city? Evidence supporting the claim is scant. Just look at Beijing. Predictions of Olympics-induced human-rights progress in China, it turns out, were greatly exaggerated. When Beijing hosted the Summer Games in 2008 the country ranked 167th on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. In 2014 the country dropped to 175th. “The reality is that the Chinese government’s hosting of the Games has been a catalyst for abuses,” said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.10 This grim record didn’t stop the IOC from selecting Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will make the city the first to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.
The IOC’s plea for apoliticism partly arises from the need to safeguard its biggest capital generator, the Games themselves. The Olympic Games have become a cash cow that the IOC and its corporate partners milk feverishly every two years, since the staggering of the Summer and Winter Olympics began in 1994. For the IOC, acknowledging politics might jeopardize their lucre.
In Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, Marc Perelman offers a blistering demolition of sport in general and the Olympics in particular. For him, sport has not only come to be “central to the machine” of capitalism, but “the new opium of the people.” Sport, he argues, is actually “more alienating than religion because it suggests the scintillating dream of a promotion for the individual, holds out the prospect of parallel hierarchy.” Perelman concludes, “The element of ‘protest’ against daily reality that even religion (according to Marx) still retained is stifled by the infinite corrosive power of sport, draining mass consciousness of all liberating and emancipatory energy.”11
While I wholeheartedly agree that sport affords us insight into how capitalism shimmies and schemes—indeed that shimmying is a major leitmotif in this book—a closer look at Marx’s original “opium of the people” passage is in order. There’s a great deal of empathy embedded in Marx’s critique —more than Perelman lets on. Marx noted, “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.” He added, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”12 So, for Marx, religion—and by extension here, sport—was “the heart of a heartless world.” We need not eviscerate what provides so many with enjoyment and zest. The chants of the sports fan are not necessarily the blind yammering of monomaniacal naïfs. They can be efforts to make meaning in a cruel capitalist world rigged for the rich—and they can wedge open a path for political conversations we might not otherwise have.
To concede the terrain of sports is to unnecessarily surrender potential common ground for political understanding, and perhaps even action. With that in mind, in this book I’ll argue that critical engagement with the politics of sports has historically helped pry open space for ethical commitment and principled action, as evidenced by the Olympic athletes who have taken courageous political stands, the alternatives to the Olympics that have emerged over the years, and the activism that springs up today to challenge the five-ring juggernaut. In short, the Olympics are more than mere opiate.
Sports are remarkably popular. Pope Francis is a lifelong soccer fan from Argentina whose favorite club, San Lorenzo, catapulted in 2013 from the brink of relegation to the league title—divine intervention?13 Sports can also be the last refuge of the scoundrel. Osama bin Laden marveled at the passion soccer could generate, and he knew it well; in 1994 in London he attended Arsenal Football Club matches on numerous occasions, even purchasing souvenirs for his sons from the club’s gift shop.14 The kind of passion sports generate can be channeled in countless directions, from the radical to the reactionary, from reverence to treachery.
I should acknowledge up front that I come to this book not as some grumpy academic with a penchant for spurning sport, but as someone who dedicated a big part of my life to competitive, high-level soccer. In the late 1980s I earned a slot on the Under-23 National Team—also known as the US Olympic Team—alongside stalwarts like Brad Friedel, Cobi Jones, Joe-Max Moore, Manny Lagos, and Yari Allnutt. My first international match with the Olympic Team took place in France in 1990. Our opponent? The Brazilian Olympic Team, which featured stars like Cafu and Marcelinho. In that same tournament I also suited up against Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The following year I captained the north squad to a gold medal at the US Olympic Festival in Los Angeles, with teammates Brian McBride, Todd Yeagley, Brian Dawson, and Brian Kamler. In short, I am a fan of sport. My personal history is entwined with the political history of the Games.
In his masterful book Beyond a Boundary, the West Indian cricketer and essayist C. L. R. James described a pivotal moment in his life. “I was in the toils of greater forces than I knew,” he wrote. “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.”15 Soccer plunged me into politics, but I still had a ton to learn. As the avant-garde poet and union organizer Rodrigo Toscano once wrote, “there’s enormous gaps in my education.”16 After my experience playing for the US Olympic Soccer Team in France, where we were roundly booed whether we were playing Brazil (understandable), Czechoslovakia (plausible), Yugoslavia (questionable), or the Soviet Union (quizzical), I was eager to start filling in the gaps in my education. In many ways this book is the outcome of that journey.
In April 2015 IOC president Thomas Bach spoke at the United Nations about the Olympic movement’s relationship to politics. He evoked a “universal law of sport” that could be threatened by “political interference” undermining “the core principles of fair play, tolerance, and non-discrimination”—traditional IOC language. However, Bach also said: “Sport has to be politically neutral, but it is not apolitical. Sport is not an isolated island in the sea of society.”17 The modern IOC has updated its rhetoric, adding a dose of nuance.
Today the International Olympic Committee is a well-oiled machine, with slick PR, palatial accommodations in Lausanne, Switzerland, and around $1 billion in reserves. National Olympic Committees now outnumber United Nations member states, 206 to 193.18 The US government references the Games in code names for covert missions. The Olympics are a force to be reckoned with. Let the reckoning begin.
Coubertin and the Revival of the Olympic Games
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
