Читать книгу Power Games - Jules Boykoff - Страница 11

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 of creating a new French elite, a new brand of French Tories shaped by English sport and compatible with the Republic. This new elite was a sort of revamped French gentry federated by sports, which would allow France to once again assume leadership status among European nations and, indeed, the world at large in the commercial, military, and colonial realms.³⁵

The Baron’s muscular nationalism worked in productive tension with his peace-loving internationalism. On one hand, sport was the supreme “peacemaker,” a cure that could help quell geopolitical tensions. He believed sport could bring people together to contemplate each other’s histories, create meaningful understanding, and surmount social and cultural barriers, making it “a potent, if indirect, factor in securing world peace.”³⁶ Coubertin asserted that “manly sports are good for everyone and under all circumstances,”³⁷ yet he recognized that there were limits to idealism. “To ask the peoples of the world to love one another,” he wrote, “is merely a form of childishness.”³⁸ While athletic activity “will not make angels of brutes,” they could, he believed, “temper that brutality, giving the individual a bit of self-control.”³⁹

But sometimes the Baron went the other direction. He argued that sport was “an indirect preparation for war,” and that the skill sets necessary for sport—“indifference towards one’s own well being, courage, readiness for the unforeseen”—translated seamlessly to warfare. “The young sportsman is certainly better prepared for war than his untrained brothers,” he asserted.⁴⁰ A mere year before the outbreak of World War I, Coubertin, in a paroxysm of bellicose prescience, wrote, “People will learn a great lesson from the athlete: hatred without battle is not worthy of man, and insult without blows is utterly unbecoming.”⁴¹

The modern Olympics have always walked a tightrope between chauvinism and internationalism. When Orwell wrote that “international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred” he had the Olympics in mind. When it comes to international sports mega-events, he argued, “there cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism—that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”⁴² Coubertin aimed to undercut chauvinism by spreading the Olympic spirit, whereby “applause is vouchsafed solely in proportion to the worth of the feat accomplished, and regardless of any national preference … all exclusively national sentiments must then be suspended and, so to speak ‘sent on temporary holiday’.”⁴³ While Orwell and his intellectual descendants would view this as hooey, Coubertin and his ilk embedded this idea in the high-minded Olympic Charter, the constitution of the Olympic movement. Still the tension between chauvinism and internationalism has persisted through all the Olympiads. It continues to trouble the Games today.

Another set of contradictions marks Coubertin’s life and work. While some Olympic historians argue he championed a “moderate political progressivism” based on inclusion and tolerance, many of his views on gender, race, and class were mired in the prejudices of the period.⁴⁴ The Olympic Games were supposedly for everyone, but from the outset, numerous athletes were excluded.

Coubertin was a man of many talents, but penning feminist theory was not among them. “The Olympic Games must be reserved for men,” he frequently proclaimed. To the Baron, including women’s competitions was “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and, I do not hesitate to add, improper.”⁴⁵ The very thought of it induced an “unseemly spectacle” in the mind.⁴⁶ “Woman’s glory,” he said, “rightfully came through the number and quality of children she produced, and that where sports were concerned, her greatest accomplishment was to encourage her sons to excel rather than to seek records for herself.”⁴⁷ He argued for “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism … with the applause of women as a reward.”⁴⁸ When it came to the Olympics, the role of women “should be above all to crown the victors, as was the case in the ancient tournaments.”⁴⁹

These opinions did not fade with time. Even in 1934—three years before he succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 74—the Baron declared, “I continue to think that association with women’s athleticism is bad…and that such athleticism should be excluded from the Olympic programme.”⁵⁰ In 1935 Coubertin was still writing that the vaunted “young adult male” was “the person in whose honor the Olympic Games must be celebrated and their rhythm organized and maintained, because it is on him that the near future depends, as well as the harmonious passage from the past to the future.”⁵¹ Even after so many years and the slowly progressing climate of society at large, his views on women and sport had not evolved.

Some Olympic scholars attribute Coubertin’s unwavering insistence on the exclusion of women to “nineteenth century thinking,” and thus find it understandable.⁵² But there were many at the time who were pressing vigorously for women’s participation in the Games. If Coubertin’s views on women don’t make him a card-carrying troglodyte, at the least they are the mark of a man who lacked a moral compass set to true equality.

On matters of race, Coubertin was prone to a Eurocentric brand of racism only slightly relieved by a few liberal impulses. The Baron didn’t hesitate to differentiate between “savages” and the “civilized”; sport, he believed, was a prime vehicle to close the gap between the two. As he put it: “Sports means movement, and the influence of movement on bodies is something that has been evident from time immemorial. Strength and agility have been deeply appreciated among savage and civilized peoples alike. Both are achieved through exercise and practice: happy balance in the moral order.”⁵³

Coubertin’s “moral order” made space for the notion that a “superior race” could enjoy “certain privileges,” and for the idea of “the natural indolence of the Oriental.”⁵⁴ His views on the subject sound shocking today. “The theory proposing that all human races have equal rights leads to a line of policy which hinders any progress in the colonies,” he wrote; “the superior race is fully entitled to deny the lower race certain privileges of civilized life”—for their own good, of course.⁵⁵

Nevertheless, Coubertin pressed for the admittance of African countries to the Olympic Games in his address to the twenty-second IOC Session in Rome in 1923. But to this liberal push for inclusion he added a hefty dose of colonialism and racist stereotyping:

And perhaps it may appear premature to introduce the principal of sports competitions into a continent that is behind the times and among peoples still without elementary culture—and particularly presumptuous to expect this expansion to lead to a speeding up of the march of civilization in these countries. Let us think, however, for a moment, of what is troubling the African soul. Untapped forces—individual laziness and a sort of collective need for action—a thousand resentments, and a thousand jealousies of the white man and yet, at the same time, the wish to imitate him and thus share his privileges – the conflict between wishing to submit to discipline and to escape from it—and, in the midst of an innocent gentleness that is not without its charm, the sudden outburst of ancestral violence … these are just some features of these races to which the younger generation, which has in fact derived great benefit from sport, is turning its attention.⁵⁶

The Baron proceeded to speculate that sport might help Africa “calm down,” since it “helps create order and clarify thought.” He concluded on an upbeat note: “Let us not hesitate therefore to help Africa join in” the Olympic Movement.⁵⁷

Coubertin sometimes dogwhistled a dim awareness of the prejudices that others held, though certainly not himself. “Anglo-Saxons have some trouble in getting used to the idea that other nations can devote themselves to athleticism, and that successfully,” he wrote. “I can understand this, and the feeling is certainly excusable.” But he knew that the progressive possibilities of sport outweighed other considerations: “It does not follow that young men of other races, with blood and muscles like their own, should not be worthy of walking in their footsteps.”⁵⁸

Many of the Baron’s views on race were socially acceptable in the mainstream of his time, but what really got him into trouble were his views on class and amateurism. The Olympic historian John Lucas once characterized the Baron as having an “ever-active mind” that “was grasshopper-like, never lingering for more than a few moments on any one subject.”⁵⁹ But like it or not, Coubertin was forced to linger on the persistently spiky issue of amateurism.

Coubertin believed reserving the Olympics for amateur athletes was vital to the Games’ development. He wrote, “Convinced as I am that amateurism is one of the first conditions of the progress and prosperity of sport, I have never ceased to work for it.” He added, “When in 1894 I proposed to revive the Olympian Games, it was with the idea that they would also be reserved to amateurs alone.”⁶⁰ His problems began when he imported the definition of amateurism that was rampant in class-bound nineteenth-century Britain. Those who performed manual labor for pay, whether tied to sports or not, were considered professionals and were thus sidelined from participation. This meant that if someone did not have an independent source of income outside of actual work—in other words, if they were not independently wealthy—they’d be excluded from the amateur category.⁶¹ Waged workers were out of luck. The Amateur Athletic Club in England took no chances, passing a rule known as “the mechanics clause,” which denied amateur status to anyone “who is by trade or employment, a mechanic, artisan, or labourer.”⁶² As Tony Collins notes in Sport in Capitalist Society, amateurism, as a crystalline reflection of British upper- and middle-class values, was deployed as “an ideology of control and exclusion, dressed up as moral imperative for sport.”⁶³ The amateur code allowed the upper and middle classes to regulate working people behind a scrim of rhetorical morality.

The Baron was not keen to exclude people—at least not Anglo-Saxon males—from his Olympics. He preferred a fluffy, non-controversial definition of amateur athletics: “perfect disinterestedness” mixed with “the sentiment of honor.”⁶⁴ But to get the five-ring engine revving, he had to compromise on the amateur issue, bending toward the British definition, at least in the early days of the Games. His reasoning became excruciatingly conciliatory, reaching such piano-wire tension that it threatened to snap altogether: “Our reaction must be based on adopting a more intelligent, broader, and certainly narrower, definition of an amateur,” he wrote in 1901, contradicting himself within a single sentence.⁶⁵

Within a few years the strict British definition of amateurism had to give, in large part because of the pressure and popularity of professional soccer in England. ⁶⁶ Working-class athletes from the United States also played a pivotal role. In advance of the 1908 Games in London, the New York Times pointed out the class bias of Olympic amateurism in discussing the “American oarsmen” who “have been discriminated against” by the Amateur Rowing Association of Great Britain’s definition of amateurism. “No artisan, laborer, or mechanic or man who does manual work for a living may compete,” the newspaper reported, constituting “a direct slap at American amateurs, most of whom are of the working class.”⁶⁷

Writing in 1919, the Baron belatedly declared solidarity with that sentiment, maintaining that he’d wanted workers to be involved all along:

Formerly the practice of sport was the occasional pastime of rich and idle youth. I have labored for thirty years to make it the habitual pleasure of the lower middle classes. It is now necessary for this pleasure to enter the lives of the adolescent proletariat. It is necessary because this pleasure is the least costly, the most egalitarian, the most anti-alcoholic, and the most productive of contained and controlled energy. All forms of sport for everyone; that is no doubt a formula which is going to be criticised as madly utopian. I do not care.⁶⁸

Coubertin argued that his Games needed to be opened up to the working class “if we do not want civilisation to blow up like a boiler without a valve.”⁶⁹ Coubertin’s gestures toward working-class inclusion should not be confused with radical tendencies. Rather they were a mode of social control, a way to tamp down class conflict and to enforce the status quo. He was a staunch French Republican; to him, socialism was a scourge. “Let us not fall into the utopia of complete communism,” he once wrote.⁷⁰ As the Olympic historian John Hoberman notes, Coubertin was able to “integrate conservative class interests into a modern ideology of sport” that has demonstrated extraordinary longevity.⁷¹

Coubertin was not dogmatic when it came to amateurism. He detested “false amateurs who reap fat rewards” for their athletic exploits,⁷² but he was also critical of the “rusty” definition of amateurism he inherited from the British, viewing it as “a means of social defense, of class preoccupation.”⁷³ Coubertin wanted a definition of “amateur” that was fair and reasonable. But his push for a more nuanced definition was denied by the IOC Executive Committee in 1922 when it defined an amateur as “an athlete who does not gain any material benefit of his participation in competitions” and a professional as “an athlete who directly/indirectly gains benefit by his personal participation in sports.”⁷⁴ As we shall see, future IOC presidents were continually forced to deal with the amateurism imbroglio. Avery Brundage, the IOC president from 1952 to 1972, was gripped with an almost religious fervor over the issue; professional athletes were the bane of his presidency. In contrast, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980 to 2001, the era of neoliberal capitalism, made professional athletes more than welcome.⁷⁵

Coubertin was a pragmatist who formed strategic alliances to keep his beloved Games moving forward, even if it meant dancing with political devils (he praised both Mussolini and Hitler, host of the 1936 Berlin Games).⁷⁶ But the Games always came first, and the Baron strove to imbue them with symbolic ritual, pomp, and pageantry. He added classical-style hymns, banners, and laurel leaves to the Olympic aesthetic. He created the iconic five-ring Olympic symbol in 1913, with the rings symbolic of the five continents and the colors of the rings representing hues found on flags around the world. Coubertin also designed the flag, with his five-ring icon in the center, first unveiling it at the 1914 Olympic World Congress in Paris to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the IOC. The flag made its Olympic premiere at the 1920 Antwerp Games, where it featured the now-familiar motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger).⁷⁷ Coubertin moved the IOC headquarters from Paris to neutral territory—Lausanne, Switzerland—in 1915, where it remains today.⁷⁸ And he chose effective teammates like Demetrios Vikelas, the affable Greek who eventually became the first president of the IOC. Thanks to the Baron’s energy, stamina, talent, and panache, the Games were on.

Party Like It’s 1896

In 1894, Coubertin gathered a throng of sports aficionados for an international congress in Paris to discuss the vexing question of amateurism in athletics. In his initial appeal, he did not explicitly mention his plan to revive the Olympic Games, for fear of alienating potential participants.⁷⁹ But by the time he issued a preliminary agenda, he tacked on as the eighth and final item “the possibility of restoring the Olympic Games … under what circumstances could they be restored?”⁸⁰ By the time the actual congress rolled around, this single bullet point was expanded into three agenda items pertaining to the Games’ “advantages from the athletic, moral and international points of view,” the selection of specific sports for inclusion at the Games, and the “nomination of an International Committee responsible for preparing their re-establishment.”⁸¹

Some 2,000 witnesses to the proceedings packed the Sorbonne’s amphitheater, including seventy-nine official delegates from forty-nine athletic societies based in twelve countries. Luminaries in attendance included representatives of the Paris Polo Club, the French Equestrian Society, and the Society for the Encouragement of Fencing. Numerous royals accepted the invitation: the king of Belgium, the prince of Wales, Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, Sweden’s royal prince, the crown prince of Greece, and more.⁸² Early on, the congress was divided into two committees, one that would examine amateurism, and the other, Olympism.⁸³ Journalists from prominent newspapers—Le Figaro, The Times of London, the New York Times, the National-Zeitung—were on hand to cover the action.⁸⁴ The stage was set.

The Baron wasn’t about to squander the opportunity. He packed the inner circle with dignitaries sympathetic to his Olympic dream. He handpicked an “International Committee for the Olympic Games”—the first iteration of the IOC—that was swiftly ratified by the congress. From the beginning, the IOC carried the whiff of aristocracy, featuring two counts, a lord, and of course the Baron. Professors, generals, and other social and political elites of the day filled out the IOC’s roster, even though a number of them hadn’t even attended the Paris congress. Coubertin envisioned the original IOC as “three concentric circles.” One comprised “a small nucleus of active and convinced members.” The second circle was “a nursery of members of good will who were capable of being educated.” Lastly, there was “a façade of more or less useful men whose presence satisfied national pretensions while giving some prestige to the group.”⁸⁵ To charges that the group was elitist and non-democratic, Coubertin replied: “We are not elected. We are self-recruiting, and our terms of office are unlimited. Is there anything else that could irritate the public more?” Was he troubled by such allegations? “We are not in the least concerned about it,” he assured a gathering in London in 1908.⁸⁶

Coubertin’s goal was to arrange for the inaugural Olympic Games to take place in 1900 in Paris. But the delegates at the Sorbonne decided unanimously to hold the first modern Olympics in Athens only two years after the congress, in 1896.⁸⁷ With the Greeks slated to host, Demetrios Vikelas was chosen as IOC president, while Coubertin assumed the post of general secretary.

Vikelas was a University of London–trained author who married a wealthy Greek heiress and enjoyed connections in high places. With only two years to prepare for the first modern Olympics, he led a mad scramble to raise funds to stage the event. But his zeal was tempered by Greek prime minister Charilaos Tricoupis, who didn’t believe in anteing up the government’s scarce funds for the effort (Coubertin later claimed that Tricoupis “did not believe in the success of the Games”).⁸⁸ In stark contrast to the Olympics of today, the 1896 Games would have to be financed outside the fiscal system of the national government. Fortunately for the organizers, King George and Crown Prince Constantine of Greece showed considerable enthusiasm for rallying private donors. While the Baron stayed behind in Paris, occupying himself with tasks such as securing sculptor Jules Chaplain to design the Olympic medals, Vikelas scurried around Athens making arrangements, brokering deals, and promising an influx of tourists. He reached out to the foreign press through a stream of telegrams hyping the Games.⁸⁹

To quell the panic over the dearth of funds, Coubertin publicly lowballed the cost of the Olympics, inaugurating a trend that still thrives today. He assured everyone that the Games could be staged for a mere 200,000 drachmas—a figure that the Olympic historian David Young dubbed “ridiculously low,” given that the stadium refurbishment alone cost three times that much.⁹⁰ Were it not for George Averoff, a wealthy Greek businessman who agreed to finance the stadium building in Athens, the Games might not have happened. (For his munificence Averoff was rewarded with a sizable statue in his likeness that graced the stadium entrance.) The 1896 Olympics also enjoyed the generous support of trade unions and working people across Athens—which was ironic since they would be ineligible to participate in the Games, thanks to the “mechanics clause.”⁹¹ Because of the groundswell of local support, the Games were on.

The opening ceremony of 1896 Olympics was said to be the largest assemblage of people for peaceful purposes since antiquity, with 50,000 packed into the stadium and another 20,000 lounging on the hillside above. Young describes the Games as “the grandest sporting event to that point in the history of earth.”⁹² These first modern Olympics featured forty-three events in nine sports, with thirteen countries sending 311 participants. Nearly three of every four competitors hailed from Greece.⁹³ The United States sent the largest contingent of foreign athletes, most of them college students from the Eastern seaboard. They fared brilliantly, scooping up a hefty satchel of medals, and punctuated their efforts with rah-rah college-boy cheers that left the assembled Greeks gobsmacked. Blending ignorance with toxic stereotyping, one Athens newspaper explained the Americans’ success by claiming they “joined the inherited athletic training of the Anglo-Saxon to the wild impetuosity of the redskin.”⁹⁴ After competing, Olympic athletes mingled with everyday citizens, making them accessible in ways unthinkable today.⁹⁵

Looking back on the 1896 Olympics, scholars have come to diverse conclusions, from deeming them “a huge success”⁹⁶ to the assessment that the Games “are best remembered for the fact that they took place.”⁹⁷ The Olympics earned mixed reviews in the US press, despite the fact that American athletes shined. One observer deemed the opening of the Games in Athens to be “a delight to the eye and an impressive appeal to the imagination.” Pointing to the intrinsic values of the revived sporting competition, the person wrote that the sport festival “has become a good thing of itself, and with all other worthy influences is making for a balanced culture and perfected manhood.”⁹⁸ Another commentator complained that the event was hardly international, contending that the IOC “failed to attract foreign competitors [and] also failed to attract foreign spectators.” Despite Vikelas’s rosy predictions, the New York Times reported that thanks to a “preposterous” hike in hotel room costs, many tourists who had planned on visiting Athens “abstained from going … intentionally delaying their visit to Athens till after the termination of the games.”⁹⁹

But the Greeks were thrilled with the outcome. At the conclusion of the Games, they were keen to host all future Olympics. At a royal banquet for the athletes and distinguished foreign guests, King George offered a bold toast:

Greece, who has been the mother and nurse of the Olympic Games in ancient times and who had undertaken to celebrate them once more today, can now hope, as their success has gone beyond all expectations, that the foreigners, who have honoured her with their presence, will remember Athens as the peaceful meeting place of all nations, as the tranquil and permanent seat of the Olympic Games.¹⁰⁰

According to the Games’ official report, the king’s suggestion elicited “an outburst of hurrahs. The enthusiasm was indiscribable [sic].” The idea was ratified by members of the US Olympic team, who wrote an open letter to Crown Prince Constantine stating that “these games should never be removed from their native soil.”¹⁰¹

Although tactfully taciturn at the time, Coubertin chafed at King George’s power move and the Americans’ enthusiasm for it. He unsheathed his pen to reassert his vision for the sports festival—to have it circumnavigate the globe to spread the Olympic gospel. Harking back to promises made at the 1894 Paris congress, he firmly insisted, “It was there agreed that every country should celebrate the Olympic games in turn.”¹⁰² And the Baron pulled a power move of his own, informing the Greeks that they were welcome to hold their own athletic festivals as long as they didn’t use the phrase “Olympic Games.” That Greek term densely embedded in Greek history apparently belonged to him.¹⁰³

In the wake of the 1896 Games, Vikelas stepped down as the head of the IOC, and Coubertin ascended from general secretary to president. He held this position until 1925, when at the age of 62 he retired. His extended tenure set the tone for future presidents to remain at the helm of the IOC for long periods of time. To date, the IOC has had just nine presidents in its 120-year history.

Unfairness at the Fair

At the turn of the century the Olympics did not yet enjoy the cachet they have today, so the 1900 Games in Paris and the 1904 Games in St. Louis had to affix themselves to the enormous cosmopolitan institutions of the day—World’s Fairs. The early modern Olympics were mere sideshows to the World’s Fairs, not the main event on the world stage that we see today.

Early on it was clear that Paris would present challenges to the IOC. Coubertin’s French compatriots were anything but eager to host the Games. The Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques resisted Coubertin’s proposal even though the Baron was the general secretary of the group. After considerable finagling, Coubertin was forced to fasten his beloved Games onto the Exposition Universelle in order to get them staged at all. Fair organizers dreaded including the Olympics, partly because French politicians and the professoriat deemed sports a lowbrow pursuit. The Baron responded by calling the Exposition “a vulgar glorified fair: exactly the opposite of what we wanted the Olympic Games to be.”¹⁰⁴ When French sport officials performed a volte-face and decided to manage the Games themselves, Coubertin and the IOC found themselves on the outside looking in. As at Athens, local organizers marginalized Coubertin, sometimes even snubbing him. This left a bitter taste in the Baron’s mouth.¹⁰⁵

Attaching the Olympics to the World’s Fair meant significant trade-offs. For starters, competition stretched over the many months that the Fair took place—in the case of Paris, some 167 days spanning July through October. Organizers insisted on referring to the sports events as the “Competitions of the Exhibition” rather than the “Olympics Games,” a decision that irked Coubertin; he called it “a poor and clumsy title we had to accept for the time being for want of something more elegant and appropriate.”¹⁰⁶ Compounding Coubertin’s chagrin, sporting competitions were scattered amid an array of unrelated events, leading to confusion among spectators as to what was an Olympic event and what wasn’t. Even athletes weren’t sure. Some returned home uncertain of whether they had even participated in the Olympics. In 1900, the Luxembourg-born French runner Michel Théato triumphed in the marathon. Yet he only figured out he was an Olympic champion some twelve years later, when Olympic statisticians waded through the mess to sync up their records, deciding which of the events were officially Olympic and which were just part of the Fair.¹⁰⁷

The Paris Games of 1900 did offer a few bright spots. With Coubertin marginalized, these Olympics were the first in which women were invited to participate, with around twenty women traveling to France to compete in sports like tennis and golf. Charlotte Cooper of Great Britain was the first woman to become an Olympic champion, winning gold in tennis. Cooper, who had already won three Wimbledon tennis tournaments and would go on to win two more, defeated Hélène Prévost of France in straight sets, 6–4, 6–2. Cooper also teamed up with fellow Briton Reginald Doherty to earn the gold medal in mixed doubles, defeating Prévost who joined forces with Harold Mahoney of Ireland. Margaret Abbott became the first woman from the United States to win gold. She beat out nine other women competing in the nine-hole golf tournament. Abbott, a Chicago socialite who had traveled to Paris in 1899 to study art, accompanied by her mother, the novelist and editor Mary Ives Abbott, chalked up her victory in part to the other competitors’ sartorial standards, commenting that “all the French girls … turned up to play in high heels and tight skirts.” The Games were so disorganized that the twenty-two-year-old golf champion had no idea that the tournament she won was part of the Olympics. She died without knowing she was an Olympic victor.

The uptick in women’s involvement was part of a larger trend: six times as many athletes participated in Paris as at Athens, coming from twenty-six countries and engaging in twenty-four sports. Yet participation was hampered by the prohibitive cost of travel, which gave a leg up to wealthier countries whose national sport committees could defray travel and living expenses. Such unequal participation is bricked into the Olympics to this day.¹⁰⁸

Coubertin saw the Games’ domination by the Universal Exhibition as a disaster. He resolved that the IOC should never again allow the Olympics to get hijacked by a World’s Fair, “where their philosophical value vanishes into thin air and their education merit becomes nil.” After the 1900 Games, Coubertin decided that Olympism would have to assert its independence and “no longer be reduced to the role of humiliated vassal to which it had been subjected in Paris.”¹⁰⁹

But humiliation was precisely what the Olympics would experience at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, where matters went from bad to worse, despite the backing of the popular US president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was named honorary president of the 1904 Olympics and even agreed to appear at the Games in person, an apt endorsement from a man the New York Times credited with catalyzing “a Nation of brawn and muscle.”¹¹⁰ Despite Roosevelt’s imprimatur, the Baron sensed disaster. He reported experiencing “a sort of presentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town.” His assessment of St. Louis was blunt: “There was no beauty, no originality.” Attaching the Games to the World’s Fair only brought him feelings of “repugnance.” He didn’t even make the voyage to St. Louis.¹¹¹

Neither did many athletes from Europe, leaving the field open for American and Canadian domination—of the 617 competitors who paid the two-dollar entrance fee plus fifty cents per event, 525 were from the United States and forty-one were from Canada. Meanwhile, women’s participation declined, with only eight females competing. The World’s Fair (officially the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) was once again spread across months, from May through November.¹¹² The official Olympics lasted a week spanning August and September, but organizers created confusion by referring to all athletic competitions in the wider exhibition as “Olympic events.” As one participant from Milwaukee recalled: “The Olympics didn’t amount to much then. They were only a little tiny part of the big show in St. Louis. There was not much of an international flavor to the Games. It was largely a meet between American athletic clubs. I ran for the Milwaukee A. C. [Amateur Club] and I never gave any real thought to the idea that I was representing the United States of America.”¹¹³

Worse yet, the St. Louis Olympics were tarnished by the inclusion of the Anthropology Days, a sequence of athletic events in mid-August that allowed social scientists and sport bigwigs to test racist hypotheses. The Anthropology Days were not part of the official Olympic program, but World’s Fair organizers often called them the “Special Olympics” and billed them as “the first athletic meeting held anywhere, in which savages were exclusive participants.”¹¹⁴

The Anthropology Days pitted ethnic and racial groups against one another in events like track and field to see which group, supposedly, was the most athletically gifted. Anthropology Days organizers aimed to whet spectators’ appetites for the official Games that would follow, but another motive was to contrast what they called “savages” to the highly trained athletes from the United States and Europe. To do this, they rigged the system to ensure that the savages could be “scientifically proven” to be inferior. Anthropologist Nancy Parezo sums up the affair as “a comedy in bad science” in the service of social Darwinism.¹¹⁵

The Anthropology Days were in part inspired by the fledgling field of social science, and it is in that historical context that they are best understood. Academics sought methodological rigor in order to put the “science” in “social science.” One form of data that found prominence was anthropometry, whereby researchers used biometric measurements to link race and body type to labels like “natural athlete” and “born criminal.” Anthropologists assumed that race existed as a stable category, and that it correlated with specific physical, psychological, and cultural characteristics. Their supposedly objective measures were shaped by politics and used to justify colonialism and racist subjugation.

The organizers of the Anthropology Days at St. Louis were two World’s Fair officials, William J. McGee and James E. Sullivan. McGee was an anthropologist and proselytizer of anthropometry. Sullivan headed the Department of Physical Culture for the Exposition. He was a former athlete and prolific writer who penned a glorified account of the proceedings for Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1905 called “Anthropology Days at the Stadium.”

Sullivan initially proposed a “Special Olympics” in order to dispel any popular notions that non-whites were “natural athletes” who could compete at the same level as Caucasians. The “utter lack of athletic ability on the part of the savages,” as Sullivan put it, would prove that Western athletes were the best in the world.¹¹⁶ Sullivan and McGee pulled their pool of participants from the nearly 3,000 indigenous people who traveled to St. Louis from around the world to take part in the Fair. A sizable number of them were enticed, cajoled, or bullied into playing along with Anthropology Days.¹¹⁷ Since the exposition was in the United States, Native groups from the US and Canada predominated, including Arapahos, Chippewas, Kickapoos, Kiowas, Navajos, Nez Perce, Pawnees, Sioux, Wichitas, and First Nations people from Vancouver Island. Even the famous Apache Geronimo was there. Also on hand were indigenous people from the Philippines, recently conquered by the United States in the Spanish-American War: the Bagobos, Igorots, Moros, Negritos, and Visayans. Other indigenous groups included African Pygmies, Argentine Patagonians, and Japanese Ainus.¹¹⁸

At the core of McGee’s belief system sat the assumption that indigenous peoples and Caucasians were subject to scientific laws governing their physical capabilities. In economic terms, the “Special Olympics” were meant to demonstrate anthropology’s use value while conjuring exchange value for his stockpile of anthropological artifacts, which he aimed to sell to procure funding for future research. He also sought to validate his theory that environment determined physical prowess.

Sullivan believed that American athletes and their training methods were unparalleled. As Parezo notes, he “absolutely believed that Caucasians were the best natural as well as the best-trained athletes in the world. Whites (especially those of Northern European heritage) were the superior race and America, because of its racial heritage, was a peerless culture, which would only progress further if it adopted his programs.”¹¹⁹ Both McGee and Sullivan arrived in St. Louis with fully formed conclusions in search of data that would “prove” they were right. If they came across findings in friction with their beliefs, they simply explained them away.¹²⁰

McGee and Sullivan’s efforts were thwarted in part by Native Americans like the Ojibwe and Osage, who refused to submit to anthropometric measuring. Others, like the Cocopas, Moros, and Visayans, refused to be photographed. Negritos refused to climb trees on demand or to have their feet measured. Unlike other athletic competitors at the World’s Fair, Anthropology Days participants were not offered cash prizes, so many indigenous people just said no. Others declined the invitation because they did not understand the rules for these totally foreign sports. Organizers tried to persuade potential participants by bringing them to witness Olympic trials so they could learn the rules by watching athletes in action. After watching swimming trials, there were no takers, aside from the Samal Moros. It didn’t help that the rules were never explicitly explained—organizers opted not to hop the language hurdles. Further, indigenous athletes were not allowed to practice. The game was rigged; some Native Americans, like the Arapahos and Wichitas, departed en masse instead of playing along with the racial experiment.¹²¹

McGee and Sullivan were undeterred—they had theories to prove. Heats for running events were arranged, one for each individual group. As Sullivan reported, there were heats for “Africans, Moros (Philippines), Patagonians, and the Ainu (Japanese), Cocopa (Mexican), and Sioux Indian tribes.”¹²² A St. Louis University professor explained the rules in English and without interpreters. The goal was to collect the fastest person from each group and place each one in the final. Sullivan was to compare their times with those of his prized athletes from the United States and Northern Europe. But cultural differences wrecked the master plan. Instead of plunging through the finish-line ribbon, indigenous runners would wait for their colleagues or duck under the tape. As Parezo notes, “Cooperation was more important than ‘victory’… waiting for friends was a sign of graciousness and a symbol of respect in many cultures.”¹²³ To Sullivan, these breaches of the rules were unforgiveable; rule-breakers were unceremoniously disqualified.

Even by the standards of the day, many found the Anthropology Days absurd and shameful. Stephen Simms, of the Field Museum in Chicago, was taken aback by the charade of racism masquerading as scientific method.¹²⁴ McGee himself initially downplayed the results of Anthropology Days over concerns that not enough data were obtained. Such quibbles did not faze Sullivan, who made capacious generalizations about the “utter lack of athletic ability on the part of the savages.”¹²⁵ He compared indigenous participants to Olympic medal-winners like track star Ray Ewry and pronounced that the comparison “proves conclusively that the savage is not the natural athlete we have been led to believe.”¹²⁶

Parezo demonstrates how such conclusions carried wide-ranging ramifications: “To Sullivan the Anthropology Days proved that his opinions about sports as a medium for shaping the moral and cognitive development of young people were correct but that Native peoples were intellectually, socially, cognitively, and morally inferior by nature.” As such, “they were not as good prospects for assimilation as European immigrants.”¹²⁷ McGee apparently agreed. In his final report on Anthropology Days he asserted “the lesson” of their Special Olympics was that “primitive men are far inferior to modern Caucasians in both physical and mental development.”¹²⁸ Sullivan concurred: “The whole meeting proves conclusively that the savage has been a very much overrated man from an athletic point of view.”¹²⁹

Although Sullivan deemed his “Special Olympics” a “brilliant success,” Coubertin did not agree. He called Anthropology Days “a mistake,” “inhuman,” and “flawed”¹³⁰ and feared that they marked the “beginnings of exotic athleticism” that were “hardly flattering.”¹³¹ Although the Anthropology Days were “the only original feature offered by the program,” they were “a particularly embarrassing one.”¹³² Other commentators agreed. Writing more than a quarter-century later, Hugh Harlan declared that featuring athletes “from various backwards nations” created “confusion and mis-direction,” a “sad spectacle” that meant the “St. Louis games could not be anything except a failure as far as an international sport festival is concerned.”¹³³

Some of the racialist assumptions that underpinned the Anthropology Days arguably persist today. Historian Mark Dyreson writes, “The contemplation of racial and national difference remains a central feature of Olympic sport in the twenty-first century. Rather than discrediting scientific and popular measurements of the ‘physical value’ of human populations, Anthropology Days embedded that practice in modern discourse.”¹³⁴ The episode also helps us better understand modern-day indigenous resistance to the Olympics, a theme I will take up later.

Despite the religious rhetoric that pervades Coubertin’s writings, Sigmund Loland asserts, “we can characterize Olympism as a secular, vitalistic ‘humanism of the muscles’.”¹³⁵ At the 1904 Games in St. Louis “humanism” was scarce. But the Olympics could also provide a platform for athletes to challenge colonialism, if through the lever of nationalism. That is what happened at the 1906 intercalary Games in Athens.

Olympian Dissent in 1906

After the debacle in St. Louis, the Olympics verged on imminent fizzle. Coubertin’s control of the Olympics was slipping, and it wasn’t entirely clear who was running the show.

According to the Baron’s original vision, the Games would rotate through the major cities of the world, touching down every four years in a new location to spread the Olympic gospel. But Greek boosters and their German allies had other plans, which they hatched at the 1901 IOC meeting in Paris. They proposed holding the Olympics every two years, alternating between Athens and “other large cities of the civilized countries.”¹³⁶ This would ensure that the Olympics landed in the Greek capital every four years, beginning in 1906.

Coubertin’s grip on the Games was far from ironclad. Many Olympics boosters in Greece saw him as a trespasser stealing their historical birthright. The American James Sullivan undermined his authority at every opportunity. The IOC was wracked with internal turbulence as members threatened to defect.¹³⁷ Under these circumstances, Coubertin grudgingly pledged the IOC’s support for the 1906 Athens Olympics, which eventually became known as the “intercalary” Games.¹³⁸ However, the Baron refused to attend the 1906 Games, and later did everything he could to undercut their historical importance, stopping just short of plugging his ears with his index fingers and ululating, la-la-la-la-la, whenever someone broached the topic.¹³⁹

The 1906 Games opened with a grand procession of the aristocracy. More than 60,000 raucous spectators watched the arrival of a carriage chock full of royalty, including King George of Greece, his sister Queen Alexandra of Great Britain, King Edward VII of Britain, Queen Olga of Greece, the Prince of Wales and his spouse, Princess Mary. The royal box seats were packed with delegates from various European courts as well as members of the Greek royal family, including the Duke and Duchess of Sparta.¹⁴⁰ Sullivan, then US commissioner to the Olympics, described the scene: “Flags were waved in a frantic manner. The fringe of soldiers around the top row of seats stood saluting, the naval officers stood back of the throne in salute. The cheers grew louder and louder—not only the people in the Stadium were cheering, but all Athens was cheering.”¹⁴¹

But the most memorable moment from the 1906 Olympics was not the regal cavalcade at the opening ceremony but the audacious act of dissent carried out by the son of an Irish shipbuilder: track athlete Peter O’Connor. O’Connor was not only one of the most accomplished Irish tracksters in history, but also an ardent Irish nationalist who abhorred the idea of having to compete as a British athlete. The English Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) tried to induce O’Connor and his fellow Irishman Con Leahy to compete for Great Britain at the Athens Games. At 34, O’Connor was nearing the twilight of a successful career, but the British felt he and Leahy were capable of boosting their medal tally. However, O’Connor and Leahy were determined to go out in a blaze of Irish green competing for the small Olympic contingent from Ireland heading to the Games.¹⁴²

O’Connor traveled to Athens with Con Leahy and two other Irish athletes, John Daly and John McGough. Everyday Irish men and women keen to see Ireland represented at the Olympics had raised money for the athletes’ passage to Athens. In correspondence with Olympic officials, the Irish athletes had made it clear they wished to represent Ireland. But to their great dismay, upon their arrival they learned—by reading souvenir programs, no less—that they were listed with the British delegation.¹⁴³ The 1906 Athens Games were the first in which athletes had to be affiliated with a National Olympic Committee (NOC) to compete. Ireland was still governed from Westminster at the time and had not yet formed an NOC.¹⁴⁴ O’Connor—a working-class clerk for a Waterford solicitor—wrote an appeal and submitted it to the Olympic organizers. He was summarily denied.¹⁴⁵ But, as O’Connor’s granddaughter Rosemarie O’Connor Quinn told me: “He was a fiery man. He was not a man to be crossing.”¹⁴⁶

For the first time ever the Olympics held an opening ceremony that resembled the flag-waving parades of today’s Games. At this first “March of Nations” the Irish athletes offered a foretaste of the protests to come, sporting bright green blazers embossed with golden shamrocks on the left breast and ornate golden braids along the cuffs and collars.¹⁴⁷ They also donned identical green caps emblazoned with 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.¹⁴⁸

The plot thickened once the athletics competition finally began. In the long jump, O’Connor alleged that Olympic official Matthew Halpin—who doubled as event judge and the manager of the US squad—engaged in biased officiating. According to O’Connor and others at the scene, Halpin allowed US long jumper Myer Prinstein to leapfrog ahead in the jumping order, thereby allowing him to run on a smoother, faster track. Halpin also called O’Connor for fouls on two of his jumps.¹⁴⁹ O’Connor later railed to the Limerick Leader: “I was enraged … If my wife had not been present looking on at this contest, which restrained me, I would have beaten Halpin to a pulp as I was half insane over the injustice.”¹⁵⁰ On the spot, O’Connor submitted a written appeal, but he was gaining a reputation as a troublemaker and was again denied. He was forced to settle for the silver.¹⁵¹

O’Connor was determined to have the last word on the matter. During the medal ceremony, when the Union Jack was hoisted up the flagpole in honor of his silver-medal performance, O’Connor scampered over to the pole and swiftly shimmied up it. He unfurled a large green flag bearing a golden harp and the words Erin Go Bragh, or Ireland Forever. Below, his teammate Con Leahy waved a similar flag and fended off the Greek police, giving O’Connor more time atop the pole.¹⁵² O’Connor later reminisced: “When I climbed a pole about 20 feet in height and remained aloft for some time, waving my large flag and Con waving his from the ground underneath the pole, it caused a great sensation … I was an accomplished gymnast in my youth and my active climbing of the post excited the spectators who had observed my violent protest to Halpin being sole judge and declaring my best jumps foul.”¹⁵³ O’Connor’s great grandson Mark Quinn later wrote, “The Irishman’s points might well be accredited to Great Britain, but the flying of the Irish flag left none in doubt as to where O’Connor’s true allegiances lay.”¹⁵⁴ Quinn told me: “Events dictated that he become political. To not become political would be to submit to British authority.”¹⁵⁵ As Rosemarie O’Connor Quinn put it, “Over 800 years of repression and dominance of a colonial power certainly inspired Peter O’Connor to pull down the British flag.”¹⁵⁶

Not everyone championed this act of dissent. After describing the incident, the Daily Mail noted, “The question of the flags was the subject of considerable comment both in the Stadium and in the city, the Irishmen’s attitude being universally disapproved.”¹⁵⁷ More broadly, O’Connor and Leahy were a vital precursor for future acts of athlete activism at the Olympic Games. They also showed how nationalism could be used as a political lever against colonial oppression in the context of sport.

Although Olympic officials were displeased with O’Connor’s act of political dissent, they did not expel him from the Games. He went on the win gold in the “hop, step, and jump” event, known today as the triple jump. When Leahy won a gold medal in the high jump he repeated his flag-waving protest, this time from the ground.¹⁵⁸ In 1956 O’Connor remarked, “The British failed miserably in their efforts to annex any credit for the Irish successes and the flag incident received wide publicity in the world’s press and turned the spotlight very much on the Irish political situation at a period when very few dared to raise a protest against the British domination of our country.”¹⁵⁹ Athletes were in the vanguard of political dissent.

There is disagreement among Olympic mavens over whether the 1906 intercalary Games qualify as an official Olympics. In the late 1940s, an IOC commission directed by future IOC president Avery Brundage decided that the 1906 Athens Games were not an actual Olympics, but a bevy of Olympic historians disagree. One scholar has gone as far as to say that those Games “may be the most important Olympic Games of the modern era—they saved the Olympic Movement.”¹⁶⁰ After all, in the aftermath of St. Louis, the Games were reeling.

The striking success of US athletes in Athens—especially in track and field events where they were dominant—lent credence to the Americans’ “scientific” training regimen. They were a hit off the field too. Their fawning deference to and enthusiastic fraternizing with the Greek aristocracy ingratiated them with their hosts. After defeating O’Connor in the long jump under dubious circumstances, Prinstein wrote a letter to his fiancée describing a wild night of partying with the Greek king where they slugged down champagne, raided the royal cigar stash, attended “a millionaire’s villa and dance,” and behaved “like wild Indians.”¹⁶¹ Even the New York Times covered the “gala dinner” given by the king to commemorate “these never-to-be-forgotten days.”¹⁶²

The 1906 Athens “intercalary” Olympics brought numerous innovations that remain with us today. As mentioned earlier, these Games had an opening ceremony with roughly 900 athletes parading behind twenty-two national flags. NOCs played a newfound role. During the Games, many athletes lived in the Zappeion, a de facto Olympic Village (although one the US team found unsatisfactory, moving quarters partway through the competition). And the Olympic organizing committee published for the first time ever an official list of participants and results, setting a trend for what became common practice as Official Reports at subsequent Olympic Games.¹⁶³ Despite these strides, political instability in and around Greece made hosting another “intercalated” Olympics in Athens unviable. After the 1906 Games the region was wracked with conflict, and the Greek government, strapped by the costs and consequences of war, lacked resources.¹⁶⁴ These and other factors made the four-year rotation of the Olympics the norm.

The Games Find Their Footing

When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 1906, forcing the 1908 Games to be relocated from Rome to London, Lord Desborough stepped in to help. An Olympic fencing medalist and IOC titan from Britain, Desborough announced that the Games “shall be carried out by private enterprise, and without help of any sort from the government, a distinction which other nations do not share.”¹⁶⁵ This subtle allusion to disgruntlement in Rome, where locals had protested the high costs of hosting the Games, points to a lasting question in Olympic history: Who should pay the five-ring tab?¹⁶⁶ Despite Desborough’s assurances, the Baron once again had to attach the Olympics to a World’s Fair, the Franco-British Exhibition, “for budgetary reasons.”¹⁶⁷ But Lord Desborough’s support was part of a pivot, transforming the IOC from what was essentially a paper-tiger front group, to one that took a much bigger role in organizing the Olympic Games.¹⁶⁸

The London Olympics would turn out to be a mixed success, but one thing about them is undeniable: they ran thick with monarchic entitlement. Bowing to the whims of privilege, the marathon began on the lawns of Windsor Castle, per the request of King Edward and Queen Alexandra, who wanted their grandchildren to see the start of the race without having to leave the cozy confines of their property. The race concluded in front of the Royal Box in the stadium. This put the marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards, which has remained the official length ever since.¹⁶⁹

The Games were marked by strident nationalism, much of it coming from the Americans who traveled across the Atlantic to compete with their former colonizers. US Olympic officials were displeased with the lodging the team was assigned in London, perceiving it as a slight, and decided to stay in Brighton instead.¹⁷⁰ The American flag was not flown at the opening ceremonies, furthering tensions, so the US flag bearer returned the favor by opting not to dip the flag in deference to the British monarchy in attendance. Irish-American athletes, meanwhile, bristled at Britain’s rejection of Irish independence. US Olympics officials including James E. Sullivan complained about the officiating, an objection European observers dismissed as American hyper-competitiveness.¹⁷¹ British royalty were offended by the Americans’ behavior, and Coubertin agreed, noting the American athletes’ “barbaric shouts that resounded through the stadium.” As for Sullivan, “he shared his team’s frenzy and did nothing to try to calm them down.”¹⁷²

Sullivan lived up to his reputation as a cutthroat competitor, working hard behind the scenes to declare ineligible the Canadian Tom Longboat—an Onondaga runner from the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in Ontario—who was favored to win the marathon. Longboat was ultimately declared an amateur and allowed to participate, but for many, the American’s efforts to exclude him left a sour taste.¹⁷³ Such fractiousness prompted the New York Times to report, “Thoughtful men in England have serious doubts … as to whether the Olympian games serve any good purpose, while theoretically they are supposed to foster international friendship.” A prime outcome of the 1908 Games was “to create international dissensions and kindle animosities.”¹⁷⁴ Meanwhile, feminist activists like Emmeline Pankhurst used the Olympics as a platform for suffrage, vowing to interrupt the Games if organizers refused to allow women to participate. They used guerrilla tactics like shoveling up golf courses and leaving behind messages like “No Votes, No Golf.”¹⁷⁵

While the 1908 Games in London were a mixed picture, many historians identify the 1912 Games in Stockholm as the Olympics that established them as a top-tier international event.¹⁷⁶ Coubertin described the contrast between the two: “Whereas in London the life of the huge metropolis had not been influenced by the invasion of Olympism, the whole of Stockholm was impregnated by it.”¹⁷⁷ Sullivan concurred. Upon his return to the United States after Stockholm, he beamed, “I have never seen a better managed set of sports since I’ve been in the Games.”¹⁷⁸ The Olympics were becoming more advanced technologically and organizationally. To preempt allegations of bias, officials from international sports federations served as judges rather than local coordinators.¹⁷⁹ Swedish officials set the standard for record keeping, deploying electric timers and finish-line photographic technology for greater precision. The “Pentathlon of the Muses” was born, with prizes handed out for literature, architecture, and the arts.¹⁸⁰ Stockholm was where Coubertin won gold for his pseudonymous poem “Ode to Sport.”

Jim Thorpe was arguably the biggest superstar of the Games. He was a Native American from Oklahoma, born to a father of Sac and Fox and Irish descent and a mother who was Potawatomie and French. Thorpe was a dazzling multi-sport athlete who starred in football, baseball, and track and field.¹⁸¹ In 1912 he achieved the remarkable feat of winning both the pentathlon and the decathlon. Among his competitors in these two events was a young Avery Brundage, the future president of the IOC. Brundage noted in his personal papers that the “1912 Games were the first that were really properly organized.”¹⁸² But Brundage himself did not have his act together. He actually dropped out of the pentathlon when he knew he was out of contention rather than completing all the events, a decision that shamed him decades later. According to his biographer, “Thorpe’s shadow was to haunt Brundage the rest of his life.”¹⁸³

In a front-page story, the New York Times anointed Thorpe—whom the paper had once called “the Redskin from Carlisle”—the “finest all-around athlete in the world.” King Gustav V of Sweden concurred, telling Thorpe, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Sullivan deemed Thorpe “the real hero of the Olympics.” When Thorpe was announced as champion of the pentathlon, the New York Times reported: “There was a great burst of cheers, led by the King. The immense crowd cheered itself hoarse, renewing its efforts a few moments later when Thorpe reappeared to receive a valuable silver model of a Viking ship presented by the Emperor of Russia to the winner of the decathlon.”¹⁸⁴ Thorpe kindled pride in Native Americans and non-Natives alike.

Nevertheless, the Games weren’t pure bliss. Despite Coubertin’s pleas for internationalism, the Olympics once again stirred intense nationalist sentiments that bubbled up throughout the festival. Media coverage encouraged a nationalist frame by regularly tallying up the number of medals and points secured by each country.¹⁸⁵ And inevitably, global politics intruded. Olympians from Finland were anything but pleased by having to participate under the Russian flag. They marched with their own flag at the opening ceremonies, aggravating the Russians.

One year after the Games, Thorpe was stripped of his medals for having broken the amateur code—in 1909 and 1910 he received a small sum of money ($60 a month) for playing semiprofessional baseball.¹⁸⁶ Coubertin actually opposed taking away the medals but was outvoted by his fellow IOC members.¹⁸⁷ In response, Coubertin wrote an Olympic oath, steeped in the principles of amateurism, that athletes would be required to swear by. “Beside its wonderful moral value,” wrote the Baron, “the athlete’s oath is proving to be the only practical means to put an end to this intolerable state of affairs,” by which he meant “disguised professionalism.”¹⁸⁸ The oath was first used at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp.¹⁸⁹

A campaign to get Thorpe’s medals restored emerged, and persisted for years. Thorpe’s old rival, Avery Brundage, became ensnared in the controversy as a member of the IOC and eventually as its president. Brundage was barraged with letters from a range of individuals and groups—from the Carlisle Jaycees to the US Senate Committee on Post Office and Civil Service—asking him to return Thorpe’s medals. Florida congressman James A. Haley pointed to French skiers whose commercial connections violated the spirit of amateurism but were still allowed to compete. The Committee for Fair Play for Jim Thorpe sent a telegram imploring him to restore the medals since “Thorpe is an ailing and aging man and return of the medals will bring happiness to a great athlete in the twilight of his career.” A private citizen, H. T. Cooke, wrote, “I am hoping there will be a reconsideration of this ruling before the old Redskin passes on to the Happy Hunting Ground” since “it would be favorably received by the general public.”¹⁹⁰ Senator A. S. “Mike” Monroney of Oklahoma reasoned, “I seriously doubt that all of the money that Jim Thorpe earned in his professional career as an athlete measures up to the money that ‘amateurs’ are paid today to play college football, basketball, baseball, run track, or participate in other events, which in many cases qualify them for participation in the Olympic Games.”¹⁹¹

However, through the years Brundage remained unmoved, performing mental gymnastics of Olympian proportions to justify his continued refusal to restore Thorpe’s medals. He informed Senator Monroney that Thorpe’s medals been redistributed to other athletes and that, in any case, Thorpe’s “outstanding record as an athlete in competition remains, and actual possession of the medals would add little to it.”¹⁹² He wrote to the sportswriter Grantland Rice, “I doubt if the men who received Thorpe’s medals would give them up”; moreover, the medals were handed out by the Swedish Organizing Committee and “I am very doubtful that they would have any interest in the subject.”¹⁹³ He told H. T. Cooke that “Olympic Games medals have no particular intrinsic value, since only silver gilt medals are given to the winner.” He then concluded dismissively, “This matter was reviewed by the 1951 Amateur Athletic Union Convention with 300 delegates from all over the United States and it was decided that nothing could be done.”¹⁹⁴

But something could be done and eventually was. In 1982, at the behest of USOC president William Simon, the IOC voted to return Thorpe’s gold medals. In a ceremony in early 1983, Juan Antonio Samaranch presented Thorpe’s children with replacement gold medals as well as replica silver medals for each of them.¹⁹⁵

It would be conjecture to attribute Brundage’s obstinacy to personal resentment at losing to Thorpe in Stockholm. After all, in one letter he wrote, “Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes of all time, we were on the same Olympic team and I was subsequently American all-around champion, so that I naturally have a very friendly feeling toward him and would be happy to please him if it could be done.”¹⁹⁶ In another letter he suggested, “Everyone has great sympathy for Thorpe,” so “instead of wasting time and energy on a couple of medals, whose intrinsic value is probably not more than $3.00 or $4.00 each, that you take up a cash collection for him, to which I and many others will be happy to contribute.”¹⁹⁷ More likely Brundage’s opposition to restoring the medals emerged from his dogmatic commitment to amateurism, which for him was “an abstract, fixed quality that does not alter or change from day to day.”¹⁹⁸ In the years ahead, Brundage’s “fixed” version of amateurism would be challenged and ultimately overturned.

But the early years of the Games are all about the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Thanks to his indefatigable vim, the Olympics were destined to be more than just a footnote on the page of history. He had a flair for the symbolic and a knack for the spectacular that lasted to the very end. In his will, he left clear instructions to slice his heart from his chest after he died and entomb it in Olympia. His wish was granted on March 26, 1938, when his heart was ceremoniously ensconced in a marble stele meters from the ancient stadium.¹⁹⁹ Still Coubertin’s vision for the Games abounded with contradictions —peace and good will, bound up with sexism, racism, and class privilege. In response, sports-minded feminists and leftists would soon organize viable, vibrant alternatives.