“English games dressed in Greek clothes by a Frenchman.” Discuss this comment on the Modern Olympic Games.

Thus the lofty voice of whoever it is that says those things that students have to discuss – in this case, me as part of the historical background to a course on the politics of sport. The trick, of course, is to distinguish carefully the three logically independent propositions implied by the three phrases and to assess them separately. Were they English games? Possibly not originally because the origins of most games are lost in the “mists” of the undocumented past. But certainly in their modernised and codified forms most modern sports and games began in the schools, universities and clubs of England. As did the original ideology of those games, the concern for amateurism and “gentlemanly conduct”. The very idea of the “Olympics” obviously harked back to the games which started in 776BCE and were terminated in 393 (though may have continued in a semi-clandestine way for some time after that). The harking back was partly to their supposed nobility, but also to many of the details. Track and field athletics almost inevitably became the prime sport of the games and its procedures were almost set in stone when three Oxford men met to form the Amateur Athletics Association in 1880. The popular throwing the cricket ball was replaced by the classical javelin and the discus was reintroduced – the vases were the guide, not the vernacular. Finally, though there had been many stated attempts to revive the ancient games over the centuries – and an increasing frequency of such in the nineteenth century – it was a Parisian, the Baron Pierre De Coubertin, born in 1863, who actually demonstrated the kind of persistence and nous necessary to achieve a movement on a sufficient scale. The games therefore have three spiritual homes, in Greece, France and England.

In fact De Coubertin was an Anglophile and was very sceptical about the modern Greeks. This should not be taken to imply a hostility to Greece, but he was very well aware that the Greeks would naturally tend to want to “own” a games called Olympics and that such ownership would become fairly complete if there were a permanent modern Olympic site in Greece. So the reference to ancient Greece offered a powerful sense of antecedence with a near-universal appeal, but also a threat to the kind of global sporting movement he envisaged. The paradox was evident even late in his life after he had left his active role in the IOC and was accepting an award from the Greek government for services to Greek culture which was presented at the ancient site of Olympia. He confesses in his Mémoires that even at the moment the award was made his mind was not in Olympia, but in Rugby School with the prone faux-medieval statue of Thomas Arnold. He attributed Arnold with no less than the reinvention of what he called chevalerie – which Arnold himself had called gentlemanly education and which both Arnold and De Coubertin saw as an antidote to modern greed and commercialism and an important hope for the world. Most historians have tended to debunk Coubertin’s worship of Arnold, which started with the French version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and led fairly quickly to an ecstatic pilgrimage to Rugby in 1883. They have pointed out quite reasonably that Arnold, unlike some Victorian public school headmasters, had little enthusiasm for games as such. But the counter-argument is that Arnold let the boys develop their own games while insisting on setting their moral tone. I have compared Arnold in this respect to George I who didn’t do very much, but more than any previous monarch allowed his country to develop what the philosopher David Hume called an unprecedented “system of liberty”.

The issue of a permanent Greek site for the modern Olympics has never been fully expunged from the agenda. Even to many people who are not Greek it makes both economic and political sense. Building massive sports resources for an event that lasts weeks has little economic logic to it and Greece has for the most part (the exception being “the colonels” government of 1967-74) been run by regimes which few people could take exception to, thus avoiding the condoning of authoritarian governments for which the IOC has regularly stood accused. The possibility of a permanent site was probably at a maximum in the years the Montreal games of 1976 lost an estimated $753 million. The doctrine which has been most invoked is to keep the circulation of host cities going is that of “legacy” – that the inspiration and facilities will enhance sport in the host nation especially. Statistically this seems to be somewhere between vague and spurious, but the more convincing reason is that in an age of global media governments are able to present the securing of host status as an important success and (often a subsequent government) can present itself to the world in a favourable light. Cultural sociologists tend to regard the Olympics as a “global mega-event”, the premier example of its kind, its main rival being football’s World Cup.

It was all very different in Paris in 1900. For most of modern Olympic history the governance of the games has been described as a three legged stool with the IOC, the international sports federations and the host city (along with its governing country) serving to support the presentation of the games themselves. Of course there have been conflicts, some of them highly complex, but, except during world wars, the games have gone on. But that was not what happened in Paris in 1900. The host city took over the entire control of the games and extended them over five months as part of the the Paris Exposition or World Fair. There was no opening or closing ceremony and the events were spread out over many existing venues. The director of the overall event, Alfred Picard, was not so much indifferent to the aspirations of the IOC as hostile: he declared the reference to the ancient games to be an “absurd anachronism” and the word Olympic was almost never used. Ballooning, motor racing and pelota were among the events never to be seen again at the games and some events such as the cricket were clearly played at a very low standard. The overall direction was in the hands of Daniel Mérillon of the French shooting federation.

It is clear that almost nothing that makes people yearn to be Olympians was present in Paris in 1900. The games were – and were described as being – “farcical”. Coubertin bitterly regretted what he described as his “surrender” to the local organisers and speculated that whereas Athens in 1896 had been a good start his native city was on the verge of finishing the Olympic movement almost before it had got going. Yet it is also clear that Coubertin and Picard were moved by the same spectre, that of France’s six-week defeat in the Franco-Prussian war thirty years earlier. De Coubertin saw the pressing need as a revival of noble military virtue which led him to hark back to Greece, but also to invent his own Olympic event, the “modern pentathlon”. Picard, like his contemporaries the Italian Futurists, saw the only hope as being a full embrace of modernity and technology; the future, and France’s hopes of revival, lay with motor racing, not javelin throwing.

Almost miraculously when the games returned to Paris in 1924 they had begun to resemble the Olympics as later generations have known them with a high level of competition, a proper stadium (Colombes), forty four countries competing, large crowds and well publicised opening and closing ceremonies. It had not been an easy time to run an international organisation with regional wars and a Great War as well as revolutions in several major countries. The St. Louis games in 1904 were predominantly American, also attached to a broader exposition and no less farcical than Paris. London in 1908 was a step forward with the games treated as a sort of adjunct to the London season and a well publicised Anglo-American rivalry. Stockholm in 1912 offered higher levels of organisation than previously, but Berlin in 1916 did not, of course, take place while Antwerp in 2020 involved only “allied” nations and was marked by improvisation, poor attendances and financial losses. The 1981 film Chariots of Fire probably exaggerates the extent to which the 1924 games were the most important thing in many peoples’ lives, but not ridiculously so. Since then the games had setbacks as a result of boycotts and financial losses particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, but essentially they have thrived.

The Olympic movement can be accused of many things. It has lent prestige to many repressive regimes, especially to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In doing so it has been massively hypocritical about such matters as amateurism and drugs. It sold out its original ideals to commercialism. It has presented itself as the pinnacle of sport whereas many of the world’s greatest sportsmen have lived their sporting lives far away from the games. But what it cannot be accused of is failure. Paris 2024 is a global mega-event which both spectators and competitors will yearn to attend. Credit is due to a century and a quarter of IOC resilience and determination. But what must be understood about the games is that they have magic, what some cultural sociologists have called the “fairy dust” which makes billions of people briefly and intensely interested in weight-lifting or field hockey if their nation might win a medal in it. Add nationalism and internationalism and a mega-event and stir the pot . . . Perhaps the word we should use is the old Lallans word for casting a spell: glamour. But we should also remember that there is black magic also involved; mega-events are ideal for terrorists and criminals.

Lincoln Allison July 2024

(This was published by Engelsberg Ideas for the beginning of the Summer Olympics at the end of July 2024.)

UPDATE – How was it for you?

My friend Alan Tomlinson sent me his account of the evening of the opening ceremony of the 2024 games. The action was on the river where there were boatloads of athletes, arranged in national teams, in a sort of float-past and tableaux set up for a global television audience. He couldn’t get to the Seine because of barricades and security procedures; friendly old ladies advised him on alleyways and secret routes, but he had to settle for watching it in a bar. In any case it was pouring down. The general opinion was that this all a bit of a flop: there are only so many athletes floating down a river on boats in the rain that you can watch and the tableaux seemed tedious and shallow. (I didn’t even notice that the one which seemed to mimic the Last Supper in the nearby Louvre could be interpreted as blasphemy.) In general the French press liked the whole thing – which is important – but the the international press were less taken, a difference experienced during a number of previous games.

A games should not be judged by its ceremonies. They are a part of it, but also apart from it. In the Olympic case they are always going to be an expression of the allusions that came with the decision to have a modern Olympic games and not just a modern games. To hark back to the Greeks is to make connections between sport and religiosity, spirituality and art, considerations which can be more or less completely put aside once the competition gets underway. As if in complete awareness of all this the Parisian authorities had a choir sing the Hymn to Apollo which had been sung at the first meeting of the International Olympic Committee in 1894.

The games themselves were far more unequivocally successful than the ceremonies. I was particularly impressed with the tennis and the sevens rugby. They were both sports which had left the games and then returned. In each case they played to capacity crowds and huge global television audiences. In the case of the short version of the rugby it is clear that the Olympics has become the premier event in the sport watched by crowds exponentially greater than any other event in the sport to an even greater degree than track and field athletics. It was notable that the French scrum half, Antoine Dupont, frequently described as the world’s greatest contemporary player, was prepared to sacrifice international caps in the full sized version of the game in order to compete; he was rewarded with a gold medal. More surprising, to me at least, was the extent to which the top players in the world wanted to compete in the tennis. The men’s final was between the greatest player of the current century, Novak Djokovic, and the winner of the two previous Grand Slam tournaments, Carlos Alcaraz. It was clear that both players regarded the games as immensely important and that was surely good for the Olympic movement. It was equally clear that not all innovations are successful and the case in point this year was “breaking” or “break dancing” which was widely regarded with derision.

Many of the games’ traditional problems revived or were exacerbated. Few games can have been so unpopular in the host city as was Paris 2024. This is partly a question of cost, but also of massive inconvenience and that was far worse than previously because of the enormity of security problems under current circumstances. But at least there was no major terrorist incident. Thus there is some threat of a return to the 1970s when nobody wanted to host. Then Los Angeles came to the rescue with a bid based on existing facilities and high television and marketing income; LA turned it round in 1984 as it may in 2028.

The issues of bans and boycotts also faced the games with revived problems. From the 1960s to the 1980s countries were absent from the games largely because of issues arising from South African apartheid and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and 2024 had the most notable absentees for some time, mainly in the shape of Russia, an habitual giant of the games. And, unlike the case in many sporting events, it was a genuine rather than a nominal absence: the two “teams” of athletes with no assigned nationality managed only one gold medal between them. Another problem from the Soviet era which was much worse than it had been for some time was the question of dubious gender in women’s events. The “sex tests” which were introduced to deal primarily with certain Soviet-bloc athletes with enhanced testosterone are gone, leaving a devolved power structure to deal with the masculinity of some nominally female athletes. This created a wide and deeply unsatisfactory spectrum of response. At the one end was track and field athletics which has even banned some athletes born female unless they have treatment to reduce testosterone levels. At the other was boxing whose attitude was caricatured by one official as saying they accepted “whatever it said on the passport”: the consequences of this were considered appalling by anyone I knew who was interested, boxing being a sport where power and testosterone are more important than in almost any other. But at least the “doping” issue – performance-enhancing drugs – was less pronounced than in previous periods and can be said to be contained though it will never go away completely.

So the glamour of the games is maintained and even enhanced in some respects, but some of the chronic problems have worsened. One can see a fairly rocky road ahead, but the global “mega-event” will not go away.

August 2024