn self-respect, and thus the diversity of national qualities becomes the source of a generous and friendly rivalry.”4 For Coubertin, sport was brimming with use value.
The Baron had previously used the pseudonym Georges Hohrod, both for a novella he published in 1899 and for a 1902 collection titled Le Roman d’un Rallié; scholars have therefore speculated that the literary judges in Stockholm knew precisely whom they were picking to win the prize.5 But those questions aside, the poem distills the idealism stoking