Games of Peace and War: The Olympics and International Politics

CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 21/2024

By Antonio Missiroli

16.7.2024

Key issues

• As the 2024 Paris Games begin, there is a need to understand how this multilateral contest is affected by the overall international context, especially in a world that now feels on the cusp of growing disorder and conflict.
• The Olympic Games have always been inherently political. They reflect the strategic landscapes in which they take place and represent rather a continuation than a suspension of international politics.
• The globalisation, professionalisation and privatisation of the Games have also brought more corruption and more politicisation.

Introduction

The Olympic Games have been historically identified with a period of truce in war and a suspension of political, domestic and – especially – international confrontation. At least, this is the myth that has accompanied them over the centuries, although in classical Greece they also provided a multilateral diplomatic platform comparable, in today’s era, to the annual plenary session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. The myth was relaunched at the end of the 19^th century by Baron Pierre De Coubertin, with the great powers of the time as modern heirs to the city-states of antiquity. The hosts of the first games of the contemporary era – from Athens in 1896 to Berlin in 1936 (the 1940 edition had been assigned to Tokyo, but Imperial Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1937 led to its cancellation) – reflected this approach. The Games also alternated between European and American host cities, both large and not so large, while reframing the ideals of amateurism and gentlemanly sportsmanship typical of the aristocratic and upper-class elites of the time – as brilliantly highlighted in the 1981 award-winning movie Chariots of Fire, set during the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Precisely for this reason, the 1936 Games still stand out today as the symbolic and tragic epilogue of that first season: the Kaiser had already obtained the organisation of the Summer Olympics for Berlin in 1912 – for the 1916 edition –, but first the outbreak of the Great War and then Germany’s exclusion from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) until 1928 – due to the “Carthaginian” Versailles peace conditions – had postponed the event. As a result, the first meeting of the organising committee was held in January 1933, a few days before Hitler became Chancellor: the Fuhrer would later turn the 1936 Games into a quintessential display of his totalitarian regime and its ideology, spoiled only by Jesse Owens’ performance, yet immortalised by Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary, Olympia, which won the Mussolini Prize at the Venice Film Festival at the end of August 1939. Just a few hours later, the invasion of Poland by Nazi troops put an end to Rome’s own hope of hosting the 1940 edition originally assigned to Tokyo, in view of which the fascist regime had just built spectacular facilities at the Foro Italico.

All this is to say that the Olympic Games have always been inherently political. They reflect the strategic landscapes in which they take place and represent rather a continuation than a suspension of international politics: at the same time, they are designed – although they sometimes occurred in times of war – to bring humankind together in peace. As the 2024 Paris Games begin, we could therefore benefit from understanding their historical contexts – especially in a world that now feels on the cusp of growing disorder and conflict – and revisiting the extent to which this particular multilateral contest has been affected by the overall multilateral context, has coped with it and, in turn, influenced international relations.

From the end of a war to the end of another (1948-1988)

In 1948, London hosted a very austere edition of the Games – in line with the restrictions of the immediate post-war period – under the banner of reviving the original Olympic flame and spirit. Germany and Japan were not invited, and the USSR had never participated in the Olympics anyway – Tsarist Russia only once, in 1912 – and it did not yet have its own national committee. China, where civil war was raging, nevertheless sent about 30 athletes, while India and Pakistan – newly independent and freshly divided – made their first appearance. So did other newborn states such as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, just “freed” from the former mandate powers Britain and France – a development that would pick up dramatically with the ensuing decolonisation process, in parallel with (and sometimes in anticipation of) the UN itself.

In turn, the subsequent Olympics held in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956) were marked by the full entry of the Cold War and, more generally, international politics into the organisation of the Games. Not only did the Helsinki edition take place while the Korean War was still on, but it also had to handle the request for participation by Moscow and the countries of the new Soviet bloc, now convinced that the Olympic platform could represent a new symbolic battleground with the West. The Finns, who were in a delicate geostrategic position, went as far as contravening the Olympic spirit by hosting the Eastern European delegations in a separate village, to avoid both possible incidents and likely defections. The IOC also tried to settle the dispute between Beijing and Taiwan over Chinese participation, with the result that the nationalists boycotted the Games and the People’s Republic only sent a delegation to the closing ceremony. And while Japan was officially readmitted, Germany was hit by a similar dispute, as the IOC only wanted to welcome a joint delegation: the condition, however, was rejected by the Democratic Republic, and “Germany” was eventually represented only by athletes from the Federal Republic.

The Melbourne Games, in the autumn of 1956, were directly affected by the two major international crises of that year. The Suez crisis, just a couple of weeks before the opening ceremony, led to the withdrawal first of Egypt, then of Iraq and Lebanon. A week later, the popular uprising in Budapest and the repression by Moscow prompted the withdrawal of the Netherlands, Switzerland and Franco’s Spain. But Melbourne was also the occasion for the withdrawal of Beijing – in protest against the presence of Taiwan – first from the Games and then from the IOC itself, as well as for the USSR’s first victory in the overall medal ranking in the history of the Olympics.

The next four editions of the Summer Games were all hosted by countries that made them a symbol and a demonstration for their internal change and new international status. The Rome Games (1960), organised by then Minister of Defence Giulio Andreotti and largely financed by Totocalcio (football bets), projected the Italy of the “miracolo economico” and the “dolce vita” – among classical antiquities, Vespas and Cinquecentos – onto the screens of Eurovision and the American CBS. The Tokyo edition (1964) relayed, for the first time via satellite, the image of an ultra-modern Japan, capable of welcoming over 100 delegations – minus apartheid South Africa, later excluded also from the IOC – and thousands of athletes. Mexico City got the 1968 Games in the same year (1961) in which the country was admitted to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the club of the most industrialised countries. And the Munich Games (1972) showcased a Federal Germany that – 36 years after Berlin 1936 – was not only back as a major economic powerhouse (“wir sind wieder wer”), but had just normalised its relations with both the USSR and the “other” Germany (already independently present at the 1968 Games), with which it had also been admitted to the UN. Even the Seoul edition (1988) marked an important turning point in the liberalisation and democratisation of the Asian country, as an internal tug-of-war within the South Korean regime was eventually resolved – on the very eve (and largely because of) the Games – in favour of the moderates, leading to Roh Tae Woo’s victory in the first free presidential elections the following December.

Yet the 20 years between 1968 and 1988 were also those in which international politics made full inroads into the Games, despite the stubborn opposition of then IOC President Avery Brundage – the only non-European to have ever held the post – to any interference with the alleged Olympic spirit. In Mexico City, it was a violent police crackdown on a student demonstration on the eve of the Games that cast a shadow over the entire event. In Munich, the “Black September” terrorist attack against a group of Israeli athletes right at the heart of the Olympic village brought the Games to a halt – for one day – before the action ended (due to a botched intervention of the German police) with the death of all the hostages and five of the eight members of the Palestinian commando. The Munich tragedy also had repercussions outside the world of sport, first with Mossad’s revenge against the surviving terrorists and their instigators (to which Steven Spielberg devoted his Munich in 2005), then with the redemption of the German counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 when it rescued all hostages of a hijacked Lufthansa flight at Mogadishu airport in 1977.

For their part, the Montreal Games (1976) – which saw the participation of Beijing as China’s official representative for the first time (although “Taipei” was allowed to keep its own Olympic committee) – were boycotted by some 30 African countries, just a few weeks after the violent repression of the Soweto uprising, in protest against the participation of New Zealand (whose exclusion they had demanded), responsible for hosting the South African Springboks rugby team for some friendly matches. The 1980 Moscow edition, in turn, was boycotted by President Carter’s United States (US) and some other western countries (including West Germany but not France, Great Britain or Italy) in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979. And the Los Angeles Games in 1984 – the first edition to be massively funded by private sponsors such as Coca Cola, Mars, IBM and AT&T – was eventually boycotted by Konstantin Chernenko’s USSR and a dozen other countries from the Soviet bloc (including Cuba but not Ceausescu’s Romania) in retaliation for the installation of the so-called “euro-missiles” in Western Europe in 1983. A few months earlier, however, those same countries had not boycotted the Sarajevo Winter Games in what was still the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

This entry of political conflicts into the Olympic world has also been framed by emblematic images being broadcast live, worldwide and, for the first time, in colour. Just take the triumphant arrival under the Arch of Constantine in Rome of Abebe Bikila, the barefoot Ethiopian marathon runner (and the first African gold medallist in the history of the Games) who was a member of the imperial guard of Hailé Selassié, exiled by Fascist Italy in the 1930s; or the black-gloved clenched fist – and bare feet – of the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the Azteca Stadium; or, again in Mexico City, the expression of indignation of the silver medal Czechoslovakian gymnast Vera Çaslavska at the anthem of the country that had invaded her own just a few weeks earlier, putting an end to the Prague Spring; or even the bras d’honneur addressed in 1980 to the Moscow public by the Polish pole vaulter Wladislaw Kozakiewicz after the jump that sealed his victory over the favourite, the Russian Volkov, just a few weeks before the birth of Solidarnòsc.

Professionalisation, globalisation and privatisation

It was only during Juan Antonio Samaranch’s long tenure as IOC president (1981-2001), however, that the Games became what they are today. The first head of the Olympic movement to permanently reside in Lausanne, Samaranch used his diplomatic experience (he had been Spain’s ambassador to Moscow in 1980) and his organisational skills – supported in this by the then president of the international athletics federation (IAAF) Primo Nebiolo – to transform the Olympics into huge, global and increasingly inclusive events, maximising television and merchandising revenues. Through a revision of the Olympic Charter itself, Samaranch also put an end to the unsustainable fiction of amateurism – epitomised by tennis star Steffi Graf’s gold medal in Seoul – and promoted the creation of an ad hoc agency (the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA) and tribunal for the prevention and control of doping in sport.

The first post-Cold War Games, held in “his” Barcelona, are probably the most successful Summer Olympics to date, thanks in part also to the unprecedented cooperation between the central government led by socialist Felipe Gonzalez and the Catalan autonomists (combined with the Basque organisation ETA’s pledge not to interfere), thereby amplifying the soft power of a Spain now fully integrated into both the EU and NATO. Barcelona welcomed almost 10,000 athletes from 169 countries, including the former Soviet Baltic republics, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia (also newly independent, and before the outbreak of the Balkan wars), a reunified Germany, Nelson Mandela’s South Africa and, for the first and only time, a joint delegation from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which included Russia and the other countries of the former USSR and paraded behind the Olympic flag. To highlight the full shift towards professionalism, the US sent to Barcelona the famous “Dream Team” with its NBA champions. Yet the perhaps most memorable moment of this “new world order” of sport was the joint victory lap of the gold and silver medallists in the 10,000 metres, the Ethiopian Derartu Tulu and the (white) South African Elana Meyer – a symbol of redemption and reconciliation even stronger than Aboriginal Cathy Freeman’s victory in the 400 metres in Sydney eight years later.

In Atlanta (1996), all the former Soviet republics participated as independent national teams, and Palestine was also able to make its first appearance, bringing the number of attending delegations to 197. Those Games, however, are still remembered for a second terrorist action, this time by Eric Rudolph, a US citizen already known to the police for attacking abortion clinics and an LGBT nightclub. The three explosive devices detonated at the city’s Centennial Park resulted in a couple of accidental deaths and a hundred wounded but, once again, only led to a brief hiatus in the competitions. Yet eight years later, when the Olympics finally returned to Athens, the threat of Islamist terrorism – which had struck in Madrid just a few months before – led the Greek government to request the assistance of NATO. As a result, the Alliance launched Operation Distinguished Games, deploying a fleet of radar planes – the AWACS – with surveillance and prevention tasks and helping secure permanent naval patrolling at sea, combined with the omnipresence of CCTV cameras. The 2012 London Olympics, too, would be heavily “securitised” – as is to be expected also of Paris 2024.

Part of the legacy of the Samaranch era was also the awarding of the Games to “emerging” countries such as China and Brazil, two of the so-called BRICS. Beijing got the organisation in 2001 – the same year it was admitted to the WTO, and shortly after reintegrating Hong Kong and Macau – and made it a proof of its “peaceful rise” (as the official slogan of the time sounded) from the start, subsequently adding also the Winter Olympics (2022). While the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro would be a much less glittering showcase of the host country’s progress, those in Beijing 2008 impressed the world with their infrastructure and facilities as much as with the performance of Chinese athletes: for the first time since 1936, in fact, the medal ranking in the Summer Games was won by a team other than the US or the USSR (including the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1992), thus putting also a virtual end to the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” in sport. And while Serbia and Montenegro made their first appearance as separate teams, North Korea was allowed to parade alone, having done that jointly with the “other” Korea in the two previous editions.

Rather than the pro-Tibet protests that preceded it or the controversies over air pollution, what risked spoiling the show offered by the new China was the outbreak of the Russian-Georgian war in the Caucasus on the very morning of the opening ceremony, on 8 August 2008 (“08/08/08”). But the tight control exercised by the organisers and the short duration of the conflict – a few days – helped keep the conflict effectively off the Olympic media horizon. Six years later, in February 2014, Vladimir Putin waited until the conclusion of the Winter Games that he had personally promoted in Sochi, on the Black Sea, before launching the special operation that led to the occupation and annexation of nearby Crimea.

Globalisation, professionalisation and privatisation have also brought more corruption – even in the awarding of the Games themselves – and more politicisation, from suspicions of “sportswashing” against authoritarian regimes to the management of ever more frequent doping scandals, including the state-sponsored practices that have recently led to sanctions against Russia and inquiries on China (in the case of its swimmers). A major case in point has been the long controversy over the Russian athletes found positive in Sochi, who were first disqualified, deprived of their medals and excluded from the 2018 Winter Games, and then partially rehabilitated, thus seriously undermining the overall credibility of the system. This has also prompted the US to act unilaterally in denouncing and prosecuting doping practices at the international level through the 2021 Rodchenkov Act – named after the first whistleblower –, which represents in many respects a sports equivalent of the American extraterritorial sanctions of the past decades.

Enter Paris 2024

Today, on the eve of the 33^rd Summer Olympics of the modern era, the IOC has 206 national committees – far more than the UN’ 193 and surpassed only by FIFA with 211 – including Palestine (who is sending two swimmers to the Games), Kosovo and Taipei. Its ninth and current President, Thomas Bach, is the first head of the organisation to have won an Olympic gold medal himself (with the German foil fencing team in Montreal), as is now also Lord Sebastian Coe – who won the 1,500 metres in Moscow and Los Angeles – for the IAAF.

The IOC has also enjoyed “permanent observer” status at the UN since 2009, and since 2015 it also includes an ad hoc committee for refugees: it was created following a UN General Assembly resolution (approved by 180 countries) that called for a “truce” in all ongoing conflicts ahead of the 2016 Games, and it is supported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The refugees committee, which parades behind the Olympic flag, has already sent about ten athletes to Rio and 30 to Tokyo, mainly from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and Venezuela. In Paris, there should be at least 50, a similar number to the contingent of Russians and Belarusians that the IOC has allowed to compete in some disciplines as Individual Neutral Athletes (AIN) on the condition that they demonstrate their “impartiality” in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. At the forthcoming Games in Paris, however, Russia and Ukraine will still be at war – despite the joint call for a freeze of all ongoing conflicts made a few weeks ago by Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping – and Russia and Belarus will be banned from attending them, following a 2022 decision by the IOC in the aftermath of their aggression against Kyiv.

The inclusiveness of 21^st century Olympics, which has also entailed a relentless expansion of the sport disciplines admitted to the Games, has however been quite limited for the so-called “Global South”. Not only did London, Paris and Los Angeles get to organise a third edition each (and Tokyo a second, held one year later due to the COVID pandemic), but the African continent – which encompasses more than a quarter of IOC members – remains the only one among the five rings of the Olympic logo that has never hosted the event.

In this respect, too, the Games have shown how inextricably linked they are to the state of world affairs, as they represent a global arena where great power competition has never abated: it has only been carried out, à la Clausewitz, by other means, and through a unique version of public diplomacy. After Paris, the Olympic flame will move to Los Angeles (2028), followed by Brisbane, Australia (2032): what the world in and around the US or the Indo-Pacific will be like by then is anyone’s guess at this stage – just as in 2016 nobody could predict the outbreak of a global pandemic or, in 2021, the outbreak of war in and around Europe.

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