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“Will war someday shatter the Olympic framework?” Baron Pierre de Coubertin wondered in 1913. He answered his own question with plenty of bombast: “Olympism did not reappear within the context of modern civilization in order to play a local or temporary role. The mission entrusted to it is universal and timeless. It is ambitious. It requires all space and time.”¹ The following summer, however, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a sequence of events that careened into World War I. Coubertin enlisted in the French military despite his advancing age (he was in his early 50s) and was assigned to the country’s propaganda service. Because the Baron believed the IOC should not be “led by a soldier,” he temporarily handed over the reins to his trusted colleague Baron Godefroy de Blonay.² Once the war broke out, the IOC moved its headquarters from Paris to Lausanne, in neutral Switzerland.

World War I forced the cancellation of the Sixth Olympiad, which had been scheduled to culminate in 1916 at Berlin. But the Baron proved correct when he maintained that when it came to the Olympic Games, “war can merely delay, not stop, its advancement.”³ Sure enough, the Olympics returned after the Great War, to Antwerp in 1920. Having survived German invasion during the war, Belgian organizers played politics, declining to invite Germany and its wartime allies Austria and Hungary; the IOC looked the other way.⁴ Germany wouldn’t return to the Olympic fold until 1928. Russia was also absent in 1920 because of its recent revolution and the fighting that ensued.

For the first time, Coubertin’s five-ring Olympic flag flew overhead.⁵ The flag proved popular with athletes—so popular that many pilfered them as souvenirs. Coubertin wrote, “Unfortunately, the Police were on guard: arrests, trials, consular interventions, followed.”⁶ Another first: athletes took a symbolic oath, pledging allegiance to the Olympic spirit. Coubertin and the IOC oversaw the proceedings from their headquarters in Switzerland.⁷

Antwerp organizers had a mere year to prepare for the Olympics. As a consequence, many facilities, like the main stadium, were only partly built, and interest from everyday Belgians was minimal. Coubertin tried to deflect criticism, chalking it up to “a crotchety journalist” here and “a professional spoilsport” there. He insisted that the Games were “held with a mastery, a perfection, and a dignity matched by the strenuous and persevering efforts of its organizers.”⁸

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nationalism flared up at the Games. After a hard-fought water polo match between England and Belgium, the crowd booed and hissed the British national anthem. The heckling continued as the monarchs in attendance filed out of the arena. British Olympic officials lodged a complaint for what they described as a “national insult,” urging further exploration of the matter.⁹ Media accounts routinely adopted a nationalistic frame, echoing the prevailing spirit.¹⁰ American athletes hitched a ride to the Games aboard military vessels. Upon their return home, they complained bitterly of “the treatment they received at the hands of foreigners” in the Olympic city. Some athletes claimed that conditions in Antwerp were so terrible that they almost opted to withdraw entirely from the Games. They alleged Belgians “displayed the greatest hostility to the competing Americans and created feelings which greatly hampered the work of the men.”¹¹

“Men” was the operative word. The Antwerp Games highlighted the lopsided gender relations that were typical of sports of the era. Twenty-two female athletes had taken part in the 1900 Olympics, and by Antwerp that number had climbed to sixty-three. But as a percentage of overall Olympic participants, this translated to a minuscule upward blip from 2.2 percent to 2.4 percent over the twenty-year period.¹² Women’s participation had essentially flatlined. They were still not allowed to participate in track and field at the Antwerp Games. For that they would have to wait until the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.

In the early 1900s a worldwide women’s movement was demanding political inclusion, with some success. In 1906, Finland granted women full voting rights, followed in subsequent years by Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Georgia, and Luxembourg. The United States passed the Nineteenth Amendment to its Constitution in 1920, granting women full voting rights in that country. The times were changing, but they weren’t changing the Baron. Behind the scenes, some IOC members were quietly moving to expand women’s participation, but Coubertin was implacable, angling for the continued marginalization of women’s sports. After the 1912 Stockholm Games, he and many of his IOC colleagues believed “an Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”¹³ Other members of the Olympic family who wished to keep the lineage patrilineal included the Americans James Sullivan and Avery Brundage. But as we shall see, many condemned the exclusion of women.

The 1924 Olympics were awarded to Paris as a shout-out to Coubertin for his decades of dedication to the Olympic cause. The Baron had announced he would retire as IOC president after the Games, perhaps in part to ensure that the Olympics ended up in France, but perhaps also to fend off accusations of an “Olympic monarchy.”¹⁴ Coubertin had sent a letter to his IOC brethren notifying them of his impending resignation following the 1924 Games and urging them to award the Olympics to Paris. “At this moment when the reviver of the Olympic Games judges his personal task to be nearly at an end,” he wrote, “no one will deny that he is entitled to ask that a special gesture should be made in favor of his native city, Paris.” The IOC granted this “special gesture,” completing what Coubertin dubbed in his memoirs “a masterly coup d’etat!”¹⁵

But politics jeopardized his “masterly coup.” In 1923 the French government sent troops into Germany to enforce war reparations, raising the specter of another armed conflict. Moreover, in what was becoming a regular headache for the IOC, elected officials in the host city challenged the use of public funds on the Olympics. In March 1922, the Paris City Council voted to contribute only 1 million francs to the Games instead of the expected 10 million. But the Chamber of Deputies eventually came through with the funds, ensuring Coubertin’s dream.¹⁶ Still, the Baron wasn’t taking any chances. With the possibility of war, European economic collapse, or simple underfunding endangering the Paris Games, he had quietly forged a back-up plan with organizers in Los Angeles who were eager to debut as hosts of the Games. While the backdoor plan to transfer the Games to LA didn’t become necessary, it did lay the groundwork for the city to secure the 1932 Olympics. In any case, the Paris council’s fiscal concerns were well merited—the Games wound up saddling the city with debt. And once again, the Olympics dissuaded tourists who otherwise would have visited Paris to spend their money, an example of what economists came to call the “stayaway factor.”¹⁷

Political friction tarnished Coubertin’s swan song. The French, like their counterparts in Antwerp, did not extend an invitation to Germany.¹⁸ The British Olympic Association insisted on an “empire plan”; rather than enter alphabetically during the opening ceremony, Great Britain would walk in first, followed by its “Dominion teams” from countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.¹⁹ During a rugby match between France and the United States, the Americans were drowned in boos; two US fans were roughed up in the stands.²⁰ After a contentious fencing match between a Frenchman and an athlete from Italy, the Italian squad stalked off chanting the Fascist anthem. Against this backdrop, the IOC argued against calculating standings based on a point system in an effort to minimize jingoism. Nevertheless, a whole host of entities—from journalists to sports lovers—devised point systems and then argued over which one was most just.²¹ All this led the New York Times to report that the Games “have left in the minds of not a few of the contending teams and with the public a feeling of irritation and distaste.”²² Ever the optimist, the Baron acknowledged the “irreparable repercussions” of the funding battles prior to the Games, before extolling “the universal good humour of the athletes” and the steady progression of Olympic spirit. “From Stockholm to Antwerp, from Antwerp to Paris, its encouraging action continued,” he wrote.²³ Perhaps most significantly, the 1924 Olympics brought the first incarnation of what eventually became the Winter Games, as the IOC gathered athletes to compete in Chamonix, France, ahead of the Summer Games in Paris.²⁴

For Coubertin, the Olympics were a religion. Fortunately for him, there were enough disciples to carry on the five-ring gospel. In 1925, at its meetings in Prague, the IOC replaced the retiring Baron with a Count—more precisely Count Henri Baillet-Latour of Belgium. More arbiter than firebrand, Baillet-Latour had long been a member of the IOC, serving competently on various committees. Most observers saw Baillet-Latour’s selection as staying the Coubertin course.²⁵ But one place where the Count differed was his grudging willingness to allow the increased participation of women at the Games.²⁶

The 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam—the first without Coubertin at the helm—doubled the number of female participants: almost 300 women took part in the Games, thanks largely to the inclusion of a small slate of women’s track and field events. However, citing medical “evidence,” the IOC ruled after the Amsterdam Games that the 800-meter run was too dangerous. In Amsterdam, after completing the race, a number of competitors fell to the turf to regain their strength. Anti-feminists pounced at the opportunity, arguing that women were too frail to run such distances, and quite remarkably their views won out. Women were not allowed to compete in the 800-meter run until the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Still, in 1928 women comprised about 10 percent of all Olympic athletes. Germany was also allowed through the Olympic gates for the first time since World War I. The Amsterdam Olympiad continued the trend started in Paris four years earlier of including all sports played on snow or ice in a separate Winter Olympics, this time at St. Moritz, Switzerland. The Summer Games featured an Olympic flame for the first time, thanks to architect Jan Wils, who designed a cauldron for the Amsterdam stadium. On the commercial front, Coca-Cola became an Olympics sponsor, a relationship that has lasted through the present day.²⁷

Amsterdam was nearly derailed as host when the Dutch Parliament rejected public funding for the Olympics, partly because of fiscal considerations but also because many parliamentarians felt holding sports competitions on Sundays would desecrate the Sabbath. The Dutch Olympic Committee, forced to conjure an end run, found financing through a hefty loan from the Municipal Council of Amsterdam: some 5 million guilders (about $2 million at the time). The Dutch East Indies also kicked in a substantial sum, backed by a group of wealthy Dutch bankers. Nevertheless, the center of gravity for Olympic funding was shifting toward the state.²⁸

The Amsterdam Games was the five-ring farewell for one of the most successful Olympians ever, Paavo Nurmi of Finland. Nicknamed the Flying Finn, Nurmi won nine gold medals and three silvers over three Olympic Games in 1920, 1924, and 1928. Nurmi was a long-distance specialist who excelled in the 1,500-meter, 5,000-meter, and 10,000-meter runs. The working-class runner who was famous for training with a stopwatch in hand might have won more medals, had the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) not deemed him ineligible ahead of the 1932 Olympics for allegedly accepting money to compete. Athletics honchos, including Avery Brundage, ruled that Nurmi had sacrified his amateur status on the altar of cash-compensated professionalism.²⁹ The battle over amateurism had flared up once again.

Women’s Games

The Olympics echoed the gender and class structures of the time, but marginalization sparked an innovative response. In the 1920s, dissident athletes teamed up in solidarity with sympathetic supporters to organize alternative athletic competitions rooted in principles of equality.

To challenge IOC sexism, women and their allies organized alternative games, a vital yet largely forgotten act of political dissent. Everywhere women looked, the Olympic cards were stacked against them. The IOC, as led by Coubertin, opposed women’s full participation, as the minutes of the 1914 IOC general session made clear: “No women to participate in track and field, but as before—allowed to participate in fencing and swimming.”³⁰ Discrimination was baked into the master plans.

Enter Alice Milliat, a French athlete and activist whose bold actions scythed a path for women’s participation in the Games. After the exclusion of women from track and field in Antwerp, Milliat founded the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) on October 31, 1921. At its first meeting, the group voted to establish a Women’s Olympics as an alternative to the male-centric Games. In total four Women’s Games were staged, in 1922 (Paris), 1926 (Gothenburg, Sweden), 1930 (Prague), and 1934 (London), with participants coming mostly from North America, Western Europe, and Japan.

Milliat and the FSFI found a way into the Olympic structure, thanks to a highly placed, grudging ally, J. Sigfrid Edström of Sweden. In 1912 Edström, a longtime Olympic movement booster, founded the International Amateur Athletic Federation to govern Olympic track and field, with Coubertin’s blessing. In 1922, following the successful Women’s Games, Edström and his colleagues brought the FSFI under the umbrella of the IAAF. This opened a path for women’s participation in the Olympics, but the price to the FSFI was forfeiting a certain degree of autonomy to the IAAF. As part of that price, the FSFI had to rename its event the Women’s World Games to avoid mentioning “Olympics,” a foretaste of the hypervigilant defense of branding to come.³¹

The first Women’s Olympics in 1922 were largely a success. More than 20,000 people attended the single day of competition at Paris’s Stade Pershing, where athletes from five countries (Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Switzerland, and the United States) competed in eleven events, more than twice as many as the IOC would include when it finally allowed more women’s track and field events in 1928. Newspapers of the day reported favorably, if somewhat backhandedly, on the strides women were making in sports. According to the New York Times, 1922 “was notable for the development of women athletes in all branches of competitions fitting to their sex. Remarkable progress was made by them, and almost overnight, they assumed a place of great prominence in the world of athletics.” No longer were “girl athletes … a decided novelty,” but “capable of impressive performances.”³²

Four years later at Gothenburg, the now renamed Women’s World Games were also a one-day affair, although with athletes from eight countries. In 1930, Prague played host to a three-day gathering featuring more than 200 top-flight female athletes from seventeen countries. Media coverage was typical of its day, if belittling by present-day standards. In an article titled “Girls Go to Prague,” one newspaper reported, “Nine girls from Vancouver B.C., young, athletic and socially prominent, accompanied by a chaperone, are on their way to Czechoslovakia.”³³ Nevertheless, the event drew considerable public interest, with more than 15,000 spectators. The fourth Women’s World Games were held in London in 1934, with nineteen participating countries. Organizers added basketball to the slate of track and field events.³⁴

In a way, the FSFI was undercut by its own success. By 1936 the group had increased membership from five to thirty countries and had secured allies in the IAAF, but, Mary H. Leigh and Thérèse M. Bonin argue, “no matter how determined they were and no matter how good their arguments were, women could not get very far without the support and alliance of the male sport establishment.”³⁵ The IAAF had incrementally taken more and more control of women’s track and field and absorbed it into the Olympic schedule.

In a last-ditch effort to maintain control of women’s sports, the FSFI asserted that unless the IOC offered a full roster of events to women and afforded them a measure of representation at the IOC itself, they would cease participating in track and field events. Edström wrote Avery Brundage, then the top Olympic official in the US: “Madame Milliat had sent a letter asking that all Women’s Sport be omitted from the Olympic Games, as she wished to have separate Olympic games for women. The proposition was rejected.”³⁶ In another letter he fumed: “I suppose you know that Mme Milliat’s federation has caused us so much trouble that we certainly have no interest at all to support it. We should like the whole thing to disappear from the surface of the earth.”³⁷ In 1936 the FSFI folded, after serving great purpose.

One result of the FSFI’s activism was to induce the IAAF to include a handful of women’s track and field events at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics as an experimental trial (the discus, the running high jump, 100-meter dash, 800-meter run, and the four by 100-meter relay).³⁸ Despite being disappointed with the limited number of events, the FSFI voted to approve the offer, although female athletes from Britain showed their disapproval by boycotting the Games. Meanwhile, traditionalists chafed at the inclusion of women. The minutes of the IOC Executive Committee reported: “A harsh discussion between Edström and [Reginald J.] Kentish took place as the former points out that the IAAF absolutely wishes to have the 4 women-events on the program. Kentish points out that in most countries the masculin [sic] and feminine sports are separated and he thinks that such a decision will not be very popular.”³⁹

Edström and the IAAF eventually won out, with more and more women’s track and field events staged at the Games. Still, men debated which sports were appropriate for women. Sometimes, those who wished to limit the range of sports positioned themselves as progressive advocates of women’s athletics. For instance, Dr. Frederick Rand Rogers, the director of the Department of Health and Physical Education for the State of New York, adopted the approach of “more, rather than less, but of the right kind.” Cloaking paternalism and sexism in the respectable garb of science, Rogers argued for “less strenuous” sports for women, and opposed women’s participation in the 1932 Olympics.⁴⁰

Alice Milliat and her colleagues used a classic inside-outside recipe for political change. They worked inside the corridors of power with IAAF and IOC power brokers while creating a viable alternative outside the IOC’s orbit—the Women’s Olympics. Their relentless pressure on the men who controlled the Olympics paid off in an early breakthrough for women in sport.

But an uphill battle still lay ahead. Many sports administrators were skeptical of women’s sports, including Brundage. While embroiled in a 1932 controversy over whether the athlete extraordinaire Mildred “Babe” Didrikson was an amateur or a professional, he remarked: “You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games. They wouldn’t even let them on the sidelines. I’m not so sure but they were right.” Didrikson had been suspended by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for alleged professionalism because she had appeared in an advertisement for milk. This was enough for Brundage to advocate suspension, although Didrikson was later reinstated.⁴¹ At the time Brundage was head of the Amateur Athletic Union, so his opinions carried weight. In 1949, as IOC vice president, he wrote: “I think it is quite well known that I am lukewarm on most of the [Olympic] events for women for a number of reasons which I will not bother to expound because I probably will be outvoted anyway. I think women’s events should be confined to those appropriate for women: swimming, tennis, figure skating and fencing but certainly not shot putting.”⁴²

In 1957, Brundage still clung to these beliefs. In a circular letter to members of the IOC he wrote, “Many still believe that events for women should be eliminated from the Games, but this group is now a minority. There is still, however, a well grounded protest against events which are not truly feminine, like putting a shot, or those too strenuous for most of the opposite sex, such as distance runs.”⁴³ These opinions were very much in tune with those emerging from the IOC. The General Session minutes from the April 1953 meeting in Mexico City read—under the heading of “Reducing the number of athletes and officials”—that “women not to be excluded from the Games, but only participation in ‘suitable’ sports.”⁴⁴ Some within the IOC claimed that limiting women’s sports was a way to cut costs in the face of an emerging concern with “gigantism.” They argued that the Olympics were becoming too big and unwieldy—and that slicing women’s sports could slim down the Games.

Sometimes the mainstream press could be even more extreme. In 1953, Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times that he would entertain the idea of eliminating women from the Olympics entirely. “There’s just nothing feminine or enchanting about a girl with beads of perspiration on her alabaster brow, the result of grotesque contortions in events totally unsuited to female architecture,” he wrote. “It’s probably boorish to say it,” he conceded, “but any self-respecting schoolboy can achieve superior performances to a woman champion.” Boorish indeed, but Daley wasn’t finished: “The Greeks knew exactly what they were doing when they invented the Olympics … Not only did they bar the damsels from competing but they wouldn’t even admit them as spectators.” He cautioned: “Don’t get me wrong, please. Women are wonderful. But when those delightful creatures begin to toss the discus or put the shot—well, it does something to a guy. And it ain’t love, Buster.”⁴⁵

Such commentary from prominent journalists notwithstanding, more and more women were participating in the Games, and from countries that did not necessarily have strong Olympic histories. The Soviet Union helped jump-start participation of female athletes in the 1950s as the athletic arena became a proxy for international tension. Soviet involvement would also play a role in the emergence and maintenance of another alternative to the IOC’s Games: the Workers’ Olympiads.

Workers of the World, Exert!

In 1928 the Baron wrote, “I have been delighted to see labor organizations embrace the Olympic ideal.” He may have been subconsciously tipping his hat to the working-class athletes who were organizing a vibrant alternative to the Olympics.⁴⁶ The International Workers’ Olympiads heralded a fresh ethos that blended sport with solidarity, socialism, cooperation, and working-class tradition.⁴⁷ More about healthy lifestyles and class opportunity than hyper-competition and elites, the Workers’ Games pushed back against the nationalism plaguing the established Olympics; they were meant to circumvent prejudice and jingoism while undermining the growing fixation on record-breaking performances by superstar athletes. People of all races, ethnicities, and genders were welcome to take part. Organized primarily by European socialists, the Workers’ Olympiads took place in 1925 (Frankfurt), 1931 (Vienna), and 1937 (Antwerp), before World War II put an end to the experiment. Labor activists also staged Winter Workers’ Olympiads in those years, in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

In 1936 another socialist-inspired alternative to the Olympics was scheduled, the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, but it was canceled by the July outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, a June letter of invitation from the Olimpíada Popular de Barcelona to the Amateur Athletic Union in the US captures the spirit of the Workers’ Games movement: “The object of the Peoples’ Olympiad is to unite in friendly competition the sportsmen of all countries, regardless of race, and thus to give a practical demonstration of the true Olympic spirit—the fraternity of races and peoples.” The letter continued, “In the struggle against fascism the broad masses of all countries must stand shoulder to shoulder, and Popular Sport is a valuable medium through which they may demonstrate their international solidarity.”⁴⁸ Implicit in this invitation was the recognition that sport was no mere opium of the masses, but rather a powerful lever for political consciousness.

In the interwar years, the International Workers’ Olympiads were an important part of the labor movement.⁴⁹ Thanks to the restrictive definition of amateurism enforced by the IOC, many workers were simply ineligible for the Games. But workers’ sports clubs—some with roots stretching back to the 1890s—provided laborers and their families an outlet for physical engagement in numerous countries from Czechoslovakia to Canada. In contrast to the ingrained elitism of the IOC, these sports clubs championed the democratization of sport, encouraging all to take part regardless of skill level or class background.⁵⁰ In 1920, trade unionists founded the Socialist Worker Sports International (SWSI), also called the Lucerne Worker Sports International, or LSI, because the congress took place in Lucerne, Switzerland. The SWSI assumed a prime leadership role in organizing the Workers’ Olympiads.⁵¹

The first Workers’ Olympiad was staged at Frankfurt in 1925. The four-day affair featured 150,000 participants from nineteen countries. Unlike the “bourgeois Olympics” in Antwerp (1920) and Paris (1924), where the defeated nations from World War I (Germany and Austria) were not invited, the Workers’ Games welcomed all comers. And if one wanted to compete in a sport, participating in the cultural festival was mandatory. So participants played their sports, but they also sang and acted. The opening ceremony featured a 1,200-person choir. Later, 60,000 people staged a performance called “Worker Struggle for the Earth.” The opening and awards ceremonies replaced national flags with red flags and national anthems with “The Internationale.” The motto for these Games was “no more war.” The Olympiad was largely considered a success, although it suffered from the sectarianism that plagued wider relations on the left; disagreements between the SWSI and the communist Red Sport International (RSI) led to the exclusion of the latter. Worker sport organizations were forced to choose one side or the other.⁵² As William Murray notes, “Both bodies ran their own sports meetings, often dedicated, like their stadiums, to heroes from the socialist past, but they neither competed with nor against each other.”⁵³

The second Workers’ Olympiad took place at Vienna in 1931. Approximately 80,000 worker-athletes from twenty-three nations participated. To boost attendance, organizers dovetailed the Games with the Socialist and Labour International’s fourth congress. The Games featured a separate festival of sport for kids, as well as art shows and running and swimming events for the masses. Some 65,000 people attended the final match of the soccer tournament, while 12,000 went to the cycling finals and 3,000 went to the water polo title match. On the final day of the Games, a crowd estimated at 250,000 watched a “festive march” consisting of approximately 100,000 athletes.⁵⁴ The socialist government in Vienna built a new stadium for the Olympiad, complete with an athletic field, bike track, and swimming pool, at a cost of $1 million. Locker rooms were constructed to accommodate the thousands of athletes who took part.⁵⁵ According to Robert Wheeler, the Vienna Olympiad “was in many ways the high point of the workers’ sports movement,” and “compared favorably or better with the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid and Los Angeles.”⁵⁶

In 1936 the Republican government in Spain planned a People’s Olympiad as a counterpoint to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or “Nazi Games.” The Comitè Català Pro-Esport Popular led the planning with the intention of creating a hybrid Games for worker athletes as well as IOC-sanctioned athletes who wished to boycott the Berlin Games for political reasons. The organizers set up a three-tier system for participants: elite athletes, almost-elite athletes, and recreational athletes from worker sport clubs. Funding came from the Spanish central government, the Catalan autonomous government, Barcelona City Hall, and the Popular Front government in France. Numerous art exhibitions were scheduled. The Catalan writer Josep Maria de Sagarra supplied the lyrics for the Olimpíada Popular hymn, and the German musician Hans Eisler wrote the orchestration. Unlike the IOC, People’s Olympiad organizers allowed for the participation of athletes from Algeria and Morocco, despite their colonial status, and afforded nation status to Catalonia, Euskadi (Basque country), and Galicia. A contingent of Canadians planned to attend, as did Palestinian athletes and worker-athletes from the US. But all these plans were scuttled. On July 19, 1936, the day of the opening ceremony, Fascist forces led by Francisco Franco carried out a coup that foiled the Olimpíada Popular. Some athletes fought fascists in the streets. Others fled to safer havens.⁵⁷

Although the People’s Olympiad was canceled, the third International Workers’ Olympiad was succesfully staged the following year at Antwerp. Approximately 27,000 worker-athletes participated from seventeen countries. Some 50,000 people attended events in the stadium on the final day of the Games, and 200,000 made the final march through the city. At these Games, RSI athletes were allowed to participate as a united front against the ascendance of fascism in Europe. This labor solidarity—the Popular Front—was notable, and unique in the history of the Workers’ Olympiad. Although the sport festival did not live up to Barcelona’s ambitiously planned grandeur, it remained a significant accomplishment given the challenging period in which it was staged.⁵⁸ The next International Workers’ Olympiad was scheduled for 1943 in Helsinki, but World War II prevented it from becoming reality.

Despite their success, the Workers’ Olympiads were largely marginalized by the mainstream media of the time, limiting their reach to the wider public. The fracture between socialists and communists also hampered their effectiveness. Within the Games, there was also a certain amount of tension between the commitment to break athletic records and the commitment to non-competitive mass participation; many worker-athletes who strove for record-breaking achievement were labeled “bourgeois” by their colleagues.⁵⁹ James Riordan argues that overt politics may have undercut the political value of the Workers’ Games: “Many worker sport leaders failed to understand that a sport organization might be more politically effective by being less explicitly political.”⁶⁰

Like the Women’s Olympiads, the alternative Workers’ Olympiads definitely had an impact on the IOC’s power brokers. The Avery Brundage archive contains brochures about the 1936 Barcelona People’s Olympiad as well as an invitation to the Amateur Athletic Union to come take part in those Games.⁶¹ Such terminology raised the IOC’s concerns that the organizers of the alternative Games were infringing on the Olympic brand. The IOC Executive Committee minutes from 1925 note: “The miss-use [sic] of the word ‘olympic’ was growing rapidly and among organization[s] using it were the ‘Olympic Games for Women’, ‘The Worker’s Olympic Games’, ‘Student’s Olympic Games’. Members from these organizations were present and told that the word ‘olympic’ was the property of the IOC and could not be used.”⁶² More recently, however, the Olimpíada Popular has been reincorporated into official Olympic history; the Olympic Museum in Barcelona features posters from the alternative competition and a brief description of the organizers’ goals.

The Olympics Pivot

Meanwhile, the “bourgeois Olympics” pressed on. The 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles brought a number of features that embedded themselves in Olympic tradition. The Los Angeles Games inspired the Baron to panegyric; he raved that crowds attending the opening ceremonies “had never before seen such a spectacle. They seem to have been greatly impressed by it, and the organizers, for their part, seem to have achieved the maximum of the desirable Olympic eurythmia on this solemn occasion.” The Games were “a glorious apotheosis on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”⁶³

Ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics, Avery Brundage, then head of the American Olympic Committee, wrote to President Herbert Hoover asking him to offer remarks during the Games’ opening broadcast. “Knowing your great interest in healthful recreation and sport,” he wrote, “we are certain that you will not refuse unless there is conflict with your other engagements.” The window Brundage offered President Hoover was relatively slim: “Any time at your convenience between five and eight o’clock in the afternoon of October first, will be satisfactory.”64 Besides Brundage’s self-assurance, the specificity of the request revealed the burgeoning prestige and confidence enjoyed by the Olympic movement at that point, thirty-six years after the modern revival of the Games. Although President Hoover declined Brundage’s request, he sent Vice President Charles Curtis in his stead. In front of 105,000 spectators—at that time the biggest crowd to attend an opening ceremony in the history of the Games—Curtis declared the Olympics officially open. It took Los Angeles only three days to surpass the total number of five-ring fans in Amsterdam. The Games were attended by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Will Rogers.⁶⁵

According to the Olympics scholar Alan Tomlinson, the 1932 Games signaled “a markedly political intensification of the event.”⁶⁶ They were being put on during the Great Depression, and organizers took care not to stage the Games in a lavish manner while the world writhed in economic pain. Organizers made prudent use of existing buildings and structures. They downplayed the incipient commercialism of the Olympics while at the same time embracing it. The Official Report claimed that “not a single note of commercialism was allowed to permeate the consummation” of Olympism, but organizers quietly lined up sponsorship and service-provision deals.⁶⁷ Such commercial pacts eventually became an integral part of the political-economic architecture of the Games.

Yet commercial contributions were meager compared to the enormous public funding that underwrote the Games. In 1927 the California legislature passed the California Tenth Olympiad Bond Act, which supplied $1 million to the Olympic cause, and the measure was ratified in a public referendum by a one-million-vote majority. But in 1929 the US was rocked by the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. Activists took to the streets to protest spending money on the Olympic spectacle while everyday Californians were suffering. Demonstrators in Sacramento raised protest placards reading “Groceries Not Games! Olympics Are Outrageous!” Feeling the political heat, California governor James Rolph remarked, “These Games are an impossible venture. What do they want, riots?” Still, Rolph did not push to cancel the Games—he had a political career to consider, and local business heavyweights were in the Olympic corner. Jittery citizens were assured that hosting the Games would bring jobs and tourism to the city—a trope that would become standard-issue Olympic rhetoric.

In retrospect there’s little evidence that the Games buoyed the local economy. But thanks to thrift, sponsorship, high attendance, and a spike in interest from Hollywood, the Olympics earned a profit of $150,000, most of which was plunged into servicing the debt on the $1 million bond and reimbursing the city and county for the facilities they anted up for the Games.⁶⁸ The city paid a quieter price when the bond market wavered on public works projects, stoking a crisis that culminated in a recall election for the mayor. The New York Times proclaimed that “the public is thoroughly ‘fed up’ on these experiments in political economy.”⁶⁹ Such “experiments”—where the costs of the Olympics are socialized, with the public taking on the bulk of the risk—ultimately became the go-to move for funding the Games.

In the words of the Official Report, the Olympics survived “the depths of a dark abyss of world depression.”⁷⁰ For the first time, organizers built a formal Olympic Village where visiting athletes stayed during the competition, although female athletes were segregated at the nearby Chapman Park Hotel.⁷¹ The medal ceremonies and three-tiered platform we see today made their first appearance. Organizers also condensed the Games’ duration, limiting competition days to sixteen, a tradition that has essentially continued through to the present. The shortened calendar helped focus media and public attention. Organizers enabled the media in other ways. They set up a “Press Department” in December 1929, long before the Games began, to do the work of a modern sports information office. When the Olympics arrived two and a half years later, more than 900 journalists from around the world were on hand to cover them, and the Press Office was well seasoned in its job of helping them.

Coubertin still criticized the news media’s coverage, decrying “a press campaign with bitterness of tone and an unfairness of intent equaled only by the self-interested calculation that inspired it.”⁷² But social science content analysis demonstrates that media coverage actually presented a neutral or positive portrayal of the Games.⁷³ The “lizards” Coubertin claimed were bad-mouthing Olympism, “proclaiming its imminent or more gradual collapse,” were more phantom than opera.⁷⁴ In fact, Olympic press officials managed the commercial media effectively, shaping the message to the organizers’ advantage.

Time magazine assessed the Games as “a gorgeous, unprecedented success.”⁷⁵ The Los Angeles organizing committee was even tossed into the mix for the Nobel Peace Prize.⁷⁶ Mildred “Babe” Didrikson raised the bar for women’s athletics, dazzling the assembled throngs with remarkable Olympic feats. Although she qualified for all five individual track and field events, Olympic power brokers only allowed her to compete in three. Didrikson won the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin, setting world records along the way. She also won silver in the high jump. On the flip side, after Luigi Beccali won the 1,500-meter race, he speared a fascist salute skyward as the Italian national anthem played during the award ceremony. This act was mentioned in the press, but only in passing and without analysis of its political import.⁷⁷ Such scant attention to the politics of the Games would not be possible four years later.

Nazi Games

The Olympics were initially of little interest to Adolf Hitler. When the 1936 Games were awarded to Berlin in 1931, a centrist, democratic coalition held power in Germany. Even in 1932, Hitler was referring to the modern Olympics as “a plot against the Aryan race by Freemasons and Jews.”⁷⁸ But propaganda minister Josef Goebbels convinced him that the Games were a prime opportunity to bathe the swastika in the Olympic glow on the world stage. Although in Mein Kampf Hitler praised boxing for the “steel-like versatility” it instilled, the Führer was no fan of sports.⁷⁹ But after becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hitler supported the Olympics, even plowing significant state funds into the event.⁸⁰ Hitler and Goebbels became intent on using the Olympics to demonstrate German superiority.

Hitler’s belief in the racial supremacy of the so-called Aryan race clashed intrinsically with the doctrine of inclusive-ness in the IOC’s official charter. The year before the Berlin Olympics and the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany had passed the Nuremburg Laws, formalizing policies that marginalized Jews. The IOC took a middle path. When Baillet-Latour saw anti-Semitic signage peppering the German landscape he complained vehemently to Hitler, threatening to cancel the Games. The Führer relented, ordering the signs’ removal.⁸¹ In Avery Brundage’s personal notes, he wrote, “Baillet-Latour said to Hitler ‘You keep your law, I keep my Games.’”⁸²

Opposition to the Nazis’ racist policies emerged in the United States in 1933, when the Amateur Athletic Union voted to boycott the Games unless anti-Jewish discrimination was reversed in Germany.⁸³ The AAU vote did not influence the group that mattered, the American Olympic Committee, which decided to participate in the Games. The decision was made after the committee chief, Avery Brundage, made a “personal investigation” into the matter and received a pledge from the German government not to discriminate against Jewish athletes.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the push to boycott the Games continued from a variety of sources, including students at Columbia College, various religious groups, and the Committee on Fair Play in Sports, a liberal organization formed specifically to oppose American participation at Berlin.⁸⁵ To be sure, the United States had its own deep-seated problems with racism, but the 1936 Olympics provided a chance to point the finger away from home. In a March 1935 Gallup poll, 43 percent of respondents favored a boycott.⁸⁶

Brundage’s “personal investigation” largely entailed listening to and then believing German officials. The more Brundage publicly explained his reasoning, the more flimsy it appeared. He told the New York Times: “Germany has nothing whatsoever to do with the management of the games. The Germans provide the facilities and make preliminary arrangements, but that is all.” The Olympics, he argued, was “under the sole jurisdiction” of the IOC. Plus, he added: “The fact that no Jews have been named so far to compete for Germany doesn’t necessarily mean that they have been discriminated against on that score. In forty years of Olympic history, I doubt if the number of Jewish athletes competing from all nations totaled 1 per cent of all those in the games. In fact I believe one-half of 1 per cent would be a high percentage.”⁸⁷ Behind the scenes, he was more direct about his feelings. When Edström wrote Brundage to complain that “all the Jews in the whole world are attacking us,”⁸⁸ Brundage responded with an accusatory screed:

The situation on this side of the Atlantic has become extremely complicated. As you no doubt know, half of the Jewish population of the United States is centered in New York City. The New York newspapers which are largely controlled by Jews, devote a very considerable percentage of their news columns to the situation in Germany. The articles are 99% anti-Nazi. As a matter of fact, this applies to the American press generally. As a result, probably 90% of the populace is anti-Nazi. The Jews have been clever enough to realize the publicity value of sport and are making every effort to involve the American Olympic Committee. Boycotts have been started by the Jews which have aroused the citizens of German extraction to reprisals. Jews with communistic and socialistic antecedents have been particularly active, and the result is that the same sort of class hatred which exists in Germany and which every sane man deplores, is being aroused in the United States.⁸⁹

Brundage’s biographer asserts that Brundage “continued obstinately to see a conspiracy of Jews and Communists” and that he was blinded by his anti-Semitism.⁹⁰

Edström had his own issues. In response to Brundage he wrote: “As regards the Jewish population in Germany, there are strong anti-Jewish tendencies, as you know. This is owing to the fact that the Jews have taken a too prominent position in certain branches of German life and have—as the Jews very often do when they got in the majority—misused their positions. This is the main reason of the Arian [sic] movement in Germany.” Lest anyone mistake him for an anti-Semite, Edström pointed out, “I have, myself, Jews in my service. You met Mr. Eliash, yourself. I saw him the other day in Berlin and he was satisfied and happy. I have heard that the treatment of the Jews in Germany is better during the last months.”⁹¹ Previously Edström noted, “When I last visited Berlin I was assured … that there are several Jewish athletes on the preparatory team for the German participation in the Olympic Games.”⁹² After his epistolary exchange with Edström, Brundage traveled to Germany. There he drank wine from a historic goblet that previously had only been presented to German leaders like Bismarck and Hitler.⁹³

The deference Brundage and his IOC counterparts showed the Nazis allowed them to manufacture an Olympic experience that would place them in a positive light. A German sports official, Carl Diem, came up with the Olympic torch relay, a tradition that would become a staple of the Games. The Berlin Games were the first in which a flame lighted at Mount Olympus wended its way to the host city’s main stadium, where it ignited the Olympic cauldron. The relay chimed with Nazi propaganda identifying German Aryans as the true and worthy heirs of the ancient Greeks. The route from Olympia to Berlin also allowed Hitler to swing Nazi propaganda though central and southeastern Europe, key areas of future Nazi ambitions. During the final days of the relay, those chosen by the regime to carry the torch through Germany were exclusively blond and blue-eyed, perfect exemplars of the Nazis’ Aryan “master race.”⁹⁴ The torch relay, which Coubertin called “gallant and utterly successful,” was a Nazi creation that seamlessly became part of Olympic tradition.⁹⁵ Another innovation had sticking power; the Berlin Games, for the first time ever, provided live TV coverage of the Olympics, as seventy-two hours were telecast to public viewing booths in Berlin and Potsdam.⁹⁶ Also, the opening ceremony for the 1936 Games in Berlin featured the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy,” a favorite of Coubertin. After Berlin 1936 it was woven into many subsequent Olympic ceremonies, from the closing ceremony at the Mexico City Games of 1968 to the 1980 Moscow Olympics to the Cultural Olympiad at the London 2012 Summer Games.⁹⁷

To keep up the right appearances, the Nazi regime gave Berlin a makeover that scrubbed away blatantly anti-Semitic advertising and signage. The notorious Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer was not sold on the streets during the Olympics. Moreover, Goebbels instructed the German press that “the racial aspect must not be remarked upon in the reporting” on the Games.⁹⁸ The press obeyed and put its usual racism and chauvinism on hiatus. Jazz, which was previously maligned as an immoral force, was allowed in nightclubs.⁹⁹ But the swastika was ubiquitous, often hanging on banners next to the Olympic flag.¹⁰⁰ Hitler himself took full advantage. Time magazine reported, “Most conspicuous in the gigantic crowds, mostly composed of provincial Germans, who stared at all these doings, was Realmleader Adolf Hitler. Suddenly become an omnivorous sports enthusiast, Herr Hitler hardly missed a day’s attendance.”¹⁰¹

Hitler loomed large in the Olympic stadium, but US track star Jesse Owens ruled the athletics oval, winning four gold medals. Owens, the son of an African-American Alabama sharecropper who moved his family north to Cleveland, Ohio, in search of opportunity, was the indisputable superstar of the Berlin Games. He dominated in the 100-meter race, setting a world record. He also smashed the Olympic records in the 200-meter run and the long jump. And he ran a leg in the 400-meter relay team that set a world record. Shirley Povich noted in the Washington Post that Owens’s success had stark political implications: “Hilter declared Aryan supremacy by decree, but Jesse Owens is proving him liar by degrees.” Owens was more conciliatory, and his focus was on political relations at home. In an open letter to the Pittburgh Courier he wrote, “I am a proud that I am an American. I see the sun breaking through the clouds when I realize that millions of Americans will recognize now that what I and the boys of my race are trying to do is attempted for the glory of our country and our countrymen.” He concluded, “Maybe more people will now realize that the Negro is trying to do his full part as an American citizen.” But in general, Owens was partial to the bromide that politics and sports competitions shouldn’t mix.¹⁰²

Yet, Owens’s fourth gold medal, as part of the 400-meter relay squad, sparked political controversy as much as racial reconciliation. In a last-minute coaching decision, Owens and fellow sprinter Ralph Metcalfe were inserted into the relay team, replacing two Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, who had been training expressly for the event and who were expected to win gold. Glickman openly chalked up the eleventh-hour rebuff to anti-Semitism, pointing a finger not only at the track coaches but at Avery Brundage, too. The athlete claimed they did not wish to make the German hosts uncomfortable by having to witness two Jews standing triumphant on the medal stand. Stoller was so distraught that he vowed to quit track altogether.¹⁰³

The grandeur of the Games was captured and magnified by Leni Riefenstahl’s iconic Olympia. The film prominently featured Jesse Owens, despite Goebbels’s demands that Riefenstahl leave footage of Owens on the cutting room floor.¹⁰⁴ Riefenstahl, famous for her pro-Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, was enraptured by Owens, noting in her memoir that he was “the athletic phenomenon of the Games.”¹⁰⁵ Hitler may have told Riefenstahl that he “was not very interested” in the Olympics and would “rather stay away,” but he largely supported her artistic autonomy with Olympia, sometimes shielding her from the cretinous Goebbels and his thuggish attempts to thwart the film. Riefenstahl had also secured special permission from the IOC to film the Games. She used groundbreaking film techniques to produce a cinematic masterpiece that, in her words, aimed to “combine the Olympic idea with the most important Olympic contests.” Owens apparently approved. When the filmmaker and the athlete reunited in Munich at the 1972 Games, the meeting was “deeply emotional,” full of hugs, kisses, and near tears, according to Riefenstahl.¹⁰⁶ Olympia also had an admirer in Avery Brundage. When theaters in the US refused to publicly screen the film, he went ballistic, fuming to one German journalist that “unfortunately the theaters and moving picture companies are almost all owned by Jews.”¹⁰⁷

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Owens received friendly greetings from everyday Germans as well as German Olympic officials—Jeremy Schaap goes as far as to assert that the Germans in attendance “embraced him as if he were one of its blond, blue-eyed Teutons.”¹⁰⁸ But the Gestapo secretly tailed him and his fellow African American athletes to ensure they didn’t have too much contact with Germans. Of particular concern to the German secret police was African Americans’ interaction with German women. During the Games, police cited more than fifty German women for approaching the foreigners “in an unseemly manner.”¹⁰⁹ Meanwhile, back at home, Southern newspapers minimized the athletic feats of Owens and other African Americans—the Atlanta Constitution failed to run a single photo of Owens or his black teammates. In fact, Owens resented President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who never sent him a note of congratulations, more than Hitler. Owens called Hitler “a man of dignity.” Later, when campaigning for Republican candidate Alf Landon in the 1936 US presidential election against Roosevelt, part of Owens’ stump speech mentioned that “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”¹¹⁰

In the wake of the Games, American athletes were expected to travel through Europe competing in various exhibitions. Meanwhile, big-money offers came pouring in to Owens from the United States. Part way through the tour he decided to ditch the exhibition circuit and head home to cash in. He had the full-throated support of his college coach, Larry Snyder, who helped him to Olympic glory in Berlin. With the possibility of Owens earning $100,000, Snyder said, “Jesse has a chance to make more money now than he may earn the rest of his life through ordinary channels.” He added, “I cannot conscientiously advise Owens not to seize what may be the chance of his lifetime.” The AAU, headed by Brundage, promptly suspended Owens, prompting the athlete to lash out at the organization, calling it “one of the great rackets of the world” and accusing it of “trying to run the Olympics on strictly business lines.” He added, “Somebody’s making money somewhere” and that the AAU was “trying to grab all they can” while athletes couldn’t even afford souvenirs. Coach Snyder said the athletes were being treated “like cattle.” He was blunt: “You wouldn’t ask the poorest show troupe to work the way these boys worked immediately after the games—all without a cent of spending money with which to brighten an otherwise drab picture.”¹¹¹

Unfortunately for Owens, the lucrative offers to capitalize on his Olympic glory evaporated upon his return to the United States. Most of the overtures were mere publicity ploys. Owens tried to make a living off his notoriety, starting an unsuccessful dry-cleaning chain before ultimately declaring personal bankruptcy in 1939. Later he became owner of a Negro League baseball team in Portland, Oregon—the Portland Rosebuds—which only lasted a year. He even resorted to racing horses. He reportedly stated, “People said it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? … I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.” Eventually Owens became a successful motivational speaker, but achieving financial stability was a long road. Although Owens struggled to cash in, memorabilia collectors did not—in 2013 one of Owens’s gold medals from 1936 was auctioned off for $1.47 million to a Los Angeles billionaire investor.¹¹²

At the close of the Berlin Games, Coubertin hailed them as “powerful and diverse,” and said, “I thank the German people and their leader for what they have just accomplished.”¹¹³ Most commentators also hailed the Games as a success. In an article titled “Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich,” the New York Times asserted that the Games contributed nothing less than “the undoubted improvement of world relations and general amiability.” The newspaper also reported that visitors left the Olympics with the impression that “this is a nation happy and prosperous almost beyond belief; that Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leaders in the world today, and that Germans themselves are a much maligned, hospitable, wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them.”¹¹⁴ Brundage echoed such high praise: “No country since ancient Greece has displayed a more truly national public interest in the Olympic spirit in general than you find in Germany.” He added: “We can learn much from Germany. We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.”¹¹⁵ So much for staying out of politics. In his personal notes, he even wrote: “An intelligent, beneficent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government. Observe what happened in Germany for six or seven years in the 1930’s.”¹¹⁶

Brundage’s key role in the Berlin Games catapulted him into a position in the IOC, where he continued to extol the virtues of separating politics and sport. In a talk he gave in Munich he explained: “The enemies of Hitler, and there were many, decided to try to spite him by boycotting and spoiling the Games. We could not tolerate such a use of the Games as a political weapon. This battle centered in the U.S.A., where I was President of the NOC [National Olympic Committee], and we led the successful struggle to save them. I was often called a Fascist and a Nazi but I have also been called on other occasions a Communist or a racist or a capitalist, which has left me, as you can see, unaffected.”¹¹⁷ In another speech titled “The Wondrous Flame of the Olympics” he said that the Olympic movement “should be like a protective antitoxin neutralizing the infections of future wars. It is not natural for humans to wish to fight those whom they know as friends, those whom they have found to be good sports on the field of honor.”¹¹⁸ Brundage’s lofty words proved untrue as the world plunged into war. The thirteenth Olympiad scheduled for Tokyo and moved to Helsinki was canceled, as were the 1944 Olympics that were tentatively scheduled for London.

Cold War Inklings

In 1948 the Olympics emerged from the ashes of war, returning to London for a second time. The Winter Games were held in St. Moritz, site of the 1928 Games. Edström, a longtime IOC insider, had taken over the IOC presidency after Baillet-Latour suffered a heart attack and died in 1942. Edström was determined to get the Games back on track, and according to the Official Report for the 1948 Olympics, the robust Swede and his colleagues faced “a herculean task,” especially with regard to the Summer Games.¹¹⁹ Europe was devastated by war. Resources were thin. London was still cratered from aerial bombing, and the detritus of war littered the city. Shortages in food and housing wracked the city’s residents, and rationing for basic staples was still in effect. Cash-strapped British officials saw the Games as a chance to gain hard currency from tourist expenditures and ticket sales, but accommodation for athletes was makeshift and many of them brought their own food from home. As such, the 1948 Games became known as the “Austerity Olympics.”

The Games were officially awarded to London in 1946, so Olympic officials had little time to prepare. Organizers also had to fight against what Janie Hampton describes as “defeatism of the press,” as critics charged that the Games were misspending public money while regular Londoners suffered. The Times of London questioned whether the city and the country had the gumption to pull it off: “With only a few weeks left there is little evidence that Britain is grasping this opportunity.”¹²⁰ In a New York Times opinion piece, Dudley Carew wrote of the Olympics as “money-spinning gladiatorial shows which usurp the honorable title of sport.” He argued that the Games encouraged facile, false generalizations about nations and their inhabitants based on their exploits on the field, which only exacerbated stereotyping and nationalism. He concluded, “The Olympic Games are a financial proposition, and when money comes tinkling in at the turnstiles, the spirit of true sport has a way of flying out the window.”¹²¹

Others revived a charge from the 1908 London Games, that American hyper-competitiveness led to an “unpleasant atmosphere” that in turn led to an “argument over the success of the Olympic games as a builder of international good will.”¹²² Arthur Daley of the New York Times telegraphed his later musings on the female athlete, airing his displeasure over the increased participation of women at London. The Greeks excluded women from the ancient Olympics, he argued, but spectators have “long suffered from watching female footracers and hardware heavers burlesque a noble sport. They just haven’t the correct architecture for it. So why run counter to the obvious wishes of Mother Nature?”¹²³

On the broadcasting front, for the first time ever a national television network—the British Broadcasting Corporation—consented to pay an organizing committee for the right to broadcast the Games. Amid the austerity, the IOC moved to tighten its grip on Olympic symbology. At the London Games, the IOC made itself the exclusive proprietor of the Olympic symbol of five interlocking rings as well as the long-used motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius.”¹²⁴

One conspicuously absent participant was the Soviet Union. This would change in 1952 when Helsinki hosted the Summer Games, starting a process whereby the USSR would become a major Olympic player. The coming decades would see an absence of direct war between the world’s biggest military powers; instead, that rivalry played out in proxy wars across the Third World and in bitter competition in Olympic sport.