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- [00:02]
A
The Olympics are not a timeless celebration of peace. They were, and always have been, an instrument of power, identity and spectacle. Are people dying? Is it really brutal?
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B
These victors, they're heroes, but they're also homicidal maniacs in some instances.
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A
Why does physical supremacy matter so much?
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C
Do we have a population that's fit enough to go to war?
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D
The Olympics were a largely racialized project. The 1936 Olympics in Germany under Adolf Hitler. There's a lot of pressure on athletes to not stand up for what they believe in. And it runs like a thread through the history of the Olympics.
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A
Before they were weaponized by dictators, there was corruption, violence, politics. It's all there from the very beginning. But let's not jump the gun. Olympia is a Greek town in the western Peloponnese, a secluded river cut valley where the Alphaeus and Cladius meet. The air here would have been heavy with damp earth and wild herbs, the sound of running water and cicadas constant. Long before champions were breaking this peace with shattering bones, before roaring crowds in the Olympics, this was sacred land, with evidence that it was revered as a special kind of a place for over 4,000 years. But by the 10th century BC, it was sacred to Zeus, king of the gods. We're often told that the first Olympic Games took place here in Olympia in 776 BC. But that apparently fixed date comes from a polymath, Hippias of Elis, writing centuries after the fact and calculating back. However, the Mediterranean world had long standing, ritualised traditions of physical wrestling, running, chariot racing. Homer describes athletic contests in the Iliad and the Odyssey Games that were staged at funerals amid dust and sacrifice to honour fallen warriors and and local heroes. So what happened at Olympia likely grew out of those funereal commemorative rituals, gradually turning into something that looks like the Olympic Games. Originally, Olympia itself wasn't a city or a sports site in a modern sense. It was a sanctuary, with sacred groves, temples, treasuries, training grounds and a bare, packed earth stadium. On competition days, the valley would have filled with voices, footballs and chanting. The scent of olive oil, sweat and smoke from offerings hanging in the heat. Every four years, athletes traveled here from across the widely scattered Greek world under an enforced sacred truce. To break that truce would be an insult to Zeus. And these athletes weren't competing for money or medals, but for honor, an olive wreath and for glory in front of the gods. Of course, much of what happened here is lost. The colors and the sounds and the precise rules of the games. But archaeology gives us stone traces Ground plans and some dates. Our imagination has to bridge the gaps. So to understand what we really know and what we don't, I spoke to Nigel Spivey, who's an author of a book called the Ancient Olympics and a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He is also a former hammer throwing champion. So he is our guy all round. And we talked about uncovering the earliest origins of the Olympic Games.
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B
There's basically a mythical web of explanations as to how the Olympics came about. And in one strand of that, you get the story that the hero Heracles paced out the stadium. There's an archaeological story about how the Olympics begin, which is rooted in cult practice at this place. Olympia, which gradually evolves into. It transitions from being a religious festival into a festival that is religious but also athletic. And right until the end of its official existence, that festival involves singing hymns, saying prayers, conducting certain rites. So, you know, it's. I think we tend to look at the more secular aspects of it, but in the ancient instantiation of the Games, you could never kind of separate the sacred from everything else that was happening in the athletic arena. Does that make sense?
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A
It does. Why was Olympia chosen? Of all the places in ancient Greece, why this sanctuary, essentially?
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B
Well, the first thing to say is it's not the only place to do big athletic competitions, and they happened all over the ancient Mediterranean. But you're right, Olympia becomes special. And anyone who goes there today, I think, does get a sense of a microclimate. It gets very humid and very thundery in the summer. So if you imagine a deity who is the principal deity, Zeus, Jupiter, to the Romans, a place where there's lots of thunder would be appropriate for a God whose epithet is the cloud gatherer and the thunderer. So I think people felt that there was something a bit numinous about this particular place, but there were practical considerations. So although it's inland, it's not very far inland and it's easily accessed by sea. And that was hugely important in the development of the festival because we have a record of the. The winners in certain events that allegedly goes back to the very first games. And one thing you notice about the provenance of the people who are winning is that they are mostly coming from the Greek colonies abroad, that is not from mainland Greece, not even from the Peloponnese. I mean, Olympia is in the northwest area of Peloponnese, and you might expect one of the cities in the Peloponnese, namely Sparta, to dominate the victory list, but it doesn't. It's the Greek Colonies, especially the ones in southern Italy and Sicily, for whom it's quite an easy, well, relatively easy transit across the Adriatic to get to Olympia. There's an archaeological story about how the Olympics begin, which is rooted in cult practice at this place. Olympia, which gradually evolves into. It transitions from being a religious festival into a festival that is religious but also athletic. And right until the end of its official existence, that festival involves singing hymns, saying prayers, conducting certain rites. So, you know, it's. I think we tend to look at the more secular aspects of it, but in the ancient instantiation of the games, you could never kind of separate the sacred from everything else that was happening in the athletic arena.
- [07:58]
A
If we picture, you and I, where in ancient Olympia the games are about to begin, what do we know about what happened in the opening and closing ceremonies in terms of the ritual?
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B
We don't have a lot of detailed description of the precise sort of formulaic incantations, but I think it's agreed that it's a, it is a five day event and we know what the climax was, which is like a big act of sacrifice. You and I, I think, would have found it completely nauseating because it would involve leading large animals, large quadrupeds, cows and bullocks to an altar in the same precinct where some of the athletics was happening. So things like boxing would happen quite close to the temple where the sacrifice would also happen. And it was, yeah, it would be pierced with the noises of animals being hauled basically to be butchered on the altar. But you have to imagine a sort of giant scale barbecue. And these are people for whom the consumption of meat is. It's a rarity. It's not daily diet at all. They're mostly living on bread and pulses. Later on, the athletes do get special diets. But this is a big sort of festival occasion. And before that happens, you've got to have various rituals in which the athletes, in the presence of, of priests and a deity, basically undertake to obey the rules of the, of the festival. And in the lead up to all of this, you know, this, this actual, you know, the official part of it, the athletes have turned up earlier and there's a process of sorting out a kind of rank order of their, their athletic status so that you don't get, or you shouldn't get the, you shouldn't get no hopers turning up and there shouldn't be conflict.
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A
It's a little bit like the X factor. You get rid of the beginning.
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B
It's a bit like seeding in a tennis tournament that you Want the best ones to be. To be pitched against each other.
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A
So it's a good show. And you mentioned boxing. What are the original sports of the Olympic Games?
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B
Oh, what do you mean by the original sports? You mean in the program? And the program changes over time and it's clear that one element of the program was running the length of the stadium and probably back again. And that's the sort of the sprint, which in a sense was the lead event, as I think, you know, there's. There's a kind of sense that it is today that the hundred meters has a special sort of status within the Olympics originally. I mean, if we want to go back into the kind of priority prehistoric formation of these Games, in my imagination it's. It's something like an agricultural festival. And let's say you were trading horses. You would want the horses to sort of do a race to prove their pedigree and capacity and such like. It's easy to see how a kind of agricultural meeting in the early Iron Age, so early in the first millennium bce, you could have this meeting that then becomes trials of strength in various other disciplines and then of speed and such like. And we have to remember that chariot racing was probably the most exciting thing to watch in the ancient Olympics and it carried a lot of prestige for the competitors. So, yeah, the program is mixed with chariot racing, foot racing, throwing, various things. And originally there seems to have been something like a race in armour.
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A
So I was going to ask you about this and the link between the Olympics and war, because naturally a lot of the athletes, I'm sure, would have been soldiers or would have had martial training. And the running in armour seems to be one of the most obvious alongside pankration and chariots.
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B
I think it was Socrates who used to joke that one reason for keeping fit was to be able to run away from the battlefield very fast if you needed to, throwing away your arms and armour in the process. But joking aside, I think one of the rationales of having a festival, getting citizens of a given political place, a polis, keeping them fit for war, for the eventuality that you had to put out a citizen army, whether they were cavalry units or infantry units, they did need to be in state of physical readiness for this. And I think that race in armor was part of justifying the whole kind of ethos of having athletic training and having a citizen body that was ready to turn out if needed for military service.
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A
How violent were the ancient games? I read that the rules of power, pankration, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but no biting and no gouging. Which reminds me, as somebody who's always done martial arts of ufc. So are people dying? Is it really brutal?
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B
There are deaths recorded, especially in the. In the pankration and the boxing. And it's not surprising. There is a. A marvelous bronze statue of a boxer in Rome. And you see very clearly that this boxer, he's got gloves, but we wouldn't call them gloves. They're more like. They're more like what used to be known as knuckle dusters, I. E. They do protect your. Your digits and your fists, but they're studded. And you can imagine being hit hard by one of those, and it would be enough to not just give you a concussion, but it could be a fatal blow. So I think there's no doubt that serious injuries did occur and sometimes fatalities. But even though. I mean, there's a sort of mythology of certain boxers who were kind of deadly to face, but it wasn't the point of the bout, that it should end in an act of homicide, that was certainly not the intention. And I think it makes much more sense to see the development of the Olympics as part of a process of channeling aggression in a way that is controlled and adjudicated. So although unfortunate fatalities could happen, there were referees, and I think spectators would have intervened to stop the sad event of one of these competitors not getting out of it alive.
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A
There's a tale which I think is quite famous, about a posthumous victory, someone
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B
crowned a winner having expired.
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C
Yes, I think so, Isabelle, but I
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B
can't remember who it is. I mean, I think the. I buy the idea that hero cult was a very powerful part of ancient Greek religion, believing in heroes as these sort of demigods who did extraordinary things. And one of the things that you notice about heroes is that they can die in their acts of heroism, and that's one of the reasons for venerating them, but also that they're. Whilst you respect them and venerate them and you kind of look up to them and want to emulate them, they're also dangerous. And even, you know, Homer catches this when he has a hero like Odysseus sort of saying to himself, quiet, you dog. And he's talking to his own heart that's wanting to sort of come out with something very raw and violent, and it has to be a bit tamped down. So we know about Olympic victors who. There's one fellow called Cleomedes who comes from a little, charming little island called Astypalaya. Who for some reason doesn't win when he thought he should have won at the Olympics, goes back to the island, goes to a schoolroom, and he's like a sort of maniac with a gun, except he doesn't have a gun. He pulls down the pillar that's holding up the schoolroom and kills a lot of school children. And, you know, these victors, they're heroes, but they're also. Yeah, I mean, they are homicidal maniacs in some instances.
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A
If we imagine that we're living in 600 BC from a small town, but you've got sporting prowess, you're an athlete. How could your life change if you became a victor at the Olympic Games?
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B
Radically. So if you were a victor, there's no cash on offer directly and, you know, the prize is simply a bit of foliage on your. On your brow and lots of cheering. And presumably you get the prime cuts at the big barbecue at the end of the Games. But in terms of benefits, you would get rewards from your. Not from the festival organizers, but back in your. The family and the city that is, as it were, sponsoring you and who may indeed have, you know, made sacrifices for your training and your, you know, making the transport available to get to the festival, you come back, and all sorts of privileges. You might get free meals for the rest of your life or front seats at the theatre. You suddenly become a very important person in your hometown. And at some other Games, you were given multiple jars of olive oil, way too much for a family to use, and you could basically, basically cash that in. It was worth a lot. So I think if you won the prize and there were no silver and bronze medals, there was only one winner. But if you achieved that victory, not only was there all the sort of kudos of having you have a poem, possibly to celebrate your victory, that would become a classic poem. You might have a statue, that might become a classic statue, but you did have a lot of material benefits for yourself and conceivably for your descendants and your family as well. You know, one of the most. If you visit the museum at Olympia, I was there not long ago, one of the most stark displays in the museum is of lots and lots of helmets, war helmets. And these are basically trophies that one city has taken in the battle from another city, and they're using the space at Olympia to state their military prowess. And, yeah, it's a kind of warning to other city states. You know, look how many helmets we took the last time we undertook a battle. Beware of, you know, challenging us in future. So there's that kind of messaging going on and it's. There was, I think, the attitude that a city's success at the Games marked its potential for military success were it to come to the battle.
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A
Is that what the leaders got out of it? Because I was going to ask whoever was hosting the Games, the leaders involved, why was it in their interests to participate?
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B
Well, the difference in antiquity is that the Olympic Festival is always at Olympia. It doesn't move around. And the local officials, they do all that they can, I think, to make it better and more prestigious than other games being held in other places. I mean, not a million miles away from Olympia you've got a big festival area to a place called Nemea, also at Delphi as well. And the stadium at Delphi somehow is carved into the mountainside. Extraordinary sort of feat of landscaping, if you like. But there was a sense in which Olympia had to maintain its, its ultimate prestige amongst all these other competing festivals. And I think that their main strategy was to make it a sort of
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A
absolute standard beyond the creme de la creme of the athletes, the judges.
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C
And we know, like you said, a
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A
lot of them came across the Adriatic. Who else attended the Games? Because it seems like it was a place to be and if you're a poet or an artist, a place to be seen. What was the social life like at the Olympics?
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B
I think it might have been a bit like Glastonbury on a very hot period. Crowded, lots of tents. There was no, there was not really any proper accommodation for athletes and their families. I mean, over time, over the centuries, especially in the time of the Roman Empire, almost true to stereotypical form the Romans, you know, bring in more running water, more facilities, VIP guest suites, etc. You know, so a Roman emperor could just rock up at the games and be looked after in some style. But everyone else was kind of roughing
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A
it
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B
and it was characteristically, it was held at, you know, it was held in high summer and we have records that, you know, in a, in a household, probably in Roman times, miscreant slaves could be threatened by their. By the head of house. You know, if you don't behave, I'm going to send you to Olympia. So it was a punishing thing. You, I mean, you can imagine in a crowded, unsanitary place, you know, low lying. Later on, it becomes very malarial, that whole place, which is one of the reasons that the site got abandoned and then lost. Yeah, you had to be pretty strong constitution, I think, to survive the whole five day Festival, but. But it would be families. However, it's unlikely that many female spectators, if any, were at the main game. So the women, we think they had a separate festival at which there wouldn't have been many males amongst the spectators. There are records of. I think there's a record of a female disguising herself as a man and being revealed at the games. But this practice, certainly in the Greek period, possibly not in the Roman period, of competing without clothes on. You know, I think some people have the idea, probably gained from Greek, classical statues, that people walked around without their clothes on. In Greece, of course they didn't, but they. There was a space called the gymnasium where you were, you know, you could strip off and completely strip off. And Gymnos is where we get the term gymnasium literally means you don't have any clothes on, you are totally vulnerable. And there's all sorts of things sort of connected to that. You know, the Greeks were aware that they were pretty eccentric culturally, in doing things completely naked, but I think it was a part of it, especially with the martial arts, was, you know, if you've got nothing on, you've got. You can't hide anything, you're not carrying any secret weapons or anything. And I think part of the, you know, if you talk about violent sports, like you mentioned the pankration. Yes, it was, you know, I wouldn't like to have been practitioner of the pankration, but I think in antiquity they would have said, well, you know, at least we're just using fists and we're not. We're not resorting to weapons here. And, you know, George Orwell had this phrase about sport as war, minus the shooting. And I like using that for the ancient Olympics, because I think that was part of their explanation of why they did this thing. And it was made all the more curious, I think, by the nudity of the athletes.
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A
Yes. So for the martially inclined, not prudes and not those with a weak constitution, was there corruption in the ancient games? Bribery, match fixing of any sort of.
- [27:10]
B
Afraid so, yeah. And in fact, if you visit Olympia, as you go from the temple area towards the stadium, you actually kind of run the gauntlet of what used to be a series of statues that were put up. These were statues of the God Zeus with his thunderbolt raised in a kind of punitive gesture. And the inscriptions make it perfectly clear that athletes who were caught cheating, fixing bouts or, yeah. Betting on results, where they, you know, have got a stake in this bet, if they were caught, they were forced to basically pay for one of these Statues and their record, the shame of the cheating is made public. But I think that's probably the oath that they took on the eve of the athletic program would have been in the presence of, as it were, of Zeus, mediated through his statue in the temple, that they'd undertaken not to resort to foul means to gain their victory. And if you have in your mind's eye the image of Zeus as this, as the Greek sculptor Pheidias imagined him for the temple at Olympia which became one of the seven wonders of the world. But enormous figure himself, bearded and very powerful. But in his, in his palm he has the personification of victory, Nike. And it's his gift to the athletes. And so if they have cheated, Zeus knows about it, he knows everything. So there was in a sense, I think that onus that it was an element of sacrilege as well as foul play in there.
- [29:23]
A
The Roman emperor Theodosius I ruled from 379 to 395. He was a devout Christian and made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. He presided over laws that clamped down hard on pagan cults, banning animal sacrifice, outlawing divination by reading entrails. What a party pooper. Basically the whole apparatus of ancient religion. Now modern history. Historians have some doubts about just how thorough this pagan purge actually was. But it is highly likely that he suppressed the Olympic Games and after that point the sacred site of Olympia began to evanesce. Pagan cults disappeared, the sanctuary was abandoned. Nature then finished what politics started because powerful earthquakes in 522 and 551 AD destroyed the temples. Rivers, possibly triggered by tsunamis, buried the entire site under up to eight metres of sediment. Olympia vanished, lost to time. The modern Olympics don't begin with a stadium. They begin, like all great things in life, with a lecture. So in 1892 at the Sorbonne in Paris, a a 29 year old French aristocrat with one hell of a handlebar moustache stood up at the end of a talk on physical education and made a proposal that barely registered at the time, that the Olympic Games should be revived. His name was Pierre de Coubertin. You can imagine the scene like this bored, listless, shuffling audience in response to a proposal which one day is going to grip the globe and have hundreds of billions poured into it. Coubertin was not an athlete, he, he was a historian and a reformer, deeply influenced by organised sports culture he'd seen in English public schools and by the simultaneous archaeological rediscovery of ancient Greece that was unfolding across Europe. He believed sport could shape character, that disciplined bodies produce disciplined minds, and that strong citizens would ultimately make for stronger nations, including in war. But Coubertin was more idealistic than that. He admired what he thought the ancient games, amateur competition, honour over reward, and the idea that athletic struggle mattered more than the victory itself. Plus, from the ancient sacred truce, he had hoped that international competition could soften national rivalries, even promote peace. How very misworld of him. So his philosophy was distilled into a line that still, still defines the Olympic movement. And it is the important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well. In 1896, that philosophy became reality with the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens. But ideals once scaled globally rarely remain uncontested. Now, Coubertin was not perfect. Olympic historian David Wolinsky notes that Pierre didn't think that women should participate in the Games. He also had racist attitudes, very common to his era and class. And these were not like minor footnotes, because they did shape who was welcomed and who was excluded in those early years of the Games. But by the mid 20th century, the Olympics had become something far larger and far darker than Coubertin ever imagined. So let's look at what happens when. When dictators get involved. Berlin, 1936. Nazi Germany didn't just host the Games, they choreographed them as a spectacular display of racial and political supremacy. This was the first televised Olympics, the first Olympic torch relay. And Hitler's propaganda machine went into overdrive, using these innovations to broadcast a message to the world Aryan supremacy. The torch relay itself, conceived by Carl Diem, was lit in ancient Olympia and passed through seven countries over 12 days. And the point of this was to draw a symbolic link between Nazi Germany in the Third Reich and classical Greece, reinforcing the regime's claim to be the rightful heir to ancient civilization. And yet this careful planning and spectacle fractured because African American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals, publicly dismantling the very ideology that the Games were meant to showcase. His victories transcended winning races. They shattered the myth that Hitler was selling the world. Rome, 1960. So this Olympics became a truly global broadcast event. Ethiopia's Abebe Bickle won the marathon barefoot, the first black African Olympic champion. Bickler's achievement came during a year of African independence movements, with 17 African nations gaining sovereignty in 1960 alone again, his triumph deeply symbolic. Beyond sport and quietly alongside the Games, the first Paralympics were redefining who sport was for. Tokyo, 1964. This was the first Olympics in Asia and the first broadcast worldwide by satellite. An estimated 600, 800 million viewers across five continents watched the Games live. Japan poured resources into infrastructure like bullet trains, expressways, all completed in time for the world to see again. The political message was clear. Japan has returned to the international stage. Mexico City, 1968. Amid global unrest, American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised black Black Glove fists symbolizing black power and unity during the medal ceremony on October 16th. Turning this moment in the Games into one of the most enduring images of political protest in modern history. Their silent demonstration, wearing black socks, no shoes that was representing black poverty and beads to remember the victims of lynchings led to their immediate suspension from the US team and expulsion from the Olympic Village, along with death threats upon their return home. Munich, 1972. The Olympics were permanently changed when 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September. The hostage Crisis unfolded over 20 hours, broadcast live to an estimated 900 million people, ending in a failed rescue attempt at first in Felbrook Air base where all nine remaining hostages were killed. The games were suspended for 34 hours, the first time that had happened in Olympic history, but then continued at the behest of then IOC president who insisted that the Games must go on. So the Games continued, but global sport would never again be staged without much heavier security. Barcelona, 1992. The Cold War was over. South Africa returned after a 32 year ban due to apartheid, competing with its first racially integrated team. Former Soviet states competed as a unified team under the Olympic flag, winning 45 gold medals and topping the medal table. While athletes were honoured with their individual national anthems and flags at medal ceremonies. These were the first summer Olympics since 1970 without any boycotts as 169 nations participated in what became a symbol of post Cold War reconciliation. And the US Dream Team signalled the full arrival of professional athletes at the Olympics. Today, the Olympic Games still present themselves as apolitical, a claim embedded in the modern Olympic Charter itself. But after a century, more than a century of boycotts, propaganda, protest, tragedy, massive commerce and power, can we really say that the Games transcend politics? I put that question to Jules Boykoff, a political scientist and leading scholar of the Olympic movement. And I asked him if the Games have ever been apolitical or if that's just another part of the spectacle.
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D
The idea that the Olympics transcend politics has been there from the very beginning. There was a plucky French aristocrat named Baron Pierre de Coubertin. That started the Olympics way back in the 1890s. And he was very much committed to that idea that the Olympics should not be political. And yet he brought together politically powerful people, an assortment of dukes, princes, czars and so on, to create the International Olympic Committee. And despite the fact that he didn't want them to be political, they were. I mean, politics is about who gets what, when, where and how. And he excluded women from the Olympics from the very beginning. A very political decision that a lot of people disagreed with. He was against amateur. He was for amateur at the time.
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A
If I can just ask you that.
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D
Absolutely, yeah. So, I mean, he did not want women to be part of the Olympics because he didn't think that they were up for it. He felt like there were two women roles for women if they wanted to be a part of the Olympic Games. One was they could place the laurels on the heads of the victorious man, champion of the Olympics, or they could have babies and those babies could grow up to become Olympic champions. So he had a pretty much straight up sexist view around women. He also thought that if you held a job, you shouldn't be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games. So if you were a bricklayer or a barkeep, you were considered professional and not an amateur, and you could not participate in the Olympics. Well, that opened the field wide open for people like himself. Actually, the Baron won the prize for poetry at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm under a pseudonym, mind you. He submitted his poem under two fake names. But so the field was wide open for people like the Baron from the beginning. And all those decisions, political decisions. Let me give one other example. When they started doing the Parade of Nations, the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games, they could well have had the athletes march in by sport. You could have see real internationalism, you know, athletes from around the world that are swimmers, all linking arms and walking into the Olympics together. They didn't do that. Instead, as you'll know, they walk in by country, thereby inflaming the passions of political nationalism. Again, a political decision. Basically. Anybody who tells you that the Olympics aren't political deserve your healthy skepticism. They probably not always, but probably might have a money spigot open where Olympic money is flowing into their account and they might want to keep politics out of it. So that doesn't change such a good
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A
point that those elements of the Olympics are essentially a nationalist extravaganza. You've got the flags, you've got the national anthems. So did that become greater over time? Like if you look at the 20th century and we look at the political currents and the build of nationalism, is that reflected in what we see happen at the Olympic Games as well?
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D
No question. Political nationalism is the basis for the organization of the Olympic Games. So it should come as no surprise that the Olympic became a pedestal for people to cheer for their own country, to cheer against people that might be considered geopolitical foes. It became pretty quickly evident when you look through the history of the Olympics, that sports are essentially politics by other means. And the Olympics really crystallize that in a way that other events really don't.
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A
Can you say more about that? Sport is politics by other means. Really Interesting.
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D
Sure. So, I mean, sports are thrumming with the political. If it's about inclusion, exclusion, these are political decisions. I come from a political science background, and there's a famous political scientist named Harold Lasswell who offered sort of a thumbnail definition to help us decide what was political. And he said it was about who gets what, when and where and how. And so if you think about that as the frame, who gets what, when, where and how inside of the Olympics? Well, women were excluded from the Olympics for a long time. Workers were excluded from the Olympics for a long time. The Olympics were a largely racialized project. When you look at, for example, the 1936 Olympics in Germany under Adolf Hitler, it became sort of a place where Hitler could make claims about Aryan supremacy. That's where they created the Olympic torch relay that you see moving through Italy ahead of the Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina. So the Nazis actually created that event of the Olympic torch relay to not only spread the Olympic gospel far and wide, but also the Nazi gospel astride it. So the Olympics are political. It inflames political nationalism. And some real scoundrels from history, such as Adolf Hitler, have used this to
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A
their advantage because presumably, it inflames eugenicist sentiment as well.
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D
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can actually go all the way back to the early days of the Olympics when they really hadn't gotten their feet quite under them to the degree they have today, where they essentially had to attach themselves to world fairs, which were the big thing of the day. And when they did that, they had an event in St. Louis in 1904, and it was called at the time the Anthropology Days, or the quote, unquote, Special Olympics. And what they did was people brought together indigenous athletes from around the world. And the whole point of these anthropologists was to put forth a eugenicist agenda that said that white People were superior. So they brought these indigenous folks from all around the world. They explained the rules to them to these various events in English and said, go for it. So they'd have like a hundred meter dash and the indigenous folks would run to the finish line. But instead of plunging through the tape, they'd stop and wait for each other and they'd all move through together. We might say, wow, that's really beautiful. What a different way of thinking about sports. Not these eugenicists. They thought, oh my gosh, see, you can see that white people are superior. They would have plunged through the tape as the champion. These folks are inferior. So it goes all the way back to almost the very beginning of the Olympics. It wasn't just Adolf Hitler, Hitler in the 1930s.
- [43:47]
A
What latitude do and did athletes have to make a political statement individually, express political views or protest in some capacity? How tightly controlled is that by their countries?
- [44:02]
D
Well, there are two groups of people that would try to control athlete descent. One is the country from which they come, but the other is the international committee that oversees the Games. There are some incredible acts of political dissent. I mean, one of my favorites in the early days was a guy named Peter O'. Connor. He was an ardent Irish athlete who in 1906 at the Olympics in Athens, was forced to compete for Great Britain. You can imagine how thrilled an Irish athlete was to participate for Great Britain because Ireland didn't have a national Olympic committee at that time time, and Britain was ruling Ireland from Westminster. So what he did after he won a medal was he ran over to the flagpole when the Union Jack went up and he grabbed the. He shimmied up the thing, grabbed the Union Jack and yanked it down and put up, held up another flag that said, erin Gobrag, Ireland forever. And so that was 1906. He didn't face enormous repercussions. The Olympics weren't what they are today back then, but definitely the Brits that were overseeing from the National Olympic Committee were none too thrilled about that bout of athlete activism. If you shimmy forward in time to some examples that people probably know about. Smith and Carlos. Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics put their Black glove fists into the Mexico City sky. They faced enormous penalties from the United States Olympic Committee. Under pressure from the International Olympic, they were booted out of the Olympic Village. Their lives were made very difficult. Jobs were difficult to come by. Their lives were shattered. Their relationships with their partners were under a tremendous strain. So there's a lot of pressure on athletes to conform to not stand up for what they believe in. And it runs like a thread through the history of the Olympics.
- [45:48]
A
You've mentioned a couple of examples there, but from your political science perspective, do you have pet Olympic Games, ones that are pivotal, that you find particularly interesting in terms of the combination of nations and their politics at that moment?
- [46:03]
D
I do, actually. For me, this might be a little bit off the beaten path for political scientists or people that study the Olympics, but for me, 1976 was a really interesting year because on one hand, you had Montreal, where you had a mayor there named Jean Drapeau who said the Olympics could no sooner go over their cost estimates than a man could have a baby. And, wow, was he wrong. They spent billions upon billions of dollars. They didn't pay it off for some 30 years, and it made other Olympic cities go, whoa, we can't do this. And it really put a damper on the interest around the Olympic Games. Also in 1976, Denver had been assigned to host the Winter Games. But you never heard of the Denver 1976 Olympics, because they didn't happen, because people in Denver, in wider Colorado, across the political spectrum, from sort of more liberal environmentalists to fiscal conservatives, came together, got a ballot measure in place that said, we're not going to give any public money to these Olympics, and they won. So no public money was going to go to the Olympics, and the International Olympic Committee had to decide to move it elsewhere. They moved it to Innsbruck, Austria. So those were supremely political moments in the political history of the Olympics. And they led us to what happened right after that, which is sort of this other pocket of really important politics, and that is the boycott era, the 1980 Moscow Games, the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which were boycotted by major countries from around the world. Again, politics just thrumming through those events through and through.
- [47:39]
A
When does money start to pour into the Olympics? And how does the billions, the sponsorship, the brand deals, change the political latitude and climate of the Games?
- [47:51]
D
It happens right around the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics. What happened was, because there was very little interest in the Olympics at that time. There were only two cities that were bidding on the 1984 Olympics. One was Los Angeles. The other was Tehran in Iran. And Tehran experienced a revolution, basically, that meant there was only one choice for the International Olympic Committee, and that was Los Angeles. Los Angeles had power at that time. They had more leverage because they were the only choice available. And so they used that leverage to essentially corporatize the Olympics. They brought in a number of big name Sponsors, exclusive sponsors that paid top dollar in the millions of dollars to be exclusive sponsor of the Olympic Games. And actually, Los Angeles didn't lose money, they went over budget, but they ended up with a surplus at the end of those Olympics in large part because of broadcast television contracts as well as those corporate partnerships. And so that was really the key pivot in the history of the Games because the International Olympic Committee saw that and they're like, whoa, these are incredible resources that they got in Los Angeles. We need to adopt that. And by the end of the 1980s, the International Olympic Committee had created their own Olympic partner program, basically a corporate sponsorship program. And they've never turned back. I mean, today, more than nine out of every ten dollars that rolls into the International Olympic Committee's coffers comes from either television broadcast rights or corporate sponsorships.
- [49:21]
A
When a city hosts the Olympics, who tends to benefit the most and who is paying the price?
- [49:28]
D
Generally speaking, the Olympics are an exercise in trickle up economics. And what I mean by that is the money tends to trickle upward into the pockets that are already relatively full. There's a lot of money moving through the Olympic system. It's swirling around left and right. It tends to go to construction barons. It's a great chance for, if you're in the big name construction industry to get some big contracts. It tends to benefit certain politicians. A lot of politicians tend to use the Olympics like their own political trampoline. I mean, think of Boris Johnson, for example, who oversaw the Olympics in London in 2012 and kind of used it as a trampoline for his own political career. Didn't last forever for him, but you see what I mean? And many people besides Boris Johnson have tried to do that. I would say some athletes tend to also benefit from the Olympics, especially if you're from a lesser known sport. This is kind of like your one chance to get an Olympic sponsorship to help advance your career forward. But, you know, an ugly truth about the Olympics is that many athletes actually don't benefit at all. I mean, they get the prestige and everything, but they don't benefit economically. In fact, there was a study done by Toronto Metropolitan University recently that compared the amount of revenues that the English Premier League of Football athletes get. National Basketball association here in the United States, NHL, so hockey, NFL, football. They compared those groups of athletes and the revenues they get to the revenues that Olympic athletes get in those other leagues. It was 45 to 60% of the revenues go into the pockets of the athletes. In the Olympic Sphere, it's only 4.1 and I'm sure the authors of that study would want me to note that it was actually Z 0.5 of the percentage of IOC International Olympic Committee revenues went directly into the pockets of those athletes. So I say with some hesitancy, therefore, that athletes benefit from the Olympics. They might get a little bit of shine, maybe even some fame, but it doesn't always translate to their pocketbook.
- [51:27]
A
What I'm getting from listening to some of your remarks is this sense of the gulf between the spectacle and the veneer, the performance and the hard power and the mechanics behind the scenes. So looking at it from a political perspective, where do you see the net positives and negatives of the Olympic Games?
- [51:50]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think spectacle is the right word to use there. I mean, the Olympics have become a sporting and Olympic spectacle through and through. One of my favorite French theorists, Guy Debord, once wrote a long time ago that the spectacle is not a collection of images. It is a social relationship that is mediated by images. So the Olympic spectacle is a social relationship, and it involves us people who might be fans of these various athletes. It involves the athletes themselves. It involves the people who put the Olympics together. So I think that for some athletes, it can be a huge benefit for fans who get to see this incredible set of athletic performances. It's certainly to our benefit. Like, we are. We are winners. We get to see this athletic excellence grace our TV screens. Or if you're lucky enough to be in person, you get to see it right there. But there's some endemic downsides that I'm sure people would want me to mention. I mean, if I sound a little bit different, it's because my work as a political scientist has been to go to various Olympic cities, embed myself there, get to know locals over a period of time, of time, and figure out how everyday people are being affected by the Olympic Games. I lived in London ahead of those Olympics, and during those Olympics, I lived in Rio de Janeiro ahead of those Olympics, and during those Olympics, I visited Tokyo ahead of their Olympics. I was in Paris for the Olympics there, where I didn't go to all the press conferences that the International Olympic Committee puts on. There's plenty of people that can do that. Instead, I met actual people, people on the ground who didn't always benefit from the Games. And they would surely want me to tell you that there are a series of problems with the Olympics, including overspending. They say it's going to cost this much during the bid phase, but it inevitably goes up over time. In fact, every Single Olympics, Bianca, since 1960, for which there is reliable data, has gone over budget. There's the militarization of public space that affects everyday people in the system city. I mean, the Olympics are huge. They've become a terrorist target. Look at Munich, 1972. Look at Atlanta, 1996. So essentially, national and local police forces use the Olympics like their own private cash machine to get all the special weapons and laws they never be able to get during normal political times. So definitely security forces tend to benefit from the Olympics. They don't return those weapons to sender after the Games. They keep them and they become part of normal policing after the Olympics. You know, a lot of people that I've worked with over time have actually lost their homes. I mean, I interviewed two elderly women in Tokyo, Japan who lost their housing because of the Olympics at the 1964 Games in Tokyo. And then they lost their housing again. They were displaced again for the 2020 Olympics. I mean, what are the chances of that? And they wouldn't even let me use their real names. As the only time I've ever used an anonymous source in an article. It was because they were fearful for their lives. So they would want me to mention displacement to you. Another thing, last thing I'll say is just greenwashing. I mean, that means just talking a big environmental game, but not actually following through. And unfortunately, the Olympics have a track record of that. The people I met in Rio would definitely want me to mention that they were told that 80% of the water that flows into Guanabara Bay, where they have a number of Olympic events at the 2016 Olympics and where people recreate 80% of the water was supposed to be filtrated and cleaned by the time the Olympics came. Well, that didn't happen. That promise just melted away more. It was more like 25, 26% by the time the Olympics got there. So there are some real winners with the Olympics. They tend to be a privileged sliver of the global 1%, if I can sort of generalize. And then there are losers. And that kind of tends to be the rest of us. But the rest of us at least get to watch these amazing athletes.
- [55:35]
A
If someone's just watched the Olympic Games before, to see sport, to see the spectacle, and you are going to give them a cliff note of things to look out for, to decode it politically, what are you telling them?
- [55:48]
D
I love that question. And I actually have had the good fortune of sitting down with people who don't consider themselves super political and watch the Olympics and talk through with them. Some of the things that I'm seeing, and I think a great place to start, honestly, is the opening ceremony because it's a chance for a country to really put its best foot forward. And you can learn a lot about the spectacle that that country is trying to create, the image that they're trying to put forth to the rest of us. You can also learn a lot about the views of athletes and their vision for what they hope to happen at the Olympics when they're interviewed after the opening ceremony. So I would say that's a great place to start. And as we already talked about, Bianca, it's also thrumming with political nationalism that you can see with a lot of clarity and kind of have that aha moment. Yeah, these are definitely political, these events. I mean, this is political nationalism is set front and center. So I would start there. Then I would start wondering, like, well, who succeeds at the Olympics for people that are really following the sports? Who's winning all the medals? What countries are they from? How much resources do they have for sport in their country? Are athletes well taken care of? Are they left on their own? Is there even facilities where they can go that often informs kind of what happens with the winners at the Olympic Games? So I think those two things alone, I think, could get you going on some interesting conversations around politics and sports.
- [57:16]
A
Jules Boykoff, Honestly, I'm sorry. So much more enthusiastic and excited to watch the Games now because I adore politics, and now I feel like I can apply some of these lenses. Thank you so much. After speaking to Jules, I wanted to look at how some of the seismic political shifts of the last decades have played out at the Olympic Games. And I found just the expert. But before we dive into how the Olympics became a Cold War battlefield, I want to talk to you about the weirdest events that have been staged at the Games. So picture this. It's 1912. You're at the Stockholm Olympics, and the medal ceremony is not for javelin or wrestling. It's for poetry. So from 1912 to 1948, you could win Olympic gold for art. They called this the Pentathlon of the Muses. There were five categories, as the name suggests, architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. And the Olympic founder who we've talked about, Pierre de Coubertin, entered in 1912 under a pseudonym. He entered the literature competition and won gold for Ode to Sport. Apparently, no one knew until years later. So no corruption there that we know of. The arts competition collapsed, though, in 1949, when the IOC basically realized that everyone was A professional artist, and that violated the rules. Next we have live pigeon shooting. 1900, Paris. This is the only time in Olympic history where animals were deliberately killed, killed for sport. Belgian Leon de London won gold by shooting 21 birds out of the sky. Nearly 300 poor little pigeons died in total blood, feathers everywhere. And staggeringly, this ornithological gore fest never returned. Meanwhile, tug of war was a legitimate olympic sport for 20 years. And so was solo synchronised swimming, where you synchronize with yourself to music. That lasted three Olympics from 1984 to 1992. There was also pistol duelling. So in 1906, you might think, that's not an Olympic year. No, it wasn't. But there were special games held because it was the 10 year anniversary of the modern Olympics starting and they had pistol duelling. So competitors shot at dummies dressed in frock coats, but by the 1908 official Olympics, they were shooting at each other. Competitors used wax bullets fired at each other while wearing protective gear. Very wild west meets Olympics. And a dishonourable mention to round us out. Croquet was a fixture in 1900. All 10 competitors were French, and only one spectator showed up, an Englishman. So to understand how the Olympics transformed from this blood of poor pigeons fiasco and poetry medals into an ultimate Cold War battleground, I spoke with Dr. Erin Redihan, who's a lecturer at Salve Regina and one of the world's leading historians of Soviet sport and Cold War era Olympics. At which Olympics, winter or summer, were Cold War tensions at their fever pitch?
- [60:19]
C
I think the Summer Olympics tend to get a bit more of that. There are several instances if we go back through history, where we see those tensions at a paper pitch. So, for instance, if we look at 1956, the Melbourne summer Olympics, which technically happened in November and December because the summer and winter are flipped in the Southern Hemisphere. The Soviet Union, while the Hungarian team is traveling to Melbourne, crushes the Hungarian revolution. And so there's all these expectations by the athletes who are traveling by boat, many of them with the Soviet team, that they were going to arrive in Melbourne and their revolution had succeeded. And that's not the case at all. And there were thoughts, you know, what would the United States do in the midst of all this? And the answer was the United States actually helped some Hungarian athletes to defect from Melbourne. And that becomes kind of an important story in terms of how the Olympics can be used to kind of play out these political tensions in a way that's not going to lead to any kind of nuclear standoff. Right. Which was one of the biggest fears during the Cold War. So we see that in 1956. If we look again at Moscow, 1980, the United States boycotts, you know, moving into the Ronald Reagan presidential administration from 1981 to 1989, his first term, 1981 to 1985, is marked by kind of ratcheting up these tensions. And we see that again with the summer games in 1984 in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union decided not to come two months before the Games are scheduled to open. So showing those tensions are still there and very much alive.
- [61:56]
A
It's really interesting what you're saying about the Olympics being a forum to play out tensions. How effective of a safety valve is something like the Olympics to avoid? I mean, you mentioned nuclear war. The absolute worst case scenario. How can sport play a role in reducing that?
- [62:16]
C
I think something like the Olympics is absolutely critical because what the Olympics offer, again, it's a safe space to put in today's parlance. It's a place where you can. You can compete, you can compete. You know, you train hard, you can compete. It's a source of national pride on both sides. But again, it's not going to lead to that, that, that nuclear standoff. There are other ways the superpowers sought to compete that were, you know, slightly less successful to the general public. So, for instance, another big one is the space race, right? So the Soviet Union wins the opening battles by sending up Sputnik, by sending the first person into space. The United States wins the whole thing by. By having a man walk on the Moon in 1969. And that's really cool to see, but it's less accessible to the average person, the average spectator, than something like the Olympics. Olympic medals are quantifiable, right? They're. They're tangible. You know, everyone can take a sense of pride in watching a certain game or, you know, seeing a certain race play out in a way that other aspects of the Cold War weren't quite as reachable. And so it provides an outlet for the press writing about the Olympics for, you know, during. And of course, a lot of postmortem after. It provides an outlet for the public to kind of see these tensions play out. And we see the governments getting involved too, right? So the United States paying more attention to Olympic athletes, eventually investing more money in the Olympic program. And I think that shows that they understood the importance of sports for the Cold War as well.
- [63:40]
A
What was the experience like for the athletes? Whether it's in front of the eyes of Spectators or the world via television. And in the Olympic Village, behind the scenes, when tensions were so high between their respective countries, so the US and
- [63:55]
C
at the time, the ussr, the TV coverage varies a bit by Olympics. So it's. The first time we see international television coverage is actually the Cortina Winter Olympics in 1956. So, you know, 70 years ago this year. And that tends to be a bit limited. It's really once we get into the 1960s that we see the Games truly globalized, where they're covered on six continents. So, for instance, if we look at the Rome 1960 Games, those are, you know, the first that are broadcast really everywhere. And then by the time we get 1968, Mexico City, the Olympics are broadcast to an estimated audience of about a billion people. And so that's really when you see. When you consider the fact that, you know, the world's eye is really on you at that point. Right. The old idea, seeing is believing. It's one thing to read about these events happening in your newspaper, but if you can actually sit and watch them, it draws you in, I think, a little bit more. And so for the athletes, a lot, I think some of them did certainly feel that pressure. You know, it's not just what I'm doing for myself or for my teammates, it's what am I doing for my country. So there's certainly that patriotic element there. Regarding what's happening in the Olympic villages, there are some instances of tension. So if we go back to the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, when the Hungarians got to their housing in the Olympic village and they learned that the revolution had failed, the Soviet Union had crushed it. They tore the hammer and sickle off their national flat before putting it up outside their housing. They didn't want to sit with the Soviet teams in the dining halls, things like that. When the Soviet athletes arrived in Lake Placid in 1980, there are reports that there were a few small demonstrations. It's something that, actually, I'm working on philosophy right now and not finding much evidence. So for the most part, a lot of these tensions, I think, aren't necessarily playing out between the athletes themselves, but mostly are playing out in the media, on the broadcasts, among the governments, kind of at a. At a different level than what's happening on the playing fields.
- [65:51]
A
The Cold War, by definition, is this period of competition between the US and the ussr. But why does physical supremacy matter so much? So, beyond the obvious, why does America and the Soviet Union care so much about beating each other when it comes to medals?
- [66:11]
C
I Think there are two factors at play here. So there was always, I think, this concern coming out of the world wars at the back of the government's minds in particular, are we fit enough? If we had to go to war, Are we prepared to do so? So do we have a population that's fit enough to go to war? What's the way that we demonstrate that, well, we go and we win all these physical challenges, right? So the Olympics are kind of the centerpiece of this, but there are other. So the Soviet Union and the United States had a series of dual track meets in the 1950s and 1960s. And it was, you know, it happened every year. And it was a way to kind of direct head to head matchups to show who was the stronger country. Right. So sport offers a chance to, to, to compete, to show off your physical prowess. And I think in some ways could almost serve as a warning, like, you know, this is what we're capable of.
- [66:59]
A
What lengths would they go to? What do we know about performance enhancement during that period?
- [67:04]
C
So by the time we get to 1960, we know that it was, it was becoming more and more common within the Olympic movement. So unfortunately, the first athlete to die of performance enhancing drugs in the Olympic context happens at the rome Olympics in 1960. It was a Danish cyclist. And that kind of puts this idea of doping really front center on the International Olympic Committee's radar. And then it takes almost 40 years, it actually does take 4 years till 2000 to really get an effective testing protocol in the creation of the World Anti Doping Agency. And the superpowers are really a big part of, of this. And there's a reluctance on both sides to really commit to an effective testing protocol. I think that emanates in large part from the fact that neither side wanted to admit that, yeah, several of their athletes were doping. It's not every athlete, it's not every sport, but it was a means of attaining a competitive advantage. And the thing with doping is the, the athletes who are doing it tend to be one step ahead of the team tests that are out there. So if you have this testing protocol, are you going to kind of show your hand, show what you've been doing? And so there are concerns about that. And, you know, I think for the International Olympic Committee plays in this as well. There's a bit, a little bit of an ignorance and bliss attitude that, that goes towards doping really until we get into the 1980s and 1990s. And by that point it was absolutely rampant. And we know that the Soviet Union had a Pretty strong death testing, sorry, doping protocol. And the news of that really doesn't come until after the Soviet Union dissolves in, in 1991. But we tend to, if we think doping the. The country that comes to mind, of course, is the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet Union. American athletes were doing it too. And again, it's. It's really a competitive advantage sort of thing. And neither side would really commit to, you know, a strong testing protocol until after World War is over.
- [68:59]
A
What are the key Olympic boycotts that you would point people to that they need to understand because they tell us something important about the time?
- [69:05]
C
The two big ones would be the superpower boycott. So the United States leading 64 other nations to boycott Moscow in 1980, and then the Soviet Union leading a smaller boycott of the communist countries, except for Romania, actually, at the 1984 Summer Olympics in, in Los Angeles. So those are the big two. There are other instances of countries boycotting throughout the Cold War, but these are the ones that tend to get the most attention.
- [69:30]
A
You definitely need to do some kind of game show where this is the topic because you would clean up on balance. Do you think that the Olympics fermented more division or acted as a unifier between the US And USSR during the Cold War?
- [69:47]
C
I think in many ways they're a unifier. I'd really like to think think so. I think that there is plenty of division that's sowed outside of the. The athletes themselves. So again, looking at how the media is covering the Olympics, how they're talking about those on the, the other side of this ideological divide. But I think for the athletes themselves, you know, there, there are reports, there are stories written about athletes kind of saying, you know, at the end of the day, we're all kind of going for the same thing. We're all trying to go for these medals. They have commonalities. They're training in the same sports. They're going through, in some cases, you know, the same physical injuries that, that accompany training at a high level. And so there's this level of understanding, I think that's there. A lot of these athletes would have faced off in opportunities other than the Olympics. I mentioned those track meets already, but things like, you know, there, there were, there were hockey series that went on outside the Olympic context as well, the World Basketball Championships. So they would have gotten to know each other a bit. Right. It's a small group of people competing at that elite level. And there aren't a whole lot of stories that out there, you know, saying that, geez, you know, we couldn't stand any one of them. But they're, you know, something like the Olympics is really great that it draws people together, it gives you something to focus on that's not politics. And I think in many ways it really did achieve that, at least on the athlete level.
- [71:05]
A
When you look at how the USA and Russia engage at Olympics today, does it remind you of the Cold War?
- [71:13]
C
Not recently, because Russia's Olympic participation has been Pretty Limited since 2016. So they are, they vote. For instance, They've only got 13 athletes who are going to be competing over the next couple weeks in the Winter Olympics and smaller. They also had smaller contingents if we go back starting in 2018, first because of doping sanctions and then because of the ongoing war, war in Ukraine. So I don't think we get that same, that same buildup towards this us versus them mentality. I, I think 2028 is, is looking like it's going to be really fascinating. Will, will Russia, if they are welcomed back into the, the International Olympic Committee, will they send a team to Los Angeles? What would that look like? Will it be a full team? I think there are going to be some really fascinating storylines there because it would be the first chance really for these head to head matchups in 12 years. So I'm looking forward to that and I wouldn't be surprised if we do get some of that same mentality returning.
- [72:10]
A
That is a perfect forward looking note to end on. Thank you so much Erin, that was brilliant. Honestly, you are a walking encyclopedia and I learned quite a lot, so thank you. This episode presents some peculiar paradoxes. The ancient Olympics were a shared ritual that suspended conflict ish as it celebrated violence and dominance. The modern Olympics celebrates unity as athletes are wrapped in their flags and their national anthems are played. We turned a festival of shared identity into a competition between separate identities. But the ancient games did exclude women, slaves, non Greeks. And today we have the Paralympics. Women compete at every level. Over 200 countries are in involved. Jesse Owens shattered Hitler's mythology. Athletes protest risking expulsion. The Olympics claims that it transcends politics. But I don't think the evidence shows that at all. They absorb politics. And sometimes that absorption is our worst impulses. Nationalism, corporate greed, propaganda. But sometimes it's our best courage. The ability to overcome the possibility that right rivals can compete without killing each other. So we know how the Olympics started with a temple to Zeus, olive oil, broken bones and blood. And how they were revived by a man with a magnificent moustache and an impossible dream. The question is Whose dream are they serving now? Thank you for watching History Uncensored. Do like and subscribe and drop your favourite history topics in the comments below. I'll see you next time.