Paul Rouse: It is always amusing to hear the Olympic movement claim that it lives above politics

FACING EVIL: German dictator Adolf Hitler shakes hands with British rower Jack Beresford after he and Leslie Frank ‘Dick’ Southwood won the double sculls event at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Also present are members of the German gymnastics team. Picture: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

When the Olympics start in Tokyo later this month, it feels almost inevitable that at least one political cause will use this ultimate international platform to advance an agenda.

This will take some form of gesture of protest (whether violent or non-violent); it is not difficult to believe that individuals or organisations are currently deep in the planning for this.

And when the protest happens some Olympic official or commentator will decry the manner in which this vast global sporting and cultural spectacle has been stained by politics.

This sentiment, of course, will be utterly shameless: The very structural organisation of the Olympics is deeply political in itself.

To understand how that is the case, you need think only of the famous 1968 protest at Mexico Games. The Americans Tommy Smith and John Carlos used their presence on a medal podium to raise the clenched fist in defiance against the brutal racism that denied black people basic rights and ensured they lived lives mired in poverty.

They were sent home for their protest.

By contrast, when George Foreman won boxing gold for America at those same games, he wrapped himself in the American flag and was celebrated for his patriotism.

This is not to condemn Foreman or to pit him against Smith and Carlos, rather it is to point out the particular politics of the Olympic movement with its emphasis on national symbols and the conservative politics that runs through it like the discharge of a sewer.

It is always amusing to hear the Olympic movement claim it lives above politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence of this lies all through its history. The most obvious example is the Berlin Olympics of 1936 where the Olympic movement was the platform for the projection of German political power.

Ignoring calls for the Games to be boycotted or to be taken from Germany, the men who dominated the Olympic movement instead walked in step with Adolf Hitler and his propagandistic mission.

If anyone wished to see the scale of this endeavour, seek out Leni Reifenstahl’s incredible film Olympia.

This film was commissioned by Hitler and was actually made in two parts: ‘Festival of the Nations’ and ‘Festival of Beauty’. It can be seen on YouTube and the way in which it represented sport fundamentally influenced how sport was shown on television in the decades after the Second World War.

It sits now as an extraordinary historical insight into the politics of the Olympic Games: When the camera cuts from athletes competing for medals to the sight of Hitler clapping and cheering German successes from the stands where he sits surrounded by the Olympic movement, you get a clear look at the political aspect of this ‘sporting’
occasion.

In case anyone wishes to argue that this is before the horrors of Nazism were revealed, it should be noted that the first concentration camps had been established in 1933 (for homosexuals among others), book burnings had been organised, the Night of the Long Knives saw the murder of political opponents, there were forced sterilisations, Jews were limited in terms of employment and education, and the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 had laid bare the antisemitic intent of Hitler’s party.

No amount of retrospective pleading can camouflage what the Olympic movement chose to do.

After the Second World War, the construction of Eastern and Western blocs of power saw the divides of the Cold War repeatedly manifest at the Olympic Games.

That the development of satellite television allowed for the imagery of the games to be broadcast into living rooms on different continents further induced countries to develop systematic drug programmes for their athletes.

This reached its nadir with the respective boycotts of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984.

By then, the Olympic movement had taken a decisive political turn which left it
perfectly placed to thrive in a post-Cold War World.

This was a turn which saw it develop an extraordinary transnational body of commercial partnerships which led unprecedented amounts of money to flow into its coffers.

At the heart of this was The Olympic Programme (or TOP, for short) with its ruthless exploitation of the Olympic five-rings symbol as a marketing logo.

Global corporations — from Coca Cola and McDonalds
to Samsung and Toyota —
identified with the Olympics as a truly global brand.

With television companies around the world also paying enormous sums of money to identify with the vast nationalist orgy of flag-waving and anthem-singing, the money in the Olympic tills rang louder and louder.

Where once the reactionaries who ran the Games had been independently wealthy, now IOC members could receive spectacular expenses for their ‘volunteering’.

The local politics of cities who were bidding to host the games saw lists created which set out the various preferences of IOC members who then received all manner of gifts.

For example, as Kevin Wamsley has written, “the Salt Lake City organising committee was accused of bribing IOC members in exchange for their votes for the rights to host the 2002 winter Games… In its new bidding programme, the general gifts were replaced ‘with valuable personal gifts including health care, employment, education, shopping sprees, luxurious accommodation, lavish hospitality and cash.’”

Basically, the cash which had flowed into the coffers of the IOC in the late 20th century gave it a political power that was rooted in wealth and could now be used alongside its soft power as an instrument that was useful for individual countries to present a particular image of themselves on the world stage.

And in this political power the IOC located itself within the forces which have driven economic globalisation, with all that that means for legacies of inequality.

The key point here is a simple one: When the Olympics are used this summer by a political movement or individual to make a political point, it is worth remembering that the space in which this point is being made has already been deeply politicised.

There is nothing new to the fact of this politicisation — rather its form has evolved to fit the needs of a new millennium. No amount of sugary rhetoric or manipulative nostalgia should disguise that essential truth.

And yet there is no denying that the Olympic Games will be watched and enjoyed by billions of people this summer. Several million of those people live on our island and — to a greater or lesser extent — they will sit enthralled by sports that range from the mainstream to the bizarre.

One of the great mysteries — and delights — of the human condition is the capacity of people to pull selectively from the world around them — and to justify this selectivity or ignore the apparent contradictions or hypocrisies.

Nobody is immune from this.

But when we wave the flag, we should at least understand the context in which we are waving it.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.