Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics

Power Games

Jules Boykoff is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Power Games

A Political History

of the Olympics

Jules Boykoff

First published by Verso 2016

© Jules Boykoff 2016

Foreword © Dave Zirin 2016

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-072-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-073-9 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-074-6 (UK EBK)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press

For Kaia Sand and Jessi Wahnetah

Contents

Foreword by Dave Zirin

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Operation Olympic Games

1. Coubertin and the Revival of the Olympic Games

2. Alternatives to the Olympics

3. Cold War Games

4. Commercialization of the Olympics

5. The Celebration Capitalism Era

6. The 2016 Rio Summer Olympics and the Path Ahead

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Foreword

By Dave Zirin

My first Olympic memory is of Ronald Reagan. Seriously. Not the 1980 Miracle on Ice US hockey team, Edwin Moses, or Nadia Comaneci but Ronald Reagan. It was the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the competition was launched with a sunny address from the Gipper, played to rapturous cheers at the LA Coliseum. I cheered as well in my living room: cheering for Reagan was just like cheering for the Olympic heroes I’d read about in Sports Illustrated: people like Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton, and a spindly twenty-year-old college basketball gravity-defier named Michael Jordan. I had only the most rudimentary idea that the Soviet bloc—our Cold War enemies—were boycotting the Games because we had refused to attend theirs four years earlier. I certainly had no conception that these Olympics had actually harmed people in Los Angeles who had been displaced or locked up in the name of Olympic security. I certainly had no idea about the costs, the corporate underwriting, and the general skullduggery of cash and human flesh passed under tables to keep everyone on the International Olympic Committee happy. I had no idea that there were people who tried to resist these initiatives but found themselves drowned out by the screeching anthems of obedience that are played on repeat, regardless of host country. I had no idea about any of this because there was not a 1980s version of the indispensable Dr. Jules Boykoff.

As a sportswriter who has covered every Olympics and World Cup over the last two decades, I’ve learned that every mega-event contains debt, displacement, the militarization of public space, and varying degrees of resistance. These Olympic-sized crimes usually garner publicity as a curio about an individual country’s corrupt ways. But rarely does anyone mention that these issues afflict every Olympics or World Cup. Rarely is it mentioned that there is a continuity regardless of decade or host country that these mega-events are Typhoid Marys of organized graft.

My guide for understanding the past, present, and future of these struggles has been the work of the indispensable Jules Boykoff. What makes Boykoff so singular is that his starting point is not the internal machinations of the IOC or FIFA. Nor is his starting point ever about the Games themselves and the ways that geopolitical tensions find their way onto the field of play. His jumping-off point is always the people in the host country and how they are affected by the mega-event monolith.

By always beginning with the most beaten down, Boykoff has found himself more capable than any commentator working today of explaining why people have started to stand up, resist the coming Games, and see through the patriotic bombast to the pain the Games can bring. Whether it was the small demonstrations in London, the mass confrontations in Brazil, or the preemptive challenges toward hosting at all in places as disparate as Krakow and Boston, Boykoff tells these untold stories and translates the motivations of an international cast of characters with the lucidity of a great sportswriter and the depth of a scholar and political economist. In Power Games he combines meticulous archival research with on-the-ground interviews from Olympic sites and presents it all in a lively, engaging way. In doing so, he offers us the most important, comprehensive book on the Olympic Games that I’ve come across. This is a political history of the Games that foregrounds themes all too often brushed under the historical rug: the extraordinary privilege that IOC elites have long enjoyed, the wrought-iron ties that the Games have to corporate capitalism, the problematic history the Olympics have with indigenous peoples, and the many ways activists have resisted the Olympic machine.

Jules Boykoff is a mild-mannered individual. He is also dangerous to a lot of powerful people. He is dangerous because he goes to the Olympic cities before the spotlight is turned on, and when the real action is played out in the shadows. He understands how the mega-event industrial complex works, and what people can do to bring it to its knees. Read this book. And if you have friends living in the next Olympic city, send them fifteen copies. These are words as weapons: armaments for those who won’t have games played on their backs.

Acknowledgments

In so many ways, this book has been a collective effort. It has been my abundant fortune to have sharp minds and generous spirits on my team. I have numerous people to thank for their assistance, feedback, and encouragement during the writing of this book: Dan Burdsey, Ben Carrington, Tom Carter, Demian Castro, Julian Cheyne, Jeff Derksen, Janice Forsyth, Pete Fussey, Chris Gaffney, Tina Gerhardt, Eva Guggemos, Robin Hahnel, Reg Johanson, Katrina Karkazis, Pam Kofstad, Larissa Lacerda, Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, Cheleen Mahar, Gilmar Mascarenhas, Ian McDonald, Michelle Moore, Tom Mertes, Cecily Nicholson, Christine O’Bonsawin, Christian Parenti, Nicholas Perrin, Jessica Ritter, Matt Seaton, Orlando Santos Junior, Martin Slavin, Cynthia Sloan, Alan Tomlinson, Chris Wilkes, Theresa Williamson, and Dave Zirin.

Thank you to the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University in Canada for opening their archives to me. A big thank you goes to Rosemarie O’Connor Quinn, Tom Quinn, and Mark Quinn for their hospitality in Dublin and for supplying a photograph of the remarkable Peter O’Connor. And I am grateful to Aline Luginbühl from IOC Images for her assistance securing photographs. Thanks also to the Artists Rights Society and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. Am Johal invited me to Simon Fraser University to present my ideas on the Olympics, as did Jennifer Allen and Adam Davis from Oregon Humanities, and David Harvey and Mary Taylor at the City University of New York—thank you all. I appreciate the kindness and courage of people at NoSochi2014, including Dana Wojokh, Tamara Barsik, Lisa Jarkasi, and Zack Barsik. Massive gratitude goes to Emily Van Vleet and Matthew Yasuoka for their remarkable, reliable research assistance over the years. Thanks be to Sue Schoenbeck, Thom Boykoff, and Meg Eberle for being faithful supporters of my work. And an enormous thank you to Andy Hsiao at Verso for believing in this project, for shaping it in important ways, and for helping me see it through. I am also grateful for Jeff Z. Klein’s incisive editorial acumen.

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 of sport in general and the Olympics in particular. For him, sport has not only come to be central to the machine of capitalism, but the new opium of the people. Sport, he argues, is actually more alienating than religion because it suggests the scintillating dream of a promotion for the individual, holds out the prospect of parallel hierarchy. Perelman concludes, The element of ‘protest’ against daily reality that even religion (according to Marx) still retained is stifled by the infinite corrosive power of sport, draining mass consciousness of all liberating and emancipatory energy.¹¹

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.

1

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 Coubertin’s passion for the Olympics, as well as the contradictions inherent in that idealism.

Coubertin had wanted the Muse’s Pentathlon in the competitive mix from the time he founded the Olympic Games in 1896—or the Olympian Games, as they were more often called in the early days—but he would have to wait several years until it made its way in.⁶ Once the Muse’s Pentathlon was installed on the official list of Olympic events at Stockholm, the arts held a firm place on the agenda through 1948.⁷ Thereafter arts contests fizzled due to lack of spectator interest; the fans preferred competitive sports.⁸ Curiously, in his voluminous posthumous writings, Coubertin never alluded to his gold-medal-winning poem.⁹ But the Baron had weightier matters on his mind: how to keep his beloved Olympic creation afloat in a sea of skepticism and indifference.

Reviving the Games

In shaping the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin saw something indelibly attractive in the Ancient Games of Olympia, which took place from 776 B.C. through 261 A.D. But resurrecting the Panhellenic athletic festival of antiquity was also attractive to the Western powers during a time when French and German archaeological expeditions were unearthing the wonders of Olympia and Delphi.¹⁰ The Coubertin biographer John J. MacAloon writes that the Baron’s invocation of Europe’s shared Hellenic tradition was the thinly spread but strong symbolic glue which held nascent international sport together until Olympism could gain a foothold in the world’s imagination.¹¹

In the late nineteenth century, the Baron worked tirelessly to chisel the Games from Greek history and revive them in fresh form, helped immensely by his station in the aristocracy.¹² In 1895 the New York Times described Coubertin as a man who comes from the best conservative stock of France, who is deeply interested in the moral regeneration of his country.¹³ While the Baron could talk a good populist game, he was irrefutably a product of aristocratic wealth and values. His youth was filled with family stables, Parisian parks, and fencing lessons. His mother proselytized noblesse oblige.¹⁴ The young Baron was a man of banquets and letterheads, pomp and garnish. He had easy access to Europe’s aristocracy. To the end he signed his name with the title Baron.

Coubertin embodied fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism, with a dash of nobility and sporty panache. He penned a slew of writings on sport, education, and the revival of the Olympic Games. A peripatetic proselytizer, Coubertin crisscrossed Europe gathering allies and refining his talking points. He visited the United States more than once and, like a latter-day Tocqueville, marveled at the Americans’ pluck. Gathering support for his Olympian Games, he highlighted the distinctly cosmopolitan character of his enterprise and the idea that sport was taking the place of unhealthy amusements and evil pleasures in the lives of young men.¹⁵ He claimed alcoholism has no more powerful antidote than athletics.¹⁶ And he promised, I shall burnish a flabby and cramped youth, its body and its character, by sport, its risks and even its excesses.¹⁷ For Coubertin, sport was the vigorous key to redemption. The muscles are made to do the work of a moral educator, he wrote.¹⁸ The Olympics were a vehicle for producing an international band of the moral elite.

The Baron’s brand of macho manifesto matched up well with the worldview of US president Theodore Roosevelt. The two men struck up a friendship, marked by flurries of correspondence. In one letter, Roosevelt praised Coubertin’s jaunty approach to social uplift. [I]n our modern, highly artificial, and on the whole congested, civilization, he wrote, no boon to the race could be greater than the acquisition by the average man of that bodily habit which you describe—a habit based upon having in youth possessed a thorough knowledge of such sports as those you outline, and then of keeping up a reasonable acquaintance with them in later years.¹⁹ The Baron in turn viewed Roosevelt as a kindred spirit, a firm partisan, an invaluable friend to our cause.²⁰ Upon Roosevelt’s death, Coubertin wrote a personal obituary in which he called the former president a great man and devotee of athletics up to the end of his virile existence, whose tombstone’s epitaph should share the motto of the Olympic Institute in Lausanne: Mens fervida in corpore lacertoso (an ardent mind in a trained body).²¹ The two men shared a deep affinity for muscular Christianity and an inclination to see the marriage of sport, machismo, patriotism, and democracy as a formula for strength.²²

To capture the spirit infusing his project, Coubertin coined the term Olympism. For him this meant an aristocracy, an elite, although an aristocracy whose origin is completely egalitarian, since it is based on sporting prowess and work ethic.²³ Olympism, he wrote, is a state of mind that derives from a twofold doctrine: that of effort, and that of eurythmy.²⁴ Olympism, the cult of effort, and the cult of eurythmy formed a mystic triumvirate that reverberated through Coubertin’s writing.²⁵ Again drawing from ancient Greece, he dubbed eurythmy a divine harness, a harmonious balance of athletics and art that was prevalent in ancient times but was now more important than ever in our nervous age. To him, eurythmy meant a world in proper proportion, with people living a eurythmy of life that blended bonhomie, bonheur, art, and Olympic aesthetics into a potent concoction of possibility.²⁶

Theodore Roosevelt recognized the religious impulse in the Baron’s project: I think that you preach just the right form of the gospel of physical development.²⁷ Like the Greeks, who threaded religion through the ancient Games, Coubertin saw Olympism as a philosophico-religious doctrine, a non-denominational festival of culture and sport designed to spur reverence and purity.²⁸ Coubertin was prone to write about the Games as a sacred enclosure where athletes served a vital role. The Olympics were a sanctuary reserved for the consecrated, purified athlete only, the athlete admitted to the main competitions and who became, in this way, a sort of priest, an officiating priest in the religion of the muscles. For Coubertin, the modern Games were a sort of moral Altis, a sacred Fortress where the competitors in the manly sports par excellence are gathered to pit their strength against each other. The goal of all this was nothing less than to defend man and to achieve self-mastery, to master danger, the elements, the animal, life.²⁹

A patina of religiosity shimmered through the Baron’s writings. Sport to me was a religion, with church, dogmas, services and so on, but especially a religious feeling, wrote Coubertin.³⁰ To heighten that feeling, he doggedly installed layer upon layer of Olympic ceremony, elaborate spectacles designed to conjure the "athletic religious concept, the religio athletae. In a 1935 speech he expanded on the idea: The primary, fundamental characteristic of ancient Olympism, and of modern Olympism as well, is that it is a religion. By chiseling his body through exercise as a sculptor does a statue, the ancient athlete ‘honored the gods.’ In doing likewise, the modern athlete honors his country, his race, and his flag."³¹ Coubertin and other true believers thought they could add religious fervor to flag-waving nationalism and unproblematically stir them into a potent brew of Olympism.

Internal Contradiction

Coubertin was renowned for his bounteous handlebar mustache—a hirsute gift that kept on giving. He was also famous for his belief that sport could scythe a path away from war and toward peace. To celebrate the Olympic Games is to appeal to history, Coubertin proclaimed. In turn, history is the only genuine foundation for a genuine peace.³² Yet the Baron’s views on the role of sport in matters of war and peace were in perpetual tension.

Coubertin was an eccentric Anglophile who saw in the sporting culture of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School the magic formula for Britain’s imperial dominance. While in his view the French were mired in physical inertia, softening up like idle dandies, Britons in the mold of Rugby School were mixing rigorous discipline with manly self-display. This led him to ponder how well it would be for France were we to introduce into our school system some of that physical vitality, some of that animal spirit, from which our neighbors have derived such incontestable benefits.³³ The Baron came to believe that within the British schooling system and its athletic programs lay the means to reinvigorate the French nation after the humiliation of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. Sport, as he put it, was a marvelous instrument for ‘virilization’.³⁴

France’s brutal defeat had an enormous impact on the young Coubertin. According to the Olympic scholar Jeffrey Segrave:

Coubertin became obsessed with the idea