As the Olympics roll out in Rio, it’s tough not to feel part of a big event. Television and online ads for major corporations feature smiling, branded Olympic athletes, while mainstream media from ABC to BBC to CBC and all the rest of the acronyms set aside their mantle of investigative journalism to embrace wholeheartedly the role of cheerleader for the Games, with websites framed by Olympic medal counts and newscasts preceded by Olympic updates. A series of deadly bombings in Thailand plays second fiddle to a new gold medal in freestyle swimming.
The only hint of something other than global celebration going on peeks around the edges of sanitised Olympic coverage. A jeep of officers from Brazil’s national security force took a wrong turn off the heavily protected international airport highway, wandered into a local low-income neighbourhood, and a security officer (one of the 85,000 security officers at the games; twice the number of those deployed at the 2012 London Olympics) tragically died “in a hail of bullets.” (National Post article by Nick Faris, 11 August 2016)
The tragic event reveals how much is masked by Olympic hype. But a growing number of activists and scholars are working to expose the dark side of the Games. That dark side is not confined only to the most recent decades of the modern iteration of the Games. Since the establishment of the Games in 1896 by a handful of white colonial elites obsessed with the decline of white civilization and the conviction that manly white bodies competing with each other on the field of athletics could somehow rehabilitate white Christian society, the Games have been avid partners with society’s reactionaries: patriarchal men, white colonial elites, fascist politicians, and now neoliberal corporations.
Shaping the Narrative
Jules Boykoff, a US-based professor of politics, produced a masterful summation of the Games’ problematic heritage earlier this year. His book, Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, offers an excellent starting point for those seeking some critical analysis of the Games. It reveals that even purportedly progressive moments of the Games’ history reflect the shaping of public memory in favour of the Games’ regressive history and politics. The treatment of black Americans is a case in point. US track athlete Jesse Owens, and his triumphs at the 1936 Olympics hosted by Nazi Germany and presided over by Adolf Hitler, are often cast as an in-your-face victory against the racist notions of the Games’ Nazi hosts.
Yet the reality is more complicated. Owens’ fourth gold medal, as part of the 400-metre relay squad, came about as the result of a last-minute removal of two star Jewish athletes from the relay squad; they later charged that they’d been removed from the event for which they had trained because the US was under pressure not to allow Jewish athletes to appear on the medal stand in front of the Nazis.
Another well-known moment in Olympic history is the courageous symbolic stand of American black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith, commemorated in the iconic photo of the two on the medal stand, fists raised. As Carlos later wrote “We decided that we would wear black gloves to represent strength and unity. We would have beads hanging from our neck, which would represent the history of lynching. We wouldn’t wear shoes to symbolize the poverty that still plagued so much of black America. On the medal stand, all we would wear on our feet would be black socks.” Smith said that “The totality of our effort was the regaining of our black dignity.” In an interview with Boykoff, Carlos elaborated that their action was intended “to set a standard. To have a society show its best face. To bring attention to the consciousness of those who had let their conscience go dormant. And to encourage people to stand for what’s right as opposed to standing for nothing.”
The cost of their action was high: they were both suspended from the US Olympic team and sent home. Attacks on them by the mainstream white press led to death threats and unemployment. Their marriages collapsed. The white Australian athlete, Peter Norman, who had joined their gesture in solidarity on the medal stand was also vilified and barred from future Olympic competition by his country.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) went so far as to demand that footage of Carlos and Smith be removed from official films of the Olympics, on the basis that it injected politics into the Games. Yet as Boykoff notes, the IOC had made no similar critique of the blatant promotion of Nazi and fascist imagery and propaganda in the films and commemoration of those earlier Games. Athletes who gave fascist salutes on stage had been cheered, by media and IOC alike.
The targeting of black American athletes didn’t end there. Four years later at the 1972 Munich Olympics two other black American track athletes, Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett (who had been teammates with Smith and Carlos the previous Olympics), were on the stand for gold and silver medals. As Boykoff explains, “Mindful that conditions for African Americans hadn’t much improved since the last Games, Matthews and Collett lounged as the national anthem played, swirling their medals around their fingers and stroking their chins. The New York Times described the athletes’ “indifference and disrespect” as provoking “spectators’ wrath” in Munich.”
The press and IOC were ready to pounce on anything the black American athletes did. As Matthews later said, “We came up with no protest in mind, but the crowd had protest in mind when we left.”
The “nonchalant” attitude of Matthews and Collett during the award ceremony was nothing compared to Carlos and Smith’s action during the previous Olympics, but the price these two would pay was even higher. They weren’t sent home, because the IOC was afraid this would make heroes out of them like it did with Smith and Carlos, but instead had a lifetime ban quietly imposed on them, a punishment even Smith and Carlos hadn’t incurred.
The suite of incidents, however, demonstrates the heightened scrutiny with which black athletes were monitored and punished by the IOC, the US Olympic Committee, and the mainstream press alike. As Boykoff observes, it demonstrates “what sociologist Ben Carrington calls ‘the fear of the black athlete’ as rooted in ‘the projection of white masculinist fantasies of domination [and] control.’ The powerful were squirming.”
Black US athletes weren’t the only ones to engage in protest in the recent history of the Games. Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska competed mere months after the Soviet Union had invaded her homeland and crushed the ‘Prague Spring’ protests in a brutal and bloody crackdown (Caslavska herself, having signed petitions for democratic rights, had to train in hiding during the Soviet crackdown). Having won four gold medals and two silver at the Olympics, she restricted her protest at the slaughter of her fellow Czechs to a simple hanging of her head while the Russian national anthem played. In retaliation, she was barred from future competition in gymnastics.
Other struggles mark the Olympic history, and Boykoff examines many of them in his book. The struggle of black South African athletes and their allies for the exclusion of white apartheid South Africa marks a rare success in political organizing around the Olympics.
But things have changed. Carlos, quoted by Boykoff, argues that athletes at the time were driven with a greater sense of “fire”, and that their spirit was more “alive”. “All of us were such strong personalities, and that scared people. It scared government and business, everybody. It still scares them.”
For a period, it seemed the IOC had quashed political dissent on the part of athletes. And then the Winter 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia happened. An aggressively anti-LGBTQ law passed by Russia the previous year sparked calls for boycotts (which didn’t happen), but it also generated numerous instances of athletes flagrantly disregarding the anti-political agenda of the Games to make a variety of types of protest against the Russian law. As Boykoff notes, this pried open an important space for athletes to reappropriate the right to political expression. Whether Olympic athletes and organizers will continue to push that door open, remains to be seen.
The Games Must Go On
In choosing to attend the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, many athletes argued their public protests would serve the cause better than boycotts. The IOC was certainly adamant that the games should go on. Throughout the past century, organizers of the Games have demonstrated a marked indifference to the controversies their presence inevitably gives rise to, even ignoring tragic and bloody consequences of the Games. When 11 Israeli athletes and coaches (and one German police officer) were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games, the IOC declared a day of mourning but that the Games would go on. While the world remembers the 1968 Olympics for Carlos and Smith’s courageous statement on the medal stand, a mere ten days before the Games began Mexican troops massacred hundreds of people in Tlatelolco Square, Mexico City, for protesting against the use of public funds on the Games instead of on social programs. The IOC politely ignored the massacre and proceeded with the Games.
A Corporate Feast
Commercialization of the Games was in part the result of a backlash against the massive amounts of public funding which wound up being spent on them. While the 1968 protests in Mexico City — which drew crowds in the thousands — were quashed by the state-sponsored massacre of hundreds of protestors, a subsequent battleground emerged in the United States and led to a resounding defeat for Olympic organizers. Denver, Colorado had been selected as the site for the 1976 Winter Games, but an intense public debate was generated in the lead-up to 1976 by opponents of the Games. They argued that public funds should not be squandered on an extravagant sporting event, while others voiced concern for the environmental impact the Games would have.
The use of referendums by opponents of the Games has proven a successful tactic, as activists have found their best chances often lie in derailing Olympic bids before cities are selected.
State and municipal officials, along with Games organizers and the IOC itself, brushed off the protesters as irrelevant crackpots, but were proven wrong when a 1972 referendum on the Olympics led to a 60 percent vote in favour of canceling the event. Once they realized the danger, the pro-Olympics advocates had fought a ferocious last-minute campaign to keep the Olympics, but all the money and media bias they could buy proved unable to overcome popular opposition to the Games. As Boykoff notes in his book, pro-Olympics marketing exceeded $175,000 compared to less than $24,000 spent by the opposition Citizens for Colorado’s Future, and mainstream media like the Denver Post “devoted up to five times more news space to Olympic boosters than to critics.” Nevertheless, the binding referendum resulted in a powerful defeat for the Olympics, which were then moved to Innsbruck, Austria.
The use of referendums by opponents of the Games has proven a successful tactic, as activists have found their best chances often lie in derailing Olympic bids before cities are selected. In July 2015 Boston, which had been picked as the US nominee for the 2024 Games bid, backed out under pressure from anti-Olympic activists (and draconian bid contracts that would have required the city to leave taxpayers on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns), leaving the US scrambling to craft a bid around Los Angeles. In November 2015, a referendum in Hamburg quashed that city’s Olympic bid, reducing the current shortlist for the 2024 Games from five cities to four.
In a telling contrast to Denver’s rejection of the 1972 Games, the 1976 Montreal Summer Games went ahead as scheduled but proved a disaster for its host city. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau initially swore the city could host the Olympics for no more than $125 million; the final price tag was $1.5 billion, a debt which would take three decades for the city to pay off. Outrageous cost overruns — usually paid for by taxpayers, despite bogus claims about the private sector coming to the rescue — have become a regular feature of the Games. Officials promised to host the 2004 Games in Athens for $1.6 billion; the final price tag was $16 billion (and contributed in no small way to the country’s ongoing economic crisis). Beijing estimated their 2008 Games would cost $14 billion; the final price tag was $40 billion. Vancouver Canada’s 2008 Winter Games were supposed to cost a modest $1 billion; their final price tag was $10 billion. “Through taxes, each resident of the city [Vancouver] donated nearly $1000 to bankroll the two-and-a-half-week party,” writes Boykoff.
Indeed, despite assurances from officials and governments alike that the private sector and private partnerships will fund the Games, contracts always leave taxpayers on the hook. Bid organizers claimed the London 2012 Games would cost $3.8 billion, but final costs are estimated as having been anywhere from $18 to $38 billion (depending which infrastructure costs are included). Again, despite official claims about private sector funds, corporate sponsorships and other deals only covered about 12 percent of the London Games’ costs; taxpayers wound up paying the remaining 88 percent.
The failure of the private sector — and its use as a smokescreen to cover the funneling of public funds into private profit through the Games — is a consistent theme in recent Olympic history. As a result of the mounting outrage in various jurisdictions over public funds and taxpayer dollars being used to fund the Olympics (instead of much needed infrastructure and social programs), Games organizers and host city officials have put a big emphasis on the role of the private sector and public-private partnerships as salvation. But it’s largely a façade. Host city contracts bind the government (and public) as responsible for the inevitable cost overruns, while private sector firms routinely prove unable to meet their promises. In the 2012 London Games, the world’s largest private security firm, G4S, had a nearly half billion dollar contract to provide security services. Just before the Games opened it admitted that it couldn’t meet the terms of its contract, and the British military were called in to fill the gap.
With more and more jurisdictions facing referenda and legislation barring or limiting public expenditure on the Games, the Olympics began turning to commercialization — previously frowned upon by elite IOC heavyweights — as a means of funding the increasingly expensive events.
Celebrity Capitalism
In an effort to understand how the Games engage with the broader economic processes in which they operate, Boykoff develops the notion of ‘celebration capitalism’. This is a sort of flip-side to the concept of ‘disaster capitalism’, developed by Canadian activist Naomi Klein to explain “how neoliberal capitalists capitalize on catastrophe by exploiting social stress and trauma. Disasters — wars, hurricanes, military coups d’etat, terrorist violence, and severe economic downturns — spark collective states of shock that soften up the populace to the point where it is willing to concede to aggressive elites what it would otherwise ardently demand. In the aftermath of disaster, while the population is reeling, well-positioned corporations and their collaborators in government orchestrate neoliberal policies rooted in privatization and deregulation.”
Similarly, ‘celebration capitalism’ is, according to Boykoff, “a political-economic formation marked by lopsided public-private partnerships that favor private entities while dumping risk on the taxpayer. The normal rules of politics are temporarily suspended in the name of a media-trumpeted, hyper-commercial spectacle, all safeguarded by beefed-up security forces responsible for preventing terrorism, corralling political dissent, and protecting the festivities. Celebration capitalism is an upbeat shake-down, trickle-up economics with wrenching human costs.”
Boykoff argues that his notion of ‘celebration capitalism’ is distinct from contemporary understandings of neoliberalism because neoliberalism espouses principles of privatization, whereas in the Olympics privatization is a smokescreen; the State (and taxpayers) always wind up assuming responsibility for funding the Games, and use public dollars to back up private sector failures.
True enough, but it’s not really the distinction Boykoff makes it out to be. As his critics have noted, the masking of the diversion of public funds under the veil of privatization is understood by scholars as a key feature of neoliberalism’s inherent contradictions. Still, the notion of ‘celebration capitalism’ has a certain allure, and there’s no reason it cannot be integrated into an understanding of how neoliberal capitalism manifests in sporting mega-events.
Colonialism and Capitalism, Canadian-style
Canada strives to present the face of friendly to the world, but is not so innocent of the Olympics’ fraught politics.
Canada’s role in the infamous 1936 ‘Nazi’ Olympics has been widely studied but remains little known. In the Winter Games (also hosted by Nazi Germany) which preceded the Berlin Summer Games, Canadian and British athletes both drew controversy by appearing in photographs performing what appeared to be the fascist Nazi salute. In fact it was the ‘Olympic salute’, an idiosyncratic salute developed by Olympic organizers (and subsequently dropped) that resembled a fascist salute but had the arm outstretched more to the side than to the front. After it was mistaken for a fascist salute at the Winter Games the British teams dropped it but the Canadians retained it, drawing hysterical cheers from the German audience in Berlin that summer, which thought the Canadians were saluting Nazi-style.
The 2016 film Race starring Stephan James portrayed the dilemma faced by black American athletes like Jesse Owens over whether to participate in the Games or respect the demands for boycotts, given Nazi Germany’s attacks on Jews, blacks and other groups. But Jewish athletes also faced that dilemma. When Canada’s Olympic Committee decided to go ahead and participate (their excuse was that they were just following the lead of Great Britain), Jewish athlete Sammy Luftspring (a boxer from Toronto) and non-Jewish high jumper Eva Dawes both opted to reject invitations to compete in Berlin, and chose instead to boycott the Games. Along with several other Canadian athletes they headed instead to the People’s Olympiad, a sort of rival anti-fascist Olympics that was organized in Barcelona that summer and hosted by the left-leaning Spanish republican government. The Olympiad was cancelled when General Franco and his fascist supporters launched their coup (on the day of the Olympiad’s opening ceremonies), leading to the Spanish Civil War and subsequent Franco dictatorship.
Other Canadian athletes chose to go ahead and participate in the 1936 Nazi Games, including Irving Meretsky, a Jewish basketball champion from Windsor Ontario, and Phil Edwards, a black track athlete who was appointed captain of the Canadian Olympic team. In a grim reminder that racism was not the exclusive domain of the Nazis, on the way home from the Games Edwards was refused admission to a hotel in London, and the entire Canadian team walked out of the hotel in solidarity.
Canada’s decision to participate in the Games was also controversial — mostly because despite the loud calls for a boycott the Canadian Olympic Commission approved a resolution to participate without any debate and behind closed doors. The story of Canada’s participation in those Games has been the subject of an exhibit by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), which offers an insightful online module about the 1936 Games and Canada’s role in them.
At least one Canadian attending the Games made it clear that the Nazis’ clean-up act for those Games was easily seen through. Matthew Halton, correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, offered critical coverage not just of the Games but of the Nazi regime (he produced a series of dozens of articles on what the Nazis were doing to Germany). As the VHEC exhibit notes: “He observed much more than sports. Quoting his local interviewees, Halton referred to the Games as ‘the Olympic pause’ and observed: ‘Germans one meets today speak of this summer of 1936 as ‘the Olympic pause,’ and if you ask what they mean they reply ‘All is quiet until after the Olympics.’… Goebbels has officially and openly instructed all Nazi orators to take a rest until after the Olympics,” Halton wrote, “Heaven knows I don’t begrudge the German people the semi-religious rapture they got out of the Olympics: … it is much better than what will come after the ‘Olympic pause.’” (“A glimpse of Canada at the 1936 Nazi Games“, by Marsha Lederman, The Globe and Mail, 23 August 2012)
Canucks, Capitalists and Colonialists
The 1976 Montreal Games offered illustrative examples of both capitalism and colonialism in play. The Games that were supposed to cost $125 million cost in the end $1.5 billion, incurring a public debt for the city that wasn’t paid off until 2006. Montreal’s idiosyncratically wordy mayor Jean Drapeau infamously dismissed early naysayers by insisting the Olympics “can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.” When the facts wound up proving otherwise, he responded with equal dismissiveness that “This is not a deficit. This is a gap.”
Montreal’s 1976 Games closed with a show that would be remembered in subsequent years for its cultural appropriation.
Likewise, in Vancouver 2008 the Olympic Village construction “became a debacle that hemorrhaged public funds,” writes Boykoff. “Millennium, the private developer that won the bid to build the Olympic Village, lost its financial backing while the Village was only half built, and the city responded with a $100 million bailout. The Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason called the episode ‘one of the biggest financial losses in the City of Vancouver’s history.’ Olympic organizers had initially promised that 20 percent of all units would be converted into non-market housing for low-income people. But once taxpayers took on responsibility for the cost of construction, which ballooned to $875 million a full year before the Games began, the city needed to recoup what it could from condominium sales, scuttling the promise of low-income housing.”
Although Canada is not hosting the 2016 Summer Games, its expenditures in Rio have also come under fire. Construction of Canada’s $10 million Olympic House in Rio (including a $3 million boardroom) was marred by cost overruns and delays. Even Jean-Luc Brassard, originally appointed chief of the Canadian Olympic mission, expressed concern over the extravagant spending at a time when actual athletes and sporting organizations are facing funding crises. The Globe and Mail newspaper interviewed Brassard for an article on the issue. (“Olympians question COC over lavish spending on new Montreal HQ“, 26 February 2016)
“When I supported Canada Olympic House, I only saw the good,” said Brassard, a former Olympic champion in freestyle skiing, “Now, to see the pharaohic costs needed to bring that about, it’s really for nothing — because there is no museum, nothing interactive, nothing for school. It’s disappointing.”
Brassard eventually quit as Canada’s Olympic chef de mission, not over cost overruns but over a sexual harassment case involving former president of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) Marcel Aubut, who was accused of sexual harassment by several women. Aubut stepped down as president and the COC conducted an investigation, but Brassard felt the investigation did not go far enough, and that some officials who had known about the harassment had been left off the hook. He was replaced by former Olympic cyclist Curt Harnett. (“Jean-Luc Brassard quits as Canadian Olympic team’s chef de mission“, CBC.ca, 11 April 2016.)
As for colonialism, Montreal’s 1976 Games closed with a show that would be remembered in subsequent years for its cultural appropriation. As Boykoff explains, “200 native representatives were joined by 250 non-indigenous dancers sporting costumes and paint to pass themselves off as First Nations people. According to the Montreal Games’ Official Report, the ‘sumptuous procession’ was ‘made even more exciting by the play of lights and the theatrical music based on Andre Mathieu’s Danse sauvage.’ The First Nations scholar Janice Forsyth concluded, ‘In the end, non-Aboriginal performers dressed and painted to look like ‘Indians’ led the Aboriginal participants through their own commemoration.’”
In Vancouver’s 2010 Games, which took place on indigenous and unceded Coast Salish territory, the protest slogan ‘No Olympics On Stolen Native Land’ was adopted. Despite assurances the Games would bring economic benefits to indigenous communities, participation of indigenous workers in the Games only ranged between one and three per cent of the Olympic workforce. The official Olympic mascot became an anthropomorphized Inukshuk, which drew criticism both for its stylistic adaptation as well as the fact that the Games were happening on Salish territory yet the symbol was an Innu one, from the far north. While some indigenous groups accepted financial incentives to participate in the Olympics in various fashions, many other indigenous leaders participated in the Olympic Tent Village protest, which involved the occupation of a prominently located Olympics parking lot during the Vancouver Games. (“Olympic inukshuk irks Inuit leader“, CBS Sports, 26 April 2005.)
Colonialism also dogged Canada’s preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics. In February of this year organizers announced that Toronto-based design company Dsquared2 had been hired to design Team Canada’s outfits. That company had sparked controversy in 2015 by releasing a women’s clothing collection offensively titled ‘#dsquaw’ and purporting to feature “indigenous flair”. Their pick for Team Canada sparked outrage on social media and criticism in the press, and led to an apology letter from Dsquared2 to the indigenous community over its offensive 2015 activities (its first apology since the controversy of the previous year). (“Canadian Olympic outfitters send open apology letter to indigenous people” by Kathryn Blaze Baum, The Globe and Mail, 26 February 2016)
What Is to Be Done?
The question of what to do about the Olympics is a potent one. To observers the Olympics appears an unstoppable machine, steamrolling into host cities with multi-billion dollar contracts and tens of thousands of security troops.
Yet the pressure is being felt. More and more cities are rejecting the Olympics, leading to suggestions that the Games simply establish a permanent location once and for all. Others urge downsizing: reducing and capping costs to prevent the sort of extravagance that’s inspired critiques. Discussion of Olympic reform has informed recent IOC deliberations, notes Boykoff.
Alternatives to the Games are another option. The ill-fated 1936 People’s Olympiad in Barcelona was one of a series of rivals to the Olympics, ranging from Women’s Olympics (before women were admitted to the mainstream Games) to socialist workers’ sporting events. LGBTQ-oriented sporting events — ‘Out Games’ — have been a feature of the early ’00s, coordinated by the Gay and Lesbian International Sport Association. Yet although the 2013 World Out Games in Antwerp were a success, the 2016 North American Out-Games and Asia Pacific Out-Games were both cancelled, reflecting the challenge of coordinating sporting mega-events in this day and age. (“St. Louis Outgames canceled” by Roger Brigham, The Bay Area Reporter 3 March 2016)
In his book Boykoff proposes a number of suggestions, but they largely centre around reform: enhanced sustainability, cost controls, greater transparency and greater democracy. But even he notes the daunting task of surmounting the gap between worldviews of the IOC elites, and the reality of an increasingly restive global economy and population.
It’s tough to say what lies in store for the Olympics. But opening the discussion and raising awareness around the problems incurred by the Games, as a growing number of activists and scholars are doing with increasing effectiveness, means that change of some sort is inevitable.