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THE OLYMPICS STORY
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- India at the Olympics: Sir Dorabji Tata sent a team of athletes to the 1920 Antwerp Olympics at his own expense. India was the first colonised Asian nation to take part in the Olympic games and its embrace of the international sporting event was linked to the nationalist forces.
- Political propaganda: Political propaganda was surely at the core of India’s initiation into the Olympics. The Olympics is the oldest international sporting event on earth. In antiquity, sports, politics and religion came together in Olympics and winning the games was important not just for the ordinary people, but for the rulers and politicians.
- A witness to the world’s evolution: The French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the Olympics in 1896, with the idea being to draw upon the greatness and glory of the ancient event. Since then, the Olympics has been the field of political statements of all sorts. From anti-colonial struggles, to Nazi propaganda, the Cold War and the reshaping of the global order with the rise of China, the grand sporting event has seen it all.
- Replacing evil: In preparation for the rebirth of the Olympics, Coubertin travelled across Europe and visited the United States more than once to gather allies. He highlighted the distinctly cosmopolitan character of his enterprise and the idea that sports was taking the place of unhealthy amusements and evil pleasures in the lives of young men.
- Racism all the way: But he was a racist, and distinctly Eurocentric. In 1923, when he pressed for the admission of African countries to the Olympic Games, his justification was based on colonial stereotyping. “And perhaps it may appear premature to introduce the principle of sports competitions into a continent that is behind the times and among peoples still without elementary culture,” he wrote adding, "sport might help Africa “calm down”". Some modern experts say that the whole Olympics Games are colonial propaganda. It mostly features Western sport and predominantly still run by Western people (mostly men). For the longest time Canadians, Australians, South Africans and the Irish would participate in the Olympics as British.
- Irish resistance: But the Olympics also became a platform to showcase resistance against colonialism. The earliest such instance of anti-colonial demonstration in the Olympics was in 1906 (by Irish athletes Peter O’Connor, Con Leahy, John Daly and John McGough) who made it clear to the Olympics committee that they wished to represent Ireland. But they learnt that they had been registered as part of the British delegation. As a mark of protest, in the opening ceremony, the four Irish athletes turned up in bright green blazers teamed up with identical green caps carrying the symbol of a shamrock. The athletes lagged behind the rest of the British contingent, conspicuously distancing themselves from the pack and ignoring the English AAA’s demand that they feature Union Jacks on their sport coats.
- Aryan superiority: The 1936 Berlin games was a watershed moment, when Hitler made a grand athletic spectacle to demonstrate his ideology of Aryan superiority. He used the Olympics to promote the image of a new, strong and united Germany that was ready to return to the global community following its isolation after the First World War. Hitler masked his regime’s policy of targeting Jews and the Roma groups.
- Mad maniacs: The German government under Hitler used sports to promote the myth of the racial superiority of the Aryans. An ‘Aryans only’ policy was instituted across all athletic organisations in Germany, which thereby meant that Jews were not allowed to participate in sports. The only German Jewish athlete allowed to participate was Helene Mayer, that too because she was half Jewish.
- Resistance to racism: Many countries, including the US, Great Britain, Sweden, France and the Netherlands, wanted to boycott the Berlin Olympics. The president of the American Olympic Committee opposed the boycott on the grounds that “the Olympic Games belonged to the athletes and not to the politicians.” Eventually, the boycott movements failed and 49 nations sent their teams to the games, which legitimised Hitler’s Nazi propaganda and set the stage for the blatant human rights abuse that was unleashed, when millions were killed like animals. The Nazis, to promote a clean image, removed all anti-Jewish proganda from the newspapers and posters during the Games. German superiority was also promoted through symbolic means, by introducing the ‘torch relay’- a tradition in which the Olympic flame is carried by runners from Greece to the venue of the games through a relay system. (to illustrate that classical Greece was the Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich).
- Cold war and USSR: The revolutionary Russia ditched the Olympics as ‘bourgeois’, but Soviet Union decided to end its athletic isolation after the Second World War when it achieved the status of a great power and found a place in the United Nations. The 1952 Helsinki games marked the first appearance of the Soviet Union and for the next four decades, the Olympics turned into a field where the Cold War was played out.
- US boycott of 1980 Moscow games: The rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union entered a whole new level in the 1980 Moscow Games when the United States decided to boycott the event following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. President Jimmy Carter recruited boxing legend and Olympic gold medalist Muhammad Ali on a mission to Africa in order to garner support for the boycott. Ultimately, 65 nations refused to participate in the Games including Canada, China, West Germany, and South America apart from the US.
- Rise of the emerging world: For most of the 20th century, the Olympics was a first world affair. With the games being held at Beijing in 2008, Sochi in 2014, Rio De Janeiro in 2016 and at Tokyo in 2020 (2021), a shift in global politics is clearly visible. For the developing world, hosting the games is seen as particularly important, both to demonstrate to the world its economic successes and to legitimise domestic policies.
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