From inviting a country actively prosecuting a genocide to the huge profit-drive of Olympics gentrification, Somhairle Mag Uidhir looks at the Olympics from a more critical perspective, arguing that sports should be celebrated and enjoyed on a liberatory basis, not a corporate or imperial one.
A busy Parisian bar. The opening ceremony on a big TV shows team boats floating along the mayor-approved Seine. Patrons chatter. The Israeli boat appears on screen. The chatter turns to boos, at much higher decibels.
Only 15 Palestinians will compete in this year’s games: by one estimate, Israel has killed over 300 professional Palestinian athletes since October. FIFA postponed its decision on whether Israel would be allowed to feature in the soccer until after the tournament, while the IOC celebrates Israeli participation. A far cry from the staunch sanctioning of Russia following Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
The jeering of the Israeli delegation exemplifies two of the primary themes of these games. Firstly, aside from elite fawning, popular sentiment for Paris 2024 in the French capital has been decidedly tepid – protesting the games is what has exercised people most. Secondly, how the Olympics from the earliest of days have been geopolitical events, at the service of imperial powers and the ruling establishments of host countries.
Paris Revolts
“This is France!” Emmanuel Macron tweets during the opening ceremony. In many ways, the ceremony was very French, from a reimagining of Da Vinci with drag queen DJs, to the shout out for the legendary Paris Communard Louise Michel. It’s unlikely that is what Macron was referring to, however.
The embattled President clings to power after a series of disastrous elections, and he connives to retain it and keep the Left out at all costs. These games were intended to reinvigorate his besieged project and cement his legacy. In many ways, they embody it.
An historic number of security forces deployed, 20,000 of whom are undercover. The industrial clearing of unhoused people from Parisian streets. The lockdown of Parisien districts. The unprecedented hikes in public transport fares as European summers see carbon-induced record heat waves. And the righteous rage at the mass murder of Palestinians enabled by a great and good that will try to use the games to wash the bloodstains from the international community.
All of this and more has been met by mass protests in Paris in recent weeks. Workers in the hospitality industry are threatening strikes. As are transport workers. The polarisation in French society so clearly exposed in the elections will not be “healed”, no matter how many vacuous tweets Macron sends out.
Paris is Burning
Since the Cold War, the geopolitical edge to the Olympics arguably receded. No doubt, the rush for medals between the US and China in recent years was indicative of their wider imperial competition. But with war in Europe and genocide in Palestine the direct propaganda function of the games rises to the fore.
It was their imperial value which ensured the Olympics actually came to dominate the international calendar. Early games weren’t very well organised. From the 1920s, major nations hosted them with explicit political agendas, and that inter-imperial competition led to a consistency in the running and the standard of the competition.
In 1936, Hitler was in power and Berlin was the host. This led to boycott calls from sizable anti-fascist forces globally. It was very obvious how Hitler would use the games, and the racism and fascism at the centre of those Olympics is well documented.
Less spoken about is the role the Nazis played attacking trans and intersex rights in the run up to ‘36. Those familiar with queer history will know in Weimar Germany could be found the most progressive LGBTQ+ laws and culture in Europe at the time, and how fascism undertook to destroy this. As Michael Water details in a new book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, the Nazi instituted the first cases of sex testing, as well as unleashing wider propaganda against gender queerness.
Berlin 1936 was a key moment in German fascism’s offensive on the queer community. Many of today’s ‘culture war’ attack points were pioneered by the Nazis in this period. It would be well for us to rediscover this history as far-right agitators and mainstream conservatives the world over seek to use sports as a wedge issue to stoke moral panics about the trans community.
Olympic level Profit-Making
“The summer Olympics are held every four years because that’s how long it takes them to count the money.”
The sports journalist Dave Zirin attributes this quote to John Carlos, the legendary Black athlete who raised a fist on the winners’ podium in 1968 in solidarity with the Black Power movement.
The IOC has perfected the art of making a profit from sports. Wall-to-wall sponsorship, ultra-strict copyright regulations and gargantuan media rights deals are all synonymous withthe Olympics. Most lucrative of all, however, is the plundering of host countries. The costs are extortionate, and much like hosting a World Cup of European Championships, the legacy left is one of massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. As Zirin explains:
“Countries accrue debt coming out of the Olympics, but that burden tends to fall on the backs of the poor, not the wealthy. You have displacement, but that displacement actually can serve to gentrify cities. Olympic infrastructure tends to be put in working class areas, because rich people would never tolerate that disruption in their lives. Afterwards, those areas become developed and people get pushed aside. And then with Rio there’s something particularly pernicious and that’s the return of Olympic golf. Golf needs land. The IMF and World Bank have long told countries in the developing world that they should have golf resorts, because it’s a way to bring in foreign tourists and currency. So that’s another part of the Olympics. You create this tourist mecca that reimagines what work is for working-class people. It’s not industry, and it’s not union work. It’s service work. The jobs the Olympics create, after the construction, are almost entirely service work. It tends to be low pay and flexible. These are the hallmarks of neoliberal economies. These countries are trying to drastically reorganize their economies. Usually they need a war or a hurricane to do that, but those are risky and difficult to plan. The Olympic Games—that’s something you can plan for.”
These dynamics are very much alive in Paris 2024. And host populations increasingly realise this. Backlash has led to the number of countries applying to host games falling dramatically, so much so that for the first time the IOC were compelled to do a double-award from the bidders for 2024: Paris this year and Los Angeles in 2028. Ultimately having these international tournaments in your country is a very good deal for a small number of people, and can be a very bad deal for the wider population.
Another vision?
There is of course a great tragedy at play here. Sports, at their best, are examples of human creativity and flourishing. They are mass participatory events, celebrating leisure, recreation and the social underpinning of personal development.
It should be a source of enormous joy to watch Simone Biles perform genuine gymnastic wonders. It is hard to match the collective euphoria felt by people from countries who don’t have the wealth to pour huge resources into Olympic programs, watching on as their athlete beats the odds and wins a rare medal. Those people become heroes.
Think of the Armagh fans this weekend, or the Clare supporters last weekend. Their celebrations will forever be wonderful sights to behold. And the day after their wins, the players will return to the clubs and communities that helped turn them into the fantastic sportspeople they are. Whatever the contradictions at play in today’s GAA, there’s a social connection of rare value there, one we need to defend.
One of the reasons that imperial states coalesced around the Olympics when they did was that there existed, at the time, alternative models for international sporting games. As David Goldblatt writes:
“The workers’ sports movement, which had four million members across North America and Europe, was created by social democratic parties and trade unions and offered an inclusive model of sport, favouring participation over excellence and rejecting the rising tide of nationalism that accompanied Olympic sport. In 1925 it staged the first Workers’ Summer Olympiad in Frankfurt, attracting a hundred thousand participants, accommodated in comrades’ houses and festival-style camping grounds. In 1931 Vienna hosted. At the opening ceremony tens of thousands of socialist youths hauled down a giant tower representing Capital.”
The issue at question isn’t to remove politics from sport. That only reaffirms the status-quo by letting their politics in through the back door. Instead, the job is to struggle for sports to be defined by the right kind of politics, liberatory politics.
Sports which stand with the oppressed. Sports which value mass participation, amateurism and human flourishing over the demands of carnivorous shareholders. Sports rescued from the yoke of capitalist profit-making, and returned to the people, whatever their origin, colour, gender or wealth. Games where perpetrators of genocide are immediately banned, and booing them is the most celebrated of disciplines.
