Also media.
Oh oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where, unbeknownst up to this moment to everyone who has been listening for years, Matt Leeb and I live in a house that is essentially an exact replica of Burton Ernie's home in Sesame Street, and we're just we're in bed. We're getting relaxing from a long day of watching terrible things on the internet. Matt, are you are you tired? Are you bummed out?
All the time? Every day is a new fresh crop of horrors, which is why you know, I like to go home to our special Burton Ernie house that we live in together. And so we do it.
You do it, We do. That was really tough on your wife, but you know, I think it was the right decision we made.
Yeah, I mean, she hates it, but also you know, like it was pretty clear in the green up that I would continue to be living with Robert Evan in our Burton any compounds shocking explanation.
Unbelievably, the rent on Sesame Street is a nightmare.
It's insane. There's just a lot of gentrification. Now you know we are the gentrification. Yeah, well sure, but I mean when we first decided to move in there, you know, it was like it was a nice, you know, neighborhood. It had a lot of culture, you know, right, and now there's just a lot of oscar the grouches.
Yeah, just say that.
You know, they're in that trash can and I'm like, wow, maybe uh, try doing less fentanyl.
You know, speaking of fentanyl, you know the emotional equivalent of fentanyl, Matt is when you accidentally, without trying to have three straight weeks or like six straight weeks of stories about pedophiles on Behind the Bastards. I didn't mean to write when I started with the Margaret episodes that we were doing talking about those German pedophiles. I didn't
realize that the next like several weeks just happened. I mean, when I started researching the Thomas Jefferson episodes, I should have realized, like, oh no, I'm just doing another pedophile I got. I got locked into a bad pedophile loop, is what I'm saying. Man, happens to the best of us. You know, you're best of us.
You're trying to do your regular podcast schedule and it's just pedophile Pedophileoh you finally went outside.
You got fresh air. Oh yeah, yeah, I went off roading on a mountain and I came back and spent an entire week reading about the Olympics. And I'm I am proud to say, Matt, no babies die in this episode except for like offscreen, and uh no pedophilia in these episodes. You know, we're safe. We're safe. I'm so excited. Here's a round of applause.
No, that was laughter.
Fun.
Now the point is, I have a soundboard, but I have not figured out exactly which sound does what. So it's going to be a test. We'll see.
Okay, okay, a lot of tests this week. Well that's good. I just want to promise everyone before the cold Open closes, we got a fun one this week. Soay we come back. We're going to start talking about every Brandage, who was the American who kind of ran the Olympics in the United States and eventually he's going to be on the IOC and he's going to run the Olympics for everybody. And he is just a Nazi, just a real good old fashioned American Nazi. I know now I understand why
I got the call. Yeah, we're gonna have fun with this one. Anyway. That's the cold open, ah, and we're warm Matt before we roll into this episode, you got any pluggables to plug? Yeah, that's right, I waited for after the cold open guys, what Yeah.
I mean I do have some pluggables. I actually started a new podcast, and this podcast is about Israeli propaganda. It's called Bad has Bara, the World's Most Moral Podcast, as Bara of course being the word for explaining, which is kind of a euphemism in Hebrew in Israel for
you know, pr propaganda. Yeah, and so yeah, I started that podcast a few months ago and just yeah, if anyone out there is looking for sort of you know, information about what's going on in the news regarding all this Israel Palestine stuff, yeah, that's what I've been That's
what I've been doing. I've been doing it from an anti Zionist Jewish bent, so that people can, you know, more fully understand what they are seeing and hearing with their eyes and why people are telling them not to believe what they see and hear with their eyes and ears.
Well, it's fun. That does kind of fit in with our subject of today's episode, because as is going on right now in Gaza. We are talking about a time when a bunch of horrible stuff was being done by the government of a country and a lot of other countries. Everyone just kind of tried to pretend it wasn't because it was really inconvenient to deal.
With the problem.
You know, in this case, the country's Germany. Oh yes, yeah, So we're going to get to that, but first we kind of need to start this episode. We really have to peel back a couple of thousand years here, because it's worth talking about what the Olympics was.
Uh, and we had.
To start from thousands of years ago? Yeah, we do.
God damn all right, when was the first Oh that's right, the Olympics is a thing.
It's gotten back in the Yeah. No, further than that, this is the ancient Greeks, right, yeah, different, Yeah, yeah, they are, they're much older.
Once upon a time, Once.
Upon a time, there were these guys called the ancient Greeks, and you know, they invented Western philosophy, and they invented some chunk of mathematics. I don't know which part of mathematics, but I remember learning that some of math was invented by the ancient Greeks. Sure, and they made a lot of art that said, well, they did a lot of great stuff. They spent the bulk of their time murdering each other in really terrible ways. The ancient Greeks loved
killing each other. But in the late seven hundreds BC, the ancient Greeks decided, let's do something besides killing each other and philosophy, Let's do sports. Now that it's right in between, it's a mix, right, like, everyone fights, okay, but we're not going to kill at the end, We're just gonna you know, you're not.
Going to give war.
Yeah, So this is not a new Sports was not a new concept in the seven hundreds BC. People had been sportsing for basically as long as we've had cities, at least in some fashion or another. Nice but the idea that became the Olympics was new, which is that all of these cities that are periodically, you know, at war, in conflict with each other regularly, we're all going to come together and everybody's going to compete without murdering each other. Right. That is kind of but that's a novel idea at
the time. The first Olympics. You know, I think the dates there's always a little bit of flex in dates this far back, but it was probably around seven twenty six PC, and it was initially not a great show. It's just a single two hundred meter race, which given that ever people are like, you know, if you're traveling, if you're walking five days to get to another city, you could.
Die on that walk.
Right, you watch a guy run two hundred meters.
I lost three children on my way to watch people sprint for a.
While, my family died, But boy, that guy was slightly faster than anyone I'd ever seen before.
Yeah, I mean it's sad, But also I won five hundred dollars with draft Kings.
With draft that's right. DraftKings first started in seven to seventy six PC. Yeah, so everyone seems to agree. I have agreed that like doing a whole Olympics for one little race was kind of bullshit and not worth the trouble,
so they started adding games pretty quickly. Now, running is always going to be a staple, as it is today, But the Greeks were like modern humans and that once they figured out the idea of big international sporting events, they all kind of solidified that the best thing to gather to watch other people do was beat the shit out of each other. Yeah, and fighting.
Yeah, I mean that's so sad because they're probably trying to get away from that. Can can you do something like, you know, sportsmanship, like the.
Thist thing from war Running?
Yeah, listen, there's got to be blood or else want here. These people going to risk thealize of their kids to walk all the way over here. Yeah.
I literally can't even get hard without watching a guy die anymore. Like what are we doing?
So?
Wrestling was added in at the eighteenth Olympiad and seven o eight BC. Boxing entered for the twenty third Olympiad and six eighty eight BC, and then puncreation was added in the thirty third Olympiad.
You're gonna have to explain that one.
It's basically, yeah, it's ancient MMA. It's like the first kind of MMA, right, Like it's like a proto MMA style competition, right. OK, So this is this is what eventually leads to the invention of Joe Rogan.
Yeah.
Yeah, as we all know, is an undying immortal figure. Uh yeah, he's and that's right, that's right. He's essentially the Emperor from Warhammer forty thousands. But he really really just focused on fighting sports and male So the ancient Olympics had a pretty good run. They're doing this for like not far off from a thousand years something like that, a little over because they finally died. Yeah, it goes like seven seventy six to three hundred and ninety three
a d thereabouts. Again, these are kind of soft dates on the last of the Ancient Olympics is too, But the end of the old Olympics is generally blamed on Emperor Theodosius the First, who has said to he's a you know, he's one of these big Christian Roman emperors, and he said to have considered it pagan idolatry. I think that more rigorous scholarship has cast a lot of doubt on this because he doesn't seem to have actually
banned them explicitly. But whatever the truth, whatever specifically kind of leads to the fall of the Olympics, they do stop doing them right by the time. Yeah, it's a well, I don't know, I don't actually like the Olympics.
So yeah, I mean, listen, I don't know whether or not the Olympics is good. I just success that there was like the first nerd emperor who's like, oh, no sports ball please.
Maybe he may have just it may have just been that he was banning other pagan shit, but like that stuff was less popular than the Olympics, and so people kind of lied about it. I don't know. I'm not an Emperor Theodosius the first expert. I just know people have cast doubt on the fact that the idea that he killed the Olympics. Sure, we'll never know, probably at any rate, by the time the Roman Empire, the Western
Roman Empire falls, we're not doing olympicses anymore. They are a fading memory, and they would stay that way until a french man with a ridiculous mustache was born in eighteen sixty three. I'm gonna ask Sophie to get us a picture of that man's mustache up on the old
screen here. Yeah, but his name was Pierre de Kubartine, and he became French, by which I mean he was born at a terrible time to be French, because when he's seven or so, born in like eighteen sixty three, so he is seven or eight when the Emperor Napoleon the third decides, you know who I want to start a fight with Prussia and.
It's yeah, he's my favorite guy. He just he just went in there and was like, I'm gonna be like my great uncle. What was he?
He was like a nephew. It was like a great uncle. We've done the episodes on I forget the act, so it's kind of a tortured.
Yeah, but he's like, I'm going to do it but more shitty and gonna.
Be really bad at it instead of instead of beating the Prussians at a war, I'm gonna lose so badly that they create Germany. But look at this guy's mustache. My god, what a That's a one thing you can't critique the man on is his facial hair.
He looks great.
Yeah, he looks like he looks like he's just railed a triple. It's incredible stuff.
I love it. Oh my god, this guy.
Every pick click, it just gets better.
He this man, this man couldn't. It's it's what I know. He actually did live out like past the eighteen hundreds, but he shouldn't have Like that is an eighteen nineties face. He's perfect for the eighteen nineties. Pierre's family were aristocrats, and he was their fourth child. His dad and again they're aristocrats, so his dad doesn't have to do anything for a living, so he's like a painter and he's
a Royalist. He believes in bringing I think it might have been the Bourbon's back as kings, and his childhood suffered from the fact that the whole royalist cause in France kind of takes a shit after eighteen seventy one, which seems to have made his dad miserable, and his dad seems to have kind of taken it out on the family. Unlike a lot of European aristocrats, to Cubbartine is going to grow up profoundly anti war. He is actually never kind of not unique in this period, but
it's kind of refreshing, really rare. He's never one of these guys who's like, ah, the gallantry of combat, because it's earliest memories are like, we got our asses kicked. We should never have a war again.
Yeah, yeah, we're not good at it anymore.
We had one Napoleon and everything's got a shit since him.
We had Bourbons, we had the dukedoor leone guy became the thing like we can't do any of this.
Shit, Yeah, let's stop. So he's a great student, he goes to Jesuit school, which is like those that's the if you're like at all Catholicy, that's where you want to go back in this period, but he refuses to follow his father's wishes because his dad wants him to join the military, which again had been kind of the expected thing for folks in his chunk of the aristocracy.
By the time he's a young adult, de Coubartine has decided he wants to study law and history, and he seems to have kind of thoroughly concluded that like my father's France failed, right, like the culture in which I was raised in is a failure, and we need to make changes, which he's not wrong about. At age twenty,
he encounters a book called Tom Brown's School Days. This is a really influential, maybe the most influential piece of fiction and educational history, because it both because of how popular it is, like the English boarding school system had existed before, because this book is literally about it, and in fact it's like fictionalizing an actual English like basically principal Tom Arnold, who was like Arnold, Yes, yes, that
Tom Arnold. He has deep roots. Deep roots has also been around for a while yes, yeah, and was Yes, this was the thing he did before he wasn't what was it, coneheads? He was in the stupids, the stupids,
the stupids, Jesus Christ. So this is one of the most influential pieces of fiction and educational history because not only does it like create the cultural image of the English boarding school system as this incredibly like renowned and like it's part of why people from all over the rest of the world start enrolling like rich people in English boarding schools. Right, is the success of this book and it also launches the genre of boarding school novel
as like a thing. So this is literally like there, this is like the start of the DNA line that ends in Harry Potter is Tom brown schooldays, Right, these are directly related, Like we get Harry Potter because of Tom Brown School Days.
It's like the.
First ya novel. Yeah, I love this, Yeah, I mean it has a lot to do with that. Yeah, Tom Brown school Days focused on the Rugby School, which is again run by Tom Arnold. In one later article on the subject, a guy named Volker Cluges rights. Arnold sought to educate his students by including sports and community games for Christian gentlemen. I was confronted with something completely new and unexpected, athletic education. Kubertine wrote, Now, Arnold actually didn't
like sports. He's one of those guys where he's like, I don't actually, I think this is kind of like at a little common for me. But if you don't give boys away to tire themselves out, they'll masturbate. So this is the best option.
That it's always someone trying to stop you from coming as a team. Well, yeah, the fuck.
The entire route of like Victorian civilization is stopping boys from coming. That's all that we stop this. In an article for The Daily Beast, Candida Moss rights Arnold believed that in order to create Christian gentlemen, he had to replace bad impulses with good. Arnold himself wasn't a particular fan of sports, but he preferred it to fighting or poaching. If you exhaust young men and produce and promote the idea of sportsmanship, you will keep them out of trouble.
So Coopertine, he takes on this and he's going to take it further. Right, But this idea that like sporting, kills bad impulses in young men, right, and he's not as obsessed with coming as he is with violence, right, but he's going to become increasingly convinced that, like somewhere in sporting lies the solution to like all of these wars that keep happening.
Yeah, I kind of feel that there's there's something to that there where you're just like, what if, like instead of you know, everyone just like killing a bunch of people every few years, Like, what if we all just fucking had a magic the Gathering tournament and figure it out? Yeah, you know, I get it.
Yeah, I've I've seen some like not quite sports riots, but I've seen some like really rowdy fights over sports in Germany between like German and French fans. And I thought at time was like, well, this is a real move up from World War One, Right, this is so much better than the last time you guys got angry at each other.
No one's getting gassed, you know, everyone is just kind of like using a couple of teeth.
What an innovation.
Yeah.
Cooper teen spent the eighteen eighties traveling around the world through the US and UK and Switzerland and meeting all sorts of advocates for youth sports and sporting organ associations.
Particularly influential was a meeting with the Peace League, and this is an activist group who taught that boxing was a great way to like prevent war, right like if you if and I guess partly, yeah, I get that, like giving people a healthy outlet for physical aggression could be useful in that, but also there's a lot of head injuries that come with boxing, and we know that head injuries, yeah, can contribute directly to war.
Yeah, listen, this is it's a there's a pros and cons to this idea. But I get it.
I get it.
You know, you know you can see the logic stop war. You know they were ultimately wrong, yes, but I get trying it out for a little bit.
It's not like, yeah it is. It's one of those things I both want to make some bit jokes because of how like wrong this guy is, but also I can see the logic like at the time, you can't, he's not. It's it's not dumb or like a shitty for like wanting this to work. I also wish it had worked.
It's better logic than you know, Oh, this will stop you know, kids from coming. Yeah, that's that of course is not going to bed. Well, I don't even know what their thought process is because I've never been too tired to janet.
No, no, no, no young man ever has been, No young man has ever been.
We all always have a little extra room for jell O, you know what I mean.
Yeah, And it's it's also like he's got better logic than the guys who are like, well, we've built the least gun ever, surely this will stop war.
Yeah. No one's gonna want to get in front of one of these guys. So war's over.
Yeah. No one's going to feed an entire generation of their young men into these things.
We built a giant human meat grinder. Anyways, war is over now, right, pulling more men into it all cruel fate.
So Cooper teen wrote that boxing could be a peacemaker and still you know again, this, this whole process is what culminates in him being inspired to revive the Olympics. Right, he revives the Olympics because he has this messianic belief in the power of sports to end global conflict. And I think he's mostly when he talks about ending war, he's not talking about ending all these little colonial wars.
He's primarily talking about like avoiding another European war, right, yeah, right, right, right.
Right, yeah, the war that's that will cost more lives for you know, his own people. Where's the nice colonial war? Is just like no, that's just a simple eradication. Yeah, we don't even hear about that on the news, really exactly, that's not even people don't worry about that. Shaw, you kill all them.
So, as Da Kobertine wrote, let us export rowers, runners and fencers. There is the free trade of the future, and on the day when it is introduced within the walls of old Europe, the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay. Sure, it's a nice idea. Yeah. Eventually he convenes a Congress eighteen and obviously I am YadA YadA ing a lot about this process because we
don't need to get into the weeds of it. But they have a Congress in eighteen ninety three to decide, like he and a bunch of other folks who are part of like major sporting organizations in the West, how are we going to revive the Olympic Games?
Right?
It is decided that these games should be for amateur athletes only, not paid professionals. This is the first of what are going to become mini breaks with the original Olympics. In the ancient Greek Olympics, there was no rule against them making money for winning, right, you could bet on ship like. They didn't have any problem with that. There's also, as far as we know, there were no rules against doping. Now,
doping was different in ancient Greece. We know that they would like eat a lot of beef because they thought it was like it worn't the way steroids.
You know, if you eat a lot of beef, then you become strong as how everyone knows it's simple.
Yeah, beef makes you cowstraw.
Yeah, if you eat whole horse, you become run as fast as horse. It's simple logic. Everyone knows you could fly real hard. Everybody knows this.
Now. The other thing I should notice that, like at the start of the revived Olympics, there are no rules against doping, and in fact, people are going to do lots of drugs in the early Olympics and it's fine. Yeah, I'm okay with that.
Early Olympics. Yeah, you know, that's they they were figuring it out.
It's considered it actually may have been less common then just because it was considered ungentlemanly, but it wasn't like forbidden for a while, right, And so a lot of times people wouldn't do dope just because it wouldn't dope just because like, well I am a gentleman, you know.
Yeah.
Anyway, there's a lot of confusion in trying to understand what the Olympics were meant to be when they were revived, in the use of the word amateur, because like if I were, say it were to say, oh, that golf player is a real amateur, you would interpret that to mean, well, he's not very good, right, yeah, you would not. An average person would never look at a world class Olympic gymnast and go, wow, what an amateur? Right, Like, that's
just not how we use that word. Yes, but in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, that word had a very different meaning. And I want to quote from an article for Vice by la Jennings here. Sports in the nineteenth century remained a luxury of the middle and upper classes, with lower class athletes routinely excluded from participation.
The rules for the eighteen seventy eight Henley Regatta declared no person shall be considered an amateur orsman or sculler who is or has been by trader employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan, or aborer. Sports historian Alan Gutman explains that in its earliest institution, rules of amateurism were invented by the Victorian middle and upper classes to exclude the lower orders from the play of the leisure class.
Yeah, that's that sounds about right though. That's yeah, that's kind of what it is. I mean. Listen, yeah, whenever people talk about, you know, NCAA basketball players like trying to get a little bit of money for their the fact that these schools use their images and sell merch based on them, but they can't make a single dime, it does feel very similar. It's like, no, we've put these rules in place so that you stay poor, yeah, and we can make some money.
Yeah. Yeah, And that is we are talking about the origins of why the NCAA be that way, right, Like that all has its roots in this and in fact, the bastard for the avery brundage is the guy who is like has a major role and why the NCAA
adopts those like student athlete regulations. Yeah, but it's important to know that like kind of where we are now with like these student athletes, and it's like, well, you know, we can make millions of dollars off of you, and you can mortgage your body and your future health, but you can't make any money off of it because then
you wouldn't be an amateur. That has its origins, and like the origins of that are these rich people being like, well, poor people like sports too, and they're often better at them than us. So let's just say, if you make money doing anything, you can't compete with us. If you have to work for a living, you can't. You can't play our games. These are just for amateurs.
That is exactly why it was an invented. Absolutely were just like, man, these guys are way too good at rowing.
Yeah, exactly. And to be fair, Kopertine and the Olympics are actually a step forward from this very regressive. It's still regressive by modern standards, but from these you know that eighteen seventy eight, we like, yeah, nobody can take part in this if you have to work for a living. Right.
Quote when Peer de Kubertine called for the revival of the Olympic Games in eighteen ninety two, primary discussion amongst the elite group of educators and public figures who formed the first version of the Olympic Committee was to determine who would be allowed to compete in the games. In other words, who counts as an amateur, because this word is still very important to them, but they are going to kind of redefine it.
Right.
Initially it had meant like, well, only rich people can have the time to become world class athletes because they don't have to, like work for a living. And it's
going to evolve through this period. In eighteen ninety four, the workers rights movement has made enough inroads that even the kind of out of touch elites that Da kuber Teen works with to start the Olympics, they're not going to say if you have to work for wages, you can't compete, right, But they are going to try and exclude working class people anyway by basically saying you just can't make money from sports, right, which still excludes people
because only rich people can afford to like practice enough to become world class without ever making money on it. Right, it still mostly excludes people. I mean, I don't know, I mean I guess it's like someone if they run for a living because they have a job as you know, a circus performer running away from this crazy, crazed lion. But like, for the most part, it's like, yeah, no one's playing basketball on any other level except for right
professionally for money. Yeah, and there is there's also a degree of a legitimate concern, which is that these guys, as much as they hate to admit it, recognize that, like pro boxers are always going to be better like and most pro boxers are like poor people who came up fighting like the nastiest kind of fights you can fucking conceive, right, yea to be able to become like make a lot of money as a boxer, that guy, some like rich dude is like the fourteenth Earl of
chong Seberry or whatever. That guy is going to get his skull turned into powder by eighteen nineties. Mike Tyson, Right, we.
Must ben anyone who does it professionally less we get our heads mashed in by an irishman.
Yeah, a man whose ears are entirely calliflower.
Yeah, he's not allowed.
No, he can't compete, No, no, not.
So.
Eventually they come up with a new definition for amateur, which is somebody who is profited specifically for their participation in a sport that they want to compete in for the Olympics. As Alan Goodman notes, through most of the twentieth century, amateurism was defended with the argument that fair play and good sportsmanship are possible only when sports are in athlete's avocation, never his or her vocation. Kind of what's going on here, We're going to see this with
when we finally do get to Avery Brundage. There's this attitude among like the wealthy and the aristocracy, who all have a lot of money, that there's something gross about capitalism. Still they are the winners of this system, but they recognize that like the way in which we compete under capitalism kind of ruins fun stuff.
But the way of doing that yeah you know, yeah, yeah that's true.
Yeah, but their way of dealing it with it is to just try to keep poor people away. Yeah. So the first actual Olympics is going to hit in eighteen ninety six. It is, you know, more gender woke than the original Olympics. Women had not been allowed to participate in the original Olympics. The ancient Greeks not really big fans of women.
Yeah, they didn't even fuck them have Yeah, not.
Really not famous for that, so they you know, the new Olympics is going to be a lot better at that, but it is biased heavily towards men and women of means. In the longer term, the fact that this veneration of amateurism is initially bundled up in the heart of the whole idea will provide an opportunity for Olympic officials to exact execute petty grievances and fuck with athletes they don't
like for whatever reason. We are talking bullshit, power trip stuff, and the king of that kind of shit is going to be the future International Olympic Committee President, Avery Brandage. We finally got into our bastard. So that's take an ad break here and then we'll come back to talk about Avery. We're back. Do you like the Olympics, Matt like watching them and stuff? This is an Olympic year, I think.
Yeah, so I don't like them, nor watch them, but when it's on, it's something that like occasionally I'll just like turn on a TV and I'll be like, oh shit losing, you know, or like, oh that guy's doing a shot put, and I'll sit and watch for a second, and then I'll think to myself, like, how the fuck did they fill up all those seats? Yes, usually the question I have, But I don't mind people who love it, you know. Yeah, if you like watching people throw a
javelin like power to you. I wish I was that easily entertained.
Yeah, I'm torn because, like you, I don't really like watching the Olympics, and I also recognize that they often destroy the cities that they're hosted in one hundred Yeah, I kind of think we should have just picked one place to do them and right, yeah, and destroyed that and destroyed that. Yeah, really fuck up a single city in Greece. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, they're not using.
It, no, or do it in like downtown Dallas. Just absolutely annihilate, like force all of these international dignitaries to get on the fucking high five for seventeen and a half hours.
They gotta go to Dallas two years fucking Dallas.
Just absolutely take take one of the worst traffics that. I mean, they're trying to do it in La that that won't be any better.
I was. My mom prides herself in letting me know that I was conceived during the eighty four Olympics.
Yeah, but which event I don't know.
I don't want to she just says it. I run away.
I don't want to know where she fucked and during when I don't. Don't take this the wrong way, but you do seem like a shot put baby.
I don't take that.
I mean that as a compliment. Yeah, that's yeah for sure, honest sport.
Yeah, yeah, top heavy guy. Let's see what you're saying.
I didn't mate that.
So balls of steel that's what you read.
Yes, yes, there we go. Avery Brundage, let's talk about Avery. Born on September twenty eighth, eighteen eighty seven, in Detroit, Michigan. Oh yeah, Avery would be nine years old for the very first Olympics. He was one of the people the aristocrats behind the early Olympic Games actually wanted to keep out because he is definitely working class. He's going to be very rich, but he is born a working class kid. His dad is a stonecutter.
Damn.
Yeah, that's like that's the og working class.
Yeah, that's the original fucking working class job. Yeah, stonecutter and pitt digger.
And in classic working class fashion, his father abandons the family when Avery is five, which is a thing people could get away with a lot more easy, but easily back before the internet.
Yeah, you can just walk, just leave.
Yeah, he goes for a packet of smokes. Where's that gone?
Forever?
Gonna?
Who are you gonna ask?
You're the man of the house now, Avery, I hope you know what all taxes. Avery has one younger brother, Charles, and they spend their early childhood bouncing around with relatives. We don't get a lot of context is how this impacted him, but it doesn't interfere with his schooling. He is an excellent student. He wins an essay contest in nineteen oh one at age thirteen that secures him a
trip to see President McKinley's second inauguration. Yeah, he really got in on the McKinley train right before the end of it. There is that the one who oh, yeah, yeah, get he gets got yeah Anton shoh gosh.
Yeah, it's like an anarchist kills him.
There was That's the one one that we got. Yeah, there's a there's a pretty good song from a musical about that, sung by Doogie Howser, So check that one out. Yeah, in general, aside from the dad abandoned them thing. He's, you know, not a bad early nineteen hundreds childhood. He survives, so that's doing good. You know, he makes it past all the cholera and the Spanish flu, so you know, he's not doing bad. He makes a living as a teenagers,
like a boy delivering newspapers. It's kind of unclear to me how poor he really is. One source I've read claims he had to sell newspapers to help his mother buy bread, and that when he got into sports in high school he had to build his own equipment to be able to play. I kind of have come to think some of this is myth making right. He is definitely working class, but he has a big family that seems to have been very supportive of he and his brother.
And his uncle Ed is the Republican leader of Chicago's North Side during a time that means you are taking every bride conceivable like his his His uncle Ed is the Attorney General of Illinois. Eventually that man is Batman is getting so bribe.
Yeah, there's no way, okay, this is really poking holes in the whole working class here thing here.
Yeah, So one thing everyone agrees upon is that Brundage was an exceptional athlete. He becomes a track star near the end of his public school life, and when he graduates and moves to the U of Illinois to study civil engineering, he plays basketball and continues to do track. He is sort of a stereotypical jock. He's a popular kid.
He's the leader of his fraternity. He's one of those guys who would have posted quotes from Friday Night Lights on their Facebook wall every hour and a half if he had lived to see the modern era.
So a cool guy, So a cool guy, cool guy, My favorite guy from high school. Why is that to show that?
Because I grew up in Texas, Sophie, No, it is a vibe.
That's great.
My high school sports stadium was more expensive than most state sports stadiums, and my high school didn't not have a good football team. That's just we just had a ten million dollar stadium because you do. Yeah, like you've got to be ready in case someone gets good. Yeah, so you might have a kid who's really good at some point, or that.
You find Kyle Kyle Chandler to be very handsome.
Man, I don't even know who that is.
Both things can be true. Sophie.
I saw Sophie. I didn't watch my parents watch that show. I avoided it, like the plague. I just know what it means to people speaking of what sports means to avery. Since they don't have Facebook, he has to settle with writing articles for his school paper.
In Facebook, he would have found his dad.
He would have found his dad. But no, but no, So he's got to write shit like this, which I founded in nineteen seventy two Sports Illustrated article that's talking about his life. One of his contributions was entitled the football field is a sifter of men. No better place than a football field could be chosen to test out a man. Here a fellow is stripped of most of the finer little things contributed by ages of civilization, and his virgin nature is exposed to the hot fire of battle.
It is man against man, and there is no thorough a mode of exposing one's true self. Oh yeah, you've definitely exposed your urgin nature. Yeah, man, football the crucible of manhood.
Touch one, boob, bro.
You want a fucking game that's a crucible of manhood? Uh, there's a Burskashi, the Afghan version of polo, which is played on horseback with the corpse of a goat as the ball. That's a crucible of manhood, right there. Yeah, yeah, play some burskashi, right, don't get me this football ship. You guys didn't even know what to tackle back then. So Avery is, Look, they hadn't invented steroids. It couldn't have been very good football.
No.
Yeah, they were wearing all leather exactly normally.
You know they were the people were definitely getting hurt, but yes, from him, very little, but not in a.
Way that was as impressive as the way our current professional monsters hurt each other.
Yeah, yeah, you don't know about c Yeah.
So Avery is a smart kid who's obsessed with sports, and like Kubertine, he comes to see them as a potential remedy for every problem of modernity. Now, Kubertine is obsessed with peace because you know, his childhood had been defined by a war and avoiding conflict through sportsmanship. Avery, on the other hand, seems to because he is a poor kid who makes a lot of money as an adult, he comes to see athletic competition as proof of the
fact of the wisdom and goodness of capitalism. Right, because he's good at capitalism right, and so sports has to mirror the thing that he has found. Meaning in sure, Avery gets a job as a construction superintendent for a major architectural firm, and he personally supervised the construction of three percent of the buildings built in Chicago during the years that he had this job.
So he is very real money.
He has. Oh the bribes. This guy's taking my god, Chris. Throughout his early to mid twenties, he continued to compete as an amateur, in fact, working a day job completely outside of the field of athletic endeavor. Avery Brundage was the very model of what the Olympics now meant by the term amateur. Now, the early nineteen hundreds are a different time in athletic competition, and Avery was into some stuff that I was going to say was very weird sports shit until I realized this sport is still a
sport today. We just don't talk about it because it's kind of lame. But I'm gonna run from a Sports Illustrated article about his chief sport. Although heel and toe walking, the discus and shot put were his specialties. He became a devotee to the torches of the pentathlon, to cathlon and most excruciatingly of all, what he fondly calls the old American all around. Now, I'm not shitting on the pentathlon and the cathlon and stuff. Those are like really difficult,
physically demanding things. It's just incredibly funny to me that heel to toe walking is a sport.
I still I'm trying to picture heel to toe walking?
Is it just? Uh?
Is that gallivanting?
What is it looks like if you did you ever live in a place where like there would be like groups of usually like oh, and I don't say this to insult them, usually like middle aged women who would have like a walking group together.
Oh yeah, speedwalk, my mom, speed walk.
It looks like that to me. But when people describe it, they're always like, this is a shockingly intent race. Walking is actually one of the most intense and physically demanding sports you can do. And I'm sure they're right, but it also does I don't believe them that the state of time?
Did you picture at Hills Park? Yes? I did. It was just like, this is the first thing I thought of it. I was like, I've seen all these old ladies doing the speed walking and I'm.
Willing to believe it's good exercise by sure. As an adult and president of the Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage told Sports Illustrated that an eight hundred and eighty yard heel in towalk he did was quote the closest to man can come to experiencing the pangs of childbirth.
I don't know, man, it's possible. I don't know, man, but I bet it's taxing. But the problem is is that you can't think about it without being like, is there Olympic crab walking?
Is that also a thing that doesn't seem that bad?
I make it silly.
My mom did speed walking, and the only thing she ever compared to childbirth was kidney stones, which seems to be pretty widely done. So I assume kidney stones are a comparable experience in some ways, but I've never had either. I've never had either, so.
I would rather do heel to toe walking than push kiddystone through.
My heel to toe walk all day long, all day long. Anyway, racewalking is still an Olympic event, even though I made fun of it. So if you're a racewalker out there, I'm sure we're going to get the racewalking hive get really angry at us on Reddit or something. I'm not trying to shit talk your sport, but it's very silly that he compares this to childbirth. But he is a
really good athlete. In nineteen fourteen, at age twenty six, Brundage won the US championship in the American All Around, which is like, it's a series of ten events the one hundred yard dash, a high jump, high hurdle, shot put, broad jump, fifty six pound weight throw, pole vault, and then that eight hundred and eighty foot walk, plus like a hammer throw and a run, all done in a single afternoon, which is like, that's a whole thing to do, right, That is a that's a lot. He's very good at it.
Sports writers in nineteen eighteen call him the greatest athlete of his day. So that's all very impressive. You could look at Avery Brundage's early life as an almost seamless path of success from poverty to wealth to athletic greatness, with one gap in his resume of perfection, and that gap is this. In nineteen twelve, he partook in his only Olympics as a competitor in Illinois, he had been a star.
But in the.
Olympics he finishes sixth in the pentathlon and fifteen in the decathlon. And if we're looking at objective terms, neither of those is bad. You know, Yeah, you made it to the Olympics. That's pretty good, right, you got to hang on in the Olympic village.
That's sick.
Yeah, you got to. I mean, I assume they had less sex. Bat I assume at least Avery wasn't having that much sex. Yeah. This guy about race walking, Yeah yeah he didn't. He doesn't have much game. Anytime he meets a lady, he starts talking about how he knows the pain of childbirth, walk the virgin.
Virtues of heel to till walking. You'll never understand it.
But he actually drops out of the pentathlon before finishing because he realizes he can't get enough points to actually meddle, which I don't know. My kind kind of seems like bad sportsmanship. But I've never been to the Olympics.
I don't know.
Jim Thorpe, the best athlete in the field at the time, wins gold in both events. Jim Thorpe is a Native American athlete. Right, this is going to be very important because later in life, Avery is going to nurse something of a grudge against Thorpe. When Avery becomes president of the International Olympic Committee, Thorpe loses his medals, and there was like a move to like, come on, give him back. As you know read he was a great athlete, and Brundage is always going to be like, no, fuck him.
He broke the rules right, and some people will suggest maybe it's because he was kind of, you know, jealous. Still, he never got over loosing. Despite his frustration, or perhaps because of it. The whole experience of participating in the
Olympics hit Avery as a sort of religious experience. He later wrote this, what social, racial, religious, or political prejudices of any kind might have existed were soon forgotten in sportsmen from all over the world, with different ideas, assorted viewpoints, in various manners of living, mingled on the field and off with the utmost friendliness transported by an overflowing Olympic spirit. My conversion, along with many others to Kubertin's religion, the
Olympic movement was complete. And I kind of think that what's happening here is that like people didn't travel as much internationally back then it was harder, and he like goes overseas as a young man and makes a bunch of friends and has an intense physical experience, and he walks away in the same way people do when they go to raves and stuff, now festivals, Right, he has that kind of This is like burning man, right, yeah.
Yeah, they're like, damn you know. It's just like it's the only place in the world where you can feel at one with all of humanity, right, and it's like, what are you talking about. It's like bonoouyeah.
Exactly, And like any kind of person who has that sort of experience as a young person, he's going to spend some time convinced this is the way to save the world, and unlike most people, he never moves past that. Right, It's normal to take ecstasy at a really good concert and be convinced that you found the secret to war.
But like, yeah, right, a few years later taking ecstasy just to play some video games at home, and you're just like, I have a drug product.
Oh, this is no longer as fun as it was. So it was not uncommon for dedicated Olympians, particularly those who went on to work for the Olympics professionally to kind of worship the Games. This is a religion to the people who are most into it. It really is. In his book Berlin Games, Guy Walters writes Kubertine was almost regarded as Christ, and Ballet Latour, who is like his second in the Olympic committee, as his disciple. These men were infalliable because they embodied an idealism that far
transcended the grubby, quotidian strivings of humanity. It was a pagan idealism. It's pageantry, godless. But at Chauvinu's adherents were nothing less than fanatics, men for whom no other point of view was acceptable. If anyone obstructed their ideals, then they would be subjected to the most vicious ad hominem attacks. So they have a toxic fan base. Yeah, breaking new ground there, the Star Wars nerds. Yes, yes, yes, this is like how everything works now, but it is noted
at the time as being pretty unique. Right, there's nothing quite like the Olympics and it's toxic fan base.
Yeah. I told them that I didn't really like the heeled to tow running and they called me a slur.
Yeah. Yeah, they mailed a bomb to my dad's house because I joked about walking not being hard. Starting in nineteen nineteen, Brundage began to take on more because, again, by nineteen nineteen, he's not old, but he's like old for competitive athletics. So he starts taking on more and more roles in sports administration. He initially takes on roles in the Amateur Athletic Association or AAU, which what is
at one point the rival of the NCAA. This is one of those things where they both kind of come up at the same time and they're kind of trying to do at least very similar things, and so they hate each other, right, Right, there's like.
No, I'm going to these kids off.
Yeah, I want to rip off these children. I'm the pain. They like to desploit them. They pretty nasty fight for a while, They're like there's a period where athletes will get blacklisted for playing in like NCAA events or AAU events by the other group. Right, and Avery is actually going to negotiate a detente between the AAU and the NCAA. And part of how he does this is he offers the NCAA the power to certify college students as amateurs. Right,
Oh yeah, yeah, he is the start of all this. Now, yeah, at the point he does it, college sports is not an industry in the way that it is today. I don't even think it's realistic to say he would have conceived of sports period. Isn't like professional Like the best professional players of the day are making decent money, but not like they're not getting hundreds of millions of No, they're not getting anything close to that, right right.
In fact, he probably thinks it's antithetical to sportsmanships to make money off of him.
Yes, yes he does. And it's important to note that while that is an excuse now for ripping these kids off, at his time, there's not the industry behind it to profit from. So I do think he comes by this belief honestly, even though I think this is a really dumb move. Yeah, I don't think he's actually I don't think he's full of shit in the way that like modern NCAA officials.
Right, yeah, I know they all know what they're doing, but he might have been just a little bit more idealistic about it.
Right, right, right, And this is a bigger story than we have the time to lay out. But the gist of the problem that comes from this is that colleges are going to immediately realize that taking a hard line on amateur status allows them to let kids work for free and take keep all the money for themselves. This has led to something This leads very soon after Avery does what he does. This leads to some horrific situations. And I'm going to quote from an article by Ellie
Simpson and Lauren Chang Pratitt about this. Ray Denison was an Army veteran, father of three, and a football player for the Fort Lewis A and m Aggie's on a scholarship. In September nineteen fifty five, he shattered the base of his skull on the knee of a ball carrier during a game. He died thirty hours after the incident. Dennison's wife, Billy, filed a lawsuit against Fort Lewis A and M for
workers compensation. The National Collegiate Athletic Association argued that Dennison was a student athlete because he was on scholarship, meaning he was not eligible to receive benefits. In its defense, the NCAAA avoided such terms as club since that was how professionals referred to their teams. The organization added an amateurism pledge to every scholarship signing. The NCAAA won the
case coined by then NCAAA president Walter Byers. For that case, the term student athlete is used as legal precedent to limit the benefits and compensation college athletes can receive while playing full time. So damn that happens. Not all that long, you know, we're talking like forty years, a little less than forty years, But like that is the ultimate result of what Avery sets in motion. So in nineteen twenty eight, Avery is elected the head of the American Olympic Association,
replacing Douglas MacArthur. The oh shit, not long after that's going to try a new Korea.
Yeah, I love that. It's just doesn't that kind of put to rest the whole idea of sports being a way to stop war?
When Douglas McCarthy he's out. Avery's in nineteen twenty eight, and by this point the new Olympics has gone through some growing pains of its own after almost twenty years establishing itself World War One through a wrench in the planned nineteen thirty six Berlin Games, the Games had been basically set before Hitler came to power, right, I mean, it's not in power in twenty eight, but like Hitler comes to power in thirty three, the Games had been
set before then. And once the Nazis take over, this is going to become a serious issue. Right, but the games even before Hitler is in the fact that there's going to be an Olympics in Berlin is a big deal for Germany because after World War One, Germany is this Paria nation, right right, And the thirty six Olympics are seen by the Germans not wrongfully, as being like this is kind of us re entering the community of Nations. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Everything's cool now, everyone will be normal.
This is the Weimar guys talking like, yeahly, by thirty six everything will be so fucking chilled. People will welcome us with open arms.
Yeah, we've got some problems, but we'll still have some figured out by Set City five at the latest.
Yeah, it'll just be a few years from now, but people will still love Germany's in don't worry. So.
Brundage gets elected President of the American Olympic Committee in nineteen twenty nine, a role he will hold until nineteen fifty three, but later that year disaster struck. The economy crashed, and Brundage lost his first company and the bulk of his fortune on the brink of bankruptcy. He responded to losing his money by bullshitting that he was still rich. He describes going about town with quote his my chest
out and not a nickel in my pocket. But no one knew except my accountants and secretary.
He's like, He's like, I'm gonna still look rich even though I'm poor.
Yeah, and I don't know. His monicle just gets bigger and bigger. It's like, oh, I just made more money again. He's described as having lost all his money, but the way he writes things, I kind of think he took a hit, but like he was not on the streets or anything, right, he was not. It just like hurt him, right, But he does start another company, he does recover and
rebuild his fortune. I kind of think he just kind of exaggerates the degree to which he was down during the depression, because it's more impressive if you come back from being completely broke, as opposed to like, well, I went from rich to kind of struggling middle class and then I got rich again, you know.
Yeah, yeah, there's no rapper who was just like, started from the middle.
Yeah yeah, started from honestly doing pretty okay.
Yeah yeah, I started from the top, still at the top. Everything's fine, has always been.
Fine, either way, whatever the truth is. He would later mock businessmen who lost their money and committed suicide and the depression, like, saying that they lacked quote, the character building discipline of competitive sport. Wouldn't have shot himself if he'd done more heel and toe.
There's all these people jumping out of buildings. Have you tried jumping over a hurdle?
Yeah, over something slightly higher than you know you can jump over, and seeing how well you do?
You know, stop shooting yourself in the head. Stop just start shooting, yeah, shooting.
By the early thirties, Avery is back on top, and we were going to talk about what he does next. But you know who's never not been on top? O the sponsors of this motherfucking podcast.
That's right, they started from the top, still at the top. That's right.
We're gonna buy some socks or I don't know, I don't know what the product is.
Could be, it.
Could be the Washington State Highway Patrol. Either one, we're back by the early thirties. He's rich again. I assume that seems to be when he got rich again. It's a little unclear. I don't have access to the man's bank statements. Either way, he does get rich again. When he dies, he's worth like twenty million dollars. He seems to have credited his love of the Olympics and sportsmanship with instilling in him the values that made his recovery possible.
But he was worried despite the fact that things are doing better for him. He's worried about the growth of sinister socialist movements in Russia and beyond. At the same time, he finds himself intrigued by a new political strain in Germany. This Hitler chip has some interesting ideas. Fucking hey, why does it always go back to Hitler?
Robert Now?
Part of why it goes back to Hitler is that Brundage is like an Olympics worshiper, and he he comes to see the Olympics in somewhat eugenic terms, and in fact, he seems to have felt about athletes the way Hitler felt towards Germans and I'm going to quote from Guy Walters here. Brundage also saw an olympism an enshrinement of his own racist ideals, ideals he shared with the Chicago
Association of Commerce in November nineteen twenty nine. Perhaps we are about to witness the development of a new race, A race of men actuated by the principles of sportsmanship learned on the playing field, refusing to tolerate different conditions than the other enterprises of life. A race physically strong, mentally alert, and morally sound. A race not to be imposed upon because it is ready to fight for right
and physically prepared to do so. A race quick to help an adversary beaten in fair combat, yet fearlessly resenting in justice or unfair advantage.
Yes, such a short trip from race walking to race science.
Yeah, that's less than eight hundred and eighty yards. For sure.
It's a problem with it, you know, just the word itself being you're super into race, that's how you become racist. God damn it. Great stuff Like I it's it's just I don't want to say I get it, but it's like it's one of those things where you just I whenever people this is a problem I have with the Olympics and general that makes me uncomfortable is there is something of a you know, when they say like yeah, all the nations you know are competing and whatnot, it
does feel somewhat like race wars the sport. Yeah, it has that element to it a little bit.
And then it's always made me feel icky. And there's this this other thing that, like the Olympics, to Koper teen seems to legitimately have come by his I think that this could help us, you know, get past war as a society, and I respect those utopian ideas, but it does seem like we eventually walk back around to like, well, this isn't literally war, but like what do you do
in war? Well, you heard a lot of kids. And I think about like Larry Nasser molests He's not the only he's not the only gymnastics coach to have done that. And certainly I think about like, oh, you know, the the the systematic mistreatment and abuse of young men as
foot soldis. I think about stuff like you know, Soviet Union doping athletes or like athletes doping, it all sorts of countries, right, like yeah, this this obsessive need like well, we have to win, and anything that we have to do to these these athletes in order to allow them to win is okay. So let's shoot them up with whatever the fuck we could shoot them up with, right.
And creating a lot of this and the shaming of people, you know of like athletes, and they're trying to like ban fucking at the Olympic village.
There is the one great thing about the Olympics. That's why you get good at sports, right, yes, you can eventually someday, nobody some sort of village. Nobody ever became the best at a sport to not get laid, I'll say, exactly right. Going on, So, the fact that Avery is kind of arriving at race science by a way of here to tell walking yeah, leads him to occupy an awkward cultural position as Hitler takes power in Germany. Before Hitler's election, the nineteen thirty six Olympics had again been
promised to Berlin. After Hitler comes to power, many Americans, a lot of them are Jewish American athletes, but not exclusively.
There's a lot of just people who don't like Nazis decided like, well, now the Nazis are in charge, we shouldn't participate in these Olympic Games, right, because it will normalize the Third Reich and its oppression of its Jewish citizens, and not just the Jewish the there's a lot of people who are because it's not just Jewish citizens being oppressed, but in general, the Third Reich is doing a lot of terrible shit, and if we show up there to play the games will kind of be handing them a
win and legitimizing the regime. And we shouldn't, right, right, A lot of people are arguing this enrages Avery. His most prince rigid principle is that the Olympics should never be political. Now, of course that's not really true, that's what he says. But the way Avery treats the Olympics is deeply political. He just because whenever he's thinking about something he believes deeply, he doesn't consider that politics.
Right, it's not politics, that's just his that's just reality. Everyone else is just is just perverting his reality, which is the only true reality.
Yeah, and I want to I want to quote again from that Berlin Olympics book quote. He also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake and shielding sport from political manipulation upon sport for sports sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life. Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were, in Brundage's view, essential to the continued success of American
capitalism at home and abroad. But we never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics. He regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values and the continuing ideological battle between communism and the American way of life.
Yeah, but that's not political.
That's the natural. That's a natural state. That's just fine, it's just normal stuff. Now, that's not politics, right, right, Yeah.
God is a capitalist. Reality is a capitalist, right, Communism is the devil.
And most people who self identify as a political or the most political people I've ever met in my entire life.
Yes, right, of.
Course, that's like, you know, it's the height of privilege. Is the a political nature of your viewpoint when you're just like, oh, I don't know, I've always felt like politics is weird. Status quo always seems cool and great.
Yeah, you know, I back when I lived out in the middle of nowhere, I ran into one guy who identified as a political and actually was. And the reason why I believe him is when I told him that Hillary Clinton was running for president, he was like, wasn't a Clinton just president?
Yeah?
And I was like, and it like, did not seem to be aware of the Bush years. But this was a man who had been out in the mountains that entire time, not really aware, just kind of missed like sixteen years.
Yes, yes, yeah, No, if you're going to be a political you have to be like almost literally living.
Under a ruck.
No.
No, I literally have not talked to anyone in twenty years.
All my best friends are animals. I really don't know what's politics now, You, in fact, are a political sir.
Wow, all right, so Matt to plug.
Well, if you are an a political person like me, I yeah, no. I have a new podcast out there called Bad has Bara, the World's most moral podcast, in which me and some great guests we talk about what's going on in Israel and we break down some of the hilarious new propaganda that seems to be dropping on a daily fucking basis. So yeah, if you want to you know.
Check that out.
You can get it wherever you know podcasts are given away for free, or go to YouTube and type in bad has Bara. The channel is called frotcast because I used my old YouTube channel that no one watched and I started posting on there and now it's now it's mostly bad has Bara content, but proadcast is the name of the channel. Can I change it? Probably will?
I know, I don't know how youtubes work.
It's f R O T C A S T that's the name of the channel. And the podcast again is called bad has Barra h A S B A R.
Hey check it out. All right.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.