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.
The Games of the Cold War era may well have best approximated Orwell’s sport-induced “orgies of hatred,” with chauvinistic spittle spraying in every direction.1 Although revolutionary Russia had ditched the Olympics as “bourgeois,” by the 1940s the Soviet Union wanted back in. The 1952 Helsinki Games marked the return of the Soviets to the fivering fold for the first time since Lenin’s revolution. During the Cold War, the Olympics emerged as a prominent venue for rival systems to assert their superiority. As one journalist put it years later, “Our nukes are fueled by better steroids than your nukes.”2 The Games became a platform for the press to assess who was winning the wider war. The “Free World” or the Communists? Capitalism or socialism?
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