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Ancient Greek Sacrifice, Nazis and Corruption; A History Of The Olympics

History Uncensored

Thu Feb 12 2026

Summary

History Uncensored – Episode Summary

Ancient Greek Sacrifice, Nazis and Corruption: A History Of The Olympics

Host: Bianca Nobilo/History Uncensored (Wake Up Productions)
Date: February 12, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode unearths the astonishing, complex, and often dark history of the Olympic Games. Host Bianca Nobilo, joined by scholars Nigel Spivey, Dr. Erin Redihan, and Jules Boykoff, guides listeners from the ancient Greek rituals of Olympia—where sport, sacred sacrifice, and war readiness merged—through modern revivals, corruptions, boycotts, and the Games as a battleground for nationalism, racism, propaganda, protest, and profit. The show debunks idyllic myths, exposes paradoxes, and asks: whose dream do the Olympics serve now?

Key Topics & Insights

1. The Brutal, Sacred Beginnings of the Olympics

[00:02–03:37]

The Olympics have never been a pure celebration of peace; from their origin, they have been entangled with power, violence, and identity.
Olympia, in western Peloponnese, began as a sacred sanctuary, not a sports venue. Early Games were linked to funeral rituals honoring fallen heroes—a context of blood, sacrifice, and martial readiness.
The earliest recorded Games date to 776 BC, but this is based on later calculations by Hippias of Elis.

“The Olympics are not a timeless celebration of peace. They were, and always have been, an instrument of power, identity and spectacle.” – Bianca Nobilo [00:02]

Athletic contests described by Homer are precursors; contests at Olympia evolved out of these earlier rites.

2. Athletic Competition as Sacred Duty

Guest: Nigel Spivey, Cambridge lecturer and author, former hammer throw champion
[03:37–22:31]

Games grew from cult practice; the sacred and athletic aspects were inseparable.
- “You could never kind of separate the sacred from everything else that was happening in the athletic arena.” – Nigel Spivey [04:35]
Olympia was chosen partly for its unique, “numinous” weather (humid, thundery—befitting Zeus), and its accessibility to Greek colonies.
Rituals: Five-day festivals climaxed in large-scale animal sacrifices—both nausiating and rare festive occasions for meat consumption.
Athletes swore oaths before Zeus to uphold fair play; cheaters faced public shaming and funded statues that warned against corruption.

“Before that happens, you’ve got to have various rituals…athletes, in the presence of priests and a deity, basically undertake to obey the rules of the festival.” – Spivey [09:17]

The program shifted over centuries. Events included running (the “sprint” was the main event), chariot racing, throwing disciplines, and “the race in armour” (military training in sport form).

“One rationale for having a festival…keeping citizens…fit for war…they did need to be in a state of physical readiness.” – Spivey [13:19]

3. Violence, Mortality, and the Cult of Heroes

[14:07–18:04]

Violence was inherent: deaths recorded in boxing and pankration. Gloves were “knuckle-dusters,” fatalities occurred, but killing wasn't the intent; combat was “channeling aggression” into a controlled outlet.
The posthumous victory myth epitomizes the hero cult—winners received veneration and sometimes became objects of worship, but could also turn violent.

“These victors, they’re heroes, but they’re also homicidal maniacs in some instances.” – Spivey [17:14]

Victors gained radical social elevation—free meals for life, status, poems, and material rewards from hometowns (not directly from festival). Their success symbolized the city’s martial prowess.

4. Social Life, Spectacle, Nudity, and Corruption

[22:31–27:10]

The Games were crowded and rustic; like “Glastonbury on a hot day.” Only later, under Romans, did facilities improve.
Participation and even viewing were heavily gender-restricted. Nudity in competition symbolized transparency and absence of weapons.
- “Gymnasium literally means you don’t have any clothes on, you are totally vulnerable.” – Spivey [24:35]
Corruption (bribery, match-fixing) existed—the “Statues of Shame” lined athlete walkways, publicly denouncing cheaters.

“Athletes who were caught cheating…were forced to basically pay for one of these statues and their record…the shame of the cheating is made public.” – Spivey [27:18]

5. Suppression, Rediscovery, Reinvention

[29:22–36:51]

Theodosius I’s Christianization of Rome ended the pagan Games (4th c. CE). Earthquakes and rivers buried ancient Olympia.
Modern Olympics began with Pierre de Coubertin’s revival in 1896 (Athens), inspired by English sports culture and archaeological rediscovery of Greece.
- Coubertin valued amateurism and idealistic notions of “struggle over triumph,” but excluded women and held racist, classist views.

6. Nazis, Propaganda, and Political Appropriation

[36:51–37:35]

1936 Berlin Games: Nazi Germany orchestrated the Games as propaganda, pioneered the torch relay, and tried to claim heirship to Greek civilization.
Jesse Owens’s triumph exposed and shattered Hitler’s Aryan supremacy narrative.

“[Owens’] victories transcended winning races. They shattered the myth that Hitler was selling the world.” — Nobilo [36:51]

7. The Olympics in the Modern World: Power, Protest, and Profit

Guest: Dr. Jules Boykoff, political scientist and Olympic scholar
[37:35–57:16]

The “apolitical” Olympics are a myth—politics has always underpinned the Games, from exclusion of women and workers, to nationalist spectacle.
- “Basically anybody who tells you that the Olympics aren’t political deserve your healthy skepticism.” – Boykoff [39:14]
Parades of nations, flag-waving, and national anthems are inherently political, inflaming nationalism.
Athletes have historically been suppressed when attempting protest (e.g., Smith & Carlos, 1968).
- “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.” – Boykoff [44:48]
Key turning points:
- 1976 Montreal: Financial disaster; citizen resistance (Denver) blocks Olympics.
- 1984 Los Angeles: Corporate sponsorship and TV rights become dominant; most Olympic revenue now comes from these sources.
Olympics as “trickle-up economics”—benefits accrue largely to elites: construction barons, politicians, select athletes; many athletes and locals get little or nothing.

“The Olympics have become a sporting and Olympic spectacle through and through... It is a social relationship that is mediated by images.” — Boykoff [51:49]

Endemic problems: over-spending, militarization of public space, displacement of residents, environmental “greenwashing.”

8. Decoding the Olympic Spectacle

[55:34–57:16]

Boykoff encourages viewers to watch with a critical eye: analyze opening ceremonies for national messaging, scrutinize who benefits (and who loses), and see the Games as reflections of economics, politics, and inequality.

“The opening ceremony…is a chance for a country to really put its best foot forward. And you can learn a lot about the spectacle…” — Boykoff [55:58]

9. The Cold War and Olympic Rivalry

Guest: Dr. Erin Redihan, Soviet sport historian
[60:19–72:09]

Olympics serve as a “safe space” to play out geopolitical tensions (e.g., Hungary, 1956; US–USSR boycotts, 1980/1984). The medal table becomes a substitute for outright conflict.
Television globalized the Games—by 1960s, a billion people were watching, increasing pressure and propaganda value.
For athletes, effects were mixed: some felt acute patriotic or political pressure, but most tensions played out via governments and media, not interpersonal rivalry.
Performance enhancement and doping were widespread; both sides lagged on enforcement, with Cold War secrecy feeding the problem.
Major boycotts: 1980 Moscow (US & allies), 1984 LA (Soviet bloc but not Romania); these are pivotal to understanding Cold War dynamics.
Despite division, the Games could unify athletes even as governments and media sowed division.

“Something like the Olympics is really great that it draws people together, it gives you something to focus on that’s not politics.” – Redihan [71:04]

Notable Quotes & Moments

“These victors, they’re heroes, but they’re also homicidal maniacs…” – Nigel Spivey [17:14]
“Anybody who tells you the Olympics aren’t political deserve your healthy skepticism.” – Jules Boykoff [39:14]
“Sport is politics by other means.” – Jules Boykoff [41:02]
“Every single Olympics…since 1960 for which there is reliable data, has gone over budget.” – Boykoff [53:10]
(On the paradox) “We turned a festival of shared identity into a competition between separate identities.” – Bianca Nobilo [72:45]

Timeline of Key Segments

00:02 – 03:37: The mythic and ritual origins of the Olympics
03:37 – 22:31: Sacred rituals, events, role of violence, prizes, corruption in ancient Olympics (w/ Nigel Spivey)
29:22 – 36:51: Collapse of pagan Games, Coubertin’s revival, the rise of modern nationalism
36:51 – 41:02: The Olympics as political theater; Nazi Berlin, Jesse Owens’ triumph
41:02 – 57:16: Politics, protest, power and profit in the modern Games (w/ Boykoff)
60:19 – 72:09: The Cold War’s influence, boycotts, athletes’ experience, unity/division (w/ Erin Redihan)
72:45–end: Paradoxical legacy and concluding thoughts

Concluding Thoughts

The Olympics—then and now—fuse spectacle, sacred ritual, violence, politics, and identity. The “peaceful” veneer masks a history of exclusion, propaganda, and corruption—yet the Games also spark moments of courage, unity, and defiance against oppression. As Bianca Nobilo asks: “Whose dream are they serving now?” The answer is unsettled—and watching the spectacle, we are invited to decode the deeper story.

Further Listening & Reading

Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics
Jules Boykoff, Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics
Dr. Erin Redihan, research on Soviet sport and the Olympics

Loading summary...

Transcript

A (0:02)

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?

B (0:16)

These victors, they're heroes, but they're also homicidal maniacs in some instances.

A (0:21)

Why does physical supremacy matter so much?

C (0:24)

Do we have a population that's fit enough to go to war?

D (0:28)

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.

A (0:41)

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.

B (4:59)

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.

B (18:19)

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.

B (23:37)

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.

A (29:22)

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.

D (49:27)

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.

D (51:49)

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.

A (57:16)

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?

C (63:54)

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.

C (67:03)

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.