Olympic Boycotts: Always Tricky

...Ideas were the villains...

...In Britain, a growing mood of appeasement combined with the sports world's dogged insistence on the separation of sport from politics to put its team on the road to Berlin...

...His rhetoric was identical: "There is no place in the athletic world for politics...

...Although few would now accept Coubertin's vision of the Olympics as a modern religion, it is certainly true that they are premised on an act of faith...

...If spectacle, as typically constructed in opening and closing ceremonies, imposes an awesome and overwhelming distance on its spectators, then the relay—which involves more torchbearers than actual athletes, is freely accessible to many more people than get tickets for the stadium, and for countless participants represents an emotional, even life-changing event—is indisputably warm, inclusive, and humane...

...My Life as Black Man and White Man...

...Never before had a lighted torch been relayed from a Greek temple in Olympia to an athletic competition, let alone by thousands of runners trying to keep it from being extinguished...

...A public hearing of the German Bundestag's committees on sport and human rights this past January spent an afternoon politely bobbing around various China-related topics before concluding that it is difficult to measure the effects of the Olympics on human rights and that, on balance, the Games and participation in them do less harm than good...

...In 1968, Brundage reacted—somewhat more credibly—to the plea by former Czech gold medalist Emile Zatopek for the IOC to bar the Soviets from the Mexico City Games after their invasion of his country by observing, "If participation in sport is to be stopped every time the politicians violate the laws of DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 69 OLYMPIC BOYCOTTS humanity, there will never he any international contests...

...Germany was about to enter a period of unprecedented brutality...

...And specterlike, it returns to haunt many discussions of all that is, was, and might in the future be wrong with the Olympic Games...

...If anything, it highlighted the director's naïveté in involving himself in the first place...

...The IOC will never give up the sort of doublethink that allowed it both to claim that the Games will help open China to democratic influences and to ponder closing the international leg of the torch relay because of its exposure to the "crime" of political protest...

...We need to be careful about mapping Nazi Germany onto the peccadilloes or very serious misdemeanors of the Olympic movement...

...In 1976, the Olympics experienced their first major boycott, when twentyeight nations, under instruction from the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, ordered athletes home from Montreal...

...In this sense, Beijing was made for Berlin...

...Writing in the New York Times at the height of the torch relay fracas in April this year, Edward Rothstein pointed the way: "If you want to know how the Olympic torch really began its `Journey of Harmony,' as the Chinese call its current relay, if you want to see why the torch has had to pass through a human obstacle course composed of protesters, SWAT teams, and police in San Francisco, Paris, and London, then do not look to Tibet's grievances against China...

...Third, there is an unsavory whiff about the key figure who seDISSENT / Summer 2008 n 71 OLYMPIC BOYCOTTS cured the Games' resistance to boycotts...

...Relay running—albeit without a torch—had been popular from the late nineteenth century, and German athletes even trekked from the Capitol in Washington to New York in 1913...

...It was, to say the least, embarrassing: I never doubted for a single minute that I was totally on "the other side," never dreamed there might be some parts of me—and of almost everyone— which resembled parts of him...

...The low turnout in 1980 did not induce the Soviets to withdraw from the quagmire of Afghanistan any earlier...

...When they do so, they allow the representatives of sport to do what they most passionately want to do: take responsiOLYMPIC BOYCOTTS bility for themselves...

...Owens, who had failed to temper the mood of the U.S...

...Real scrutiny must be aimed, at the appropriate time, at the appropriate place, that is, the IOC's revenue stream of global conglomerates that use the Games to open and advance new markets and undoubtedly saw Beijing as an opportunity to print dollar bills...

...Not long before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a group of black sporting activists, the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), issued a list of demands, including a boycott of events held at the New York Athletic Club (NYAC), which had an exclusionary membership policy...

...To Brundage—and in 1972, as the IOC's hastily issued apology against their departing president's wishes shows, to Brundage alone— killing Israelis in the Olympic village and expelling Rhodesians from it were one and the same affront...

...But the Games' claim to be nonpolitical proved a vital survival tactic...

...This review of Olympic history shows, first, that when governments don't act, there is no boycott...

...Two of the OPHR's most prominent representatives, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, famously raised black-gloved fists on the medal rostrum at the 1968 Olympics...

...But perhaps he goes a little far in concluding that "the Olympics still preserves the selfloving aura of the Nazi myth...

...After 1936, it was inscribed in the movement's DNA...

...Brundage was its most fluent speaker...

...pressure only to find the rest of his European allies making the trip to Moscow, later noted, Olympic boycotts don't work...

...Still, in the three key sporting nations of the day—the United States (the athletic power of the era), Britain (the motherland of modern sport) and France (the birthplace of the modern Games)—governments sat on the fence or, publicly at any rate, ignored the very existence of the fence...

...CHRISTOPHER YOUNG is Head of the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge...

...Positively reviewed on the whole in the mainstream press, Blackthink reinforced the view of radical black athletes that Owens was an "Uncle Torn...

...And his argument— if the United States had boycotted in 1936, then he would not have had the opportunity to rub Hitler's nose in his own racial arguments with his stunning athletic performance— came from the same hotchpotch of contradictions about sport's neutrality...

...And, more recently, Steven Spielberg was pushed by Mia Farrow to resign as Olympic choreographer because of China's relationship with Sudan...

...This was its problem and also its strength...

...Without glossing over the obvious fact that the regime broke the Olympic Charter, scholarly opinion now suggests that the Games themselves were relatively autonomous, albeit with what might be called capillary controls...

...So while athletes would compete in the Games for themselves, they were to be entered via national Olympic committees...

...We are a long way from Wagner and the Eagle's Nest...

...Fourth, antiboycott beliefs can pitch actors of quite different political persuasions and profiles onto the same side...

...Although Brundage was quoted as saying he would rather sell the NYAC "before letting niggers and kikes" in, he proposed Owens, a strong foe of the boycott, for the board of the U.S...

...This doublethink helps it survive, but gets it into a muddle when things get rough...

...When six countries withdrew from Melbourne in 1956 to protest the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the IOC voted unanimously to censure them...

...AND WHERE does this leave US when considering current debates about Beijing 2008...

...was more than balanced out by the anger aroused by his claim that they had been the victim of "two great attacks"—the other being the dramatic expulsion of Rhodesia enforced on the IOC by an African threat to boycott just prior to the Games' commencement...

...Beijing 2008 is not Berlin 1936...

...In a further twist, modern Olympism was to rise above politics and be impervious to political influence...

...black athletes back in the Olympic Village, later rebuked the OPHR in his 1970 book Blackthink...

...Despite protestations to the contrary, the IOC was increasingly politicized after 1936...

...Although the founder's early writings focused on the ideals of the Games, his later work concentrated increasingly on how best to preserve them irrespective of "ideological cleavage...

...But in their basic structure, these boycotts were very different from the idea of one that has floated around and ultimately found little traction in 2008...

...No one can deny the right of the oppressed to draw attention to their cause...

...And fifth, without an acid belief in something no one can rationally believe—the apolitical nature of the Olympics— the Games would never have survived and won't in the future...

...In some ways, this is a non-question...

...The Brundage Agenda By 1936, Coubertin was well into his old age and came out of retirement only to provide approving sound bites for the German organizers...

...In 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 presented a troubled Jimmy Carter with an inexpensive alternative to economic sanctions...

...As president of the U.S...

...The awe inspired by Brundage's impassioned dictum that "the Games must go on...

...Berlin 1936 continues to hold our fascination...

...The simple, readily abstracted, and `universalizable' requirements of this ritual," as Chicago anthropologist John MacAloon observed, rendered it "especially open to local meaning making, not only among different cultures but also in the hearts of different persons...

...Politics was there from the outset...

...In a spirit of uneasy compromise, the new socialist government under Leon Blum failed to achieve closure by releasing funds for both Berlin and the rival Games in Barcelona (which were eventually canceled due to the Spanish Civil War...

...What Brundage "never understood," as John Hoberman observes, "was the profound vulgarity of applying the Olympic outlook to every situation he encountered...

...His cultural-political history of 1972 Olympics in Munich (with Kay Schiller) is forthcoming in 2009 from University of California Press...

...There was a paradox in the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the Olympics...

...The relay immediately disguised its origin as a recently invented tradition—being picked up immediately at the first Olympics after the Second World War in 1948 and run across a still fractious continent from Olympia to London at no small personal danger to the individual torchbearers...

...In an interview after the 1936 Games, he asked, "What's the difference between propaganda for tourism— like in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932—or for a political regime...

...The Olympic hierarchy was built around nations...

...Characterized over its first thirty years by tensions of race and ethnicity, international complexities of protocol, and diplomatic "truth games," the Olympics were hardly mugged and manipulated in Berlin by a previously unknown assailant...

...Without Brundage's zeal, Jesse Owens, the other Americans, and probably half the world would have stayed away from Berlin...

...But it was precisely this vulgarity—not just the anti-Semitism that Brundage undoubtedly shared with many of his class—that "saved" the 1936 Games and set the tone for the next forty years...

...Fundamentally, they were top-down and government-led...

...It's not just the movement itself that can get muddled about the pros and cons of boycotts...

...Any post-hoc boycott would inevitably have serious consequences for relations between the West and the emerging superpower...

...However, I am not sure that disruption would further meaningful exchange once Olympians have arrived in China this summer...

...But this same attitude caused great offense at the memorial service for the murdered Israeli athletes in Munich four years later...

...This, it seems to me, gets a fuzzy situation about right...

...But then he published I Have Changed in 1972 in quest of rapprochement with his radical critics...

...Olympic Committee...

...A reading of Brundage's various responses to boycott issues shows them veering from the commonsensical to the distasteful...

...But we should be mindful that German historiography has gradually edged away from a "hard" theory of the Games as "Nazi Olympics" to a "softer," more nuanced sense of their complex makeup...

...One might be tempted to turn to the more recent past—to "The Era of Boycott" of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Allen Guttmann describes it in his history of the Games...

...Germany was awarded the Games in 1931...

...In that homage to Berlin's 1936 Olympic Games the origins of this ritual are revealed...

...The horse bolted the moment the IOC awarded the Games to China seven years ago...

...The president (advised, in fact, by a close Jewish confidant), left the warring factions of sports functionaries to slug it out among themselves...

...Yet the more politics intruded, the more resistant Olympism became as a discourse...

...Despite detailed reports from its own representatives in Europe about discrimination against Jewish athletes in Germany, the U.S...

...On the surface, this might smack of an abdication of political duty, but the popularity of sports throughout the twentieth century also encouraged this strongly...

...With these caveats, Berlin is nonetheless the right place to start explaining the matrix DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 67 OLYMPIC BOYCOTTS within which arguments about the Beijing Games have been conducted...

...In France, social divisions between bourgeois sport and its working-class counterpart— the former fully embracing Olympic ideals, the latter going its separate way and supporting an alternative Workers' Olympics beginning in 1925—caused battle lines to be drawn up in such a way that even well-founded reservations on the right could not prevent participation...

...The Games were to respect cultures, customs, and histories of disparate nations and, as befitting the new needs of the contemporary, globalizing world, were to be international and democratic...

...In a boycott incomparably more significant in sporting terms to the one four years earlier, the United States, with sixty-one other nations trailing in its wake, stayed away, leaving only eighty-one countries to compete in Moscow...

...Recent articles in Dissent argued persuasively against calls to boycott universities and book fairs...

...As Helmut Schmidt, who as West German chancellor removed his team under U.S...

...Owens shared Brundage's blind faith in sport as a meritocracy in which fair rules were applied regardless of race, class, and background...

...the banning of South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympic Games...

...Even millions of Germans who fought behind him—many of them who stood in Berlin stadium and applauded me—weren't the villains...

...In fact, over twenty years of ethnographical fieldwork led MacAloon to define the relay as "the Olympic anti-spectacle par excellence...

...Despite the recent events in Tibet, China is slowly emerging from an era of repression and should be further encouraged in that direction via personal contact and media spotlight...

...Brundage stated that "Olympic Games are contests between individuals and not between nations...

...But without Brundage, the Olympic movement might not have survived the postwar period...

...When the archives are finally open, a chronicler will have to dissect political intrigue at the highest level but might also draw the generally accepted political lesson from the Olympics' most troubled period...

...A new but crucially reactionary generation of Olympic guardians was coming into view, with Avery Brundage to the fore...

...Second, when there is a major boycott, it has little real effect...

...But nationality, he thought, was essential to its ability to flourish...

...Disruption of the torch relay is a more complex matter...

...In the late 1960s, Jesse Owens and the recalcitrant Brundage became strange bedfellows...

...But Berlin is still a useful reference 68 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 point, first because the failure of an internationally diffuse boycott movement in the years before 1936 to derail the Games shows that, historically, when governments don't act, the Olympics proceed unperturbed...

...Look to the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film, "Olympia...

...Things changed after 1933 when Hitler came to power...

...This act momentarily tarnished but hardly dented the Beijing spectacle...

...See Martha Nussbaum, "Against Academic Boycotts," Dissent, Summer 2007, and "The Turin Book Fair Controversy: Mitchell Cohen and Andrew Arato debate Israel and the Left," Dissent online...

...On the one hand, Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't want to appear to endorse the National Socialist regime...

...On the other, he didn't want to enflame right-wing criticism of him as "proJewish...

...The more that political agencies provided the financial and institutional support needed to stage the ever-growing spectacle, the thinner the apolitical veneer became...

...In his analysis of the structures through which international nongovernmental organizations gain and legitimize world authority, John Boll noted that "rational voluntarism is universalistic because it is based on concepts of universal human rights, obligations and capacities" and for that reason "maximum inclusiveness endows the greatest authority on any particular world body...

...The same should go for the Beijing Olympics...

...But it was this evangelical, even mystical belief in sport's autonomy that sustained the Games when the cold war and decolonization might have rent them asunder...

...There has been a robust resolve among organizers of sporting events, particularly the Olympics, to regulate their own affairs...

...Coubertin and his successors were ambitious about the movement's global reach and willing to make concessions to that end...

...As the offense taken by millions of Chinese citizens (including internal critics of the regime) at Western polemics in these last few months shows, it will be very convenient for us all in the end to revert to the notion that the Olympics are "non-political...

...72 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...

...What I think I've learned, you see, is that—perverted as he was—Adolf Hitler wasn't really the villain...

...Four years later, the Soviet bloc returned the compliment when Los Angeles was host...

...State Department and the White House remained determinedly neutral...

...As a liberal, he saw individuality as the highest good...

...He cornpared the black power salute to Nazi gestures and "the collectivist, separatist rhetoric of postcivil rights activists" to Mein Kampf...

...A competitor at the 1912 Games in Stockholm who made millions in the Chicago construction industry, Brundage was an uncompromising follower of Coubertin's principles...

...As an Olympic boycott movement gathered worldwide momentum (at one stage with the whole of independent Africa joining in), Brundage 70 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 OLYMPIC BOYCOTTS found his closest domestic ally in the quadruple gold-medalist...

...In 2006 alone, three new English-language books revisited Hitler, Jesse Owens, the Reichssportfeld, and all that...

...Olympic Committee, he fought the boycott, was awarded a seat on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and eventually became head of the movement from 1952 to 1972...

...and concluded, "The most important thing is that the Olympic movement made a successful step forward...

...Government Agendas As this sketch shows, the domestic and international agendas of governments can and more often than not do influence them to avoid Olympic boycotts...

...and the removal of Avery Brundage, "a devout anti-Semitic and anti-Negro personality...

...Rothstein correctly identifies the 1936 Games as the moment when the Olympics' most potent symbol was born, although it was the Dutch who helped spark the German imagination by introducing a burning flame to the heart of the stadium in Amsterdam 1928...

...Wherever possible, dialogue and exchange should beat silence and standoff...