The Olympics!

the Olympics, the Olympic Games specifically. I guess they're happening in Paris this year. They may be happening in Paris by the time you listen to this. But I'm want to talk a little bit about the history of the Olympics because I wrote a book about it, and so I get to drawing on about it for half an hour and you have to listen to me. Where you drive your cars to work?

it's pretty obvious what play is. But it's the difference between play and sport is that sport is bounded. It happens in a certain place, within a certain set of rules. Play doesn't. So the archetypal kind of example of transitioning from play to sport would be folk football in Britain.

So back in the day, in the place where I come from, for holidays, the Saints Days and other days when people didn't work, they would have a game of football which consisted of a ball inflated pigs bladder or a similar similar device, and you have to get it from one village into the other village. And those are about all the rules, right. Sometimes they had specific rules

against stabbing. There have been like an outbreak of stabbing incidents, but other than that, it was pretty much you do what the fuck you wanted, right, You want to go on a five mile detour and come around, people come in the back way, No problem. You're on a form of phalanx of all your mates and just kind of go through like a wedge style. Not a problem at all. You know you want to start hitting people with sticks, Yeah,

not an issue. It was very loose, right, and every village or pair of villages that would play had their own kind of understanding of the rules. But it wasn't a codified set of rules. They existed across all incidences of folk football. And then we go from there to association football. Right, that's where soccer comes from. Right, as soccer soccer, association becomes assoc us sock becomes our soccer, that becomes soccer.

picked up the ball and ran with it. It's a bit weird that, like they've created a founding myth for dude who effectively just like sucked at football, so he picked it up and ran with it. Like, it doesn't seem like he deserves a literal statue that he has. Yeah, and that happened at Rugby School, right, which was one of these English boarding schools that existed to prepare young men to be officers and administrators in the British Empire.

And that is really what's the codification of sport as far as we can sort of create, like a reason for it is to prepare young men and just men to be administrators in the British Empire. Right, it's supposed to make them physically strong. It's supposed to make them obey the rules and learn to do what they're told even in stressful situations. Right, it's part of an idea called muscular Christianity. And like, as far as we can

attribute this whole combination of things to one person. It would be Thomas Arnold, right, Thomas Arnold being the headmaster at Rugby School, and he develops his idea of educating young Christian men and doing so using sport as well as academia and sports very quickly develop a set of rules around amateurism. Amateurism like sometimes we just use amateur now to me not very good, but at the time it's specifically meant not paid to do the sport. And

so yeah, this is the early Olympics. Actually, the Olympics still relatively recently have an amateurism rule, right that people can't participate if they are paid to do the sport. They have exemptions for fencing coaches, which I think tells you about everything you need to know that this isn't

This isn't there for any like purity reason. It's there to serve as a class barrier, right, And we see it used as a class barrier first of all in football, right, Like that's why we have rugby league and rugby union because the rugby league people tended to be working people and they needed to be paid. It's the rugby league allowed for professionalism, Rugby union did not, and those tended to be wealthier people, right, but it's used at the

Olympics extensively to police class. Like probably the most prominent example would be Jim Thorpe. You familiar with Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe's the cool guy. Actually, I got to read some of his correspondents. He actually wrote a history of the Olympic Games, which is very sad when you consider that Jim Thorpe himself he's a member of the Sacond Fox Nation, right, so he's indigenous to North America. He won a medal for the United States in the nineteen

twelve Summer Olympics. Who went to gold medals actually won in pentathlon and won decathlon. So like decathletes are kind of like the uber athletes, right, Like you're doing ten ten different sports that you have to just be good at exercising. And Jim thoughte was good at exercising. He also played collegiate and professional football, professional baseball, and professional basketball. See,

he's an all around sport to dad. Unfortunately, he lost his Olympic title because he had been paid at some point for playing baseball, even though he didn't do baseball in the Olympics. That's a fucked yeah, It's very clearly used as a way to class and race police the games. Right, And I think this gets to a point about what the Olympics are. So the early Olympics tend to coincide

with what are called World's fairs. Familiar with World's Fairs, Shreen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, people sort of get together have these big exhibitions and they show off there, you know if you really got yeah whatever, Yeah, look what I stole from this country that I have colonized and under force extracted these the following things. If you're in Britain, like the most famous sort of World's Fair site would be Crystal Palace, right, Crystal Palace was built, burned down, but it was built

for the World's Fair. If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park, right, was built fourteen Yeah, yeah, I.

actually has zoos started as well. Someone in their exhibition had lions and then fucking left them when they left and they were like, uh, I guess we start a zoo. Got a couple of lines on our hands. Yeah, incredible, incredible vibes. So the Olympics happen at the same time as world for it's for a long time, and that is because the Olympics are essentially a gathering of transnational bourgeois. He that's not a phrase I came up with myself.

It's from my friend David Goldblatt, who's written a really excellent history of the Olympics that's called The Games. And if you're going to read one book about the Olympics, it should be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure he's not listening hello, David. If you are, I would

recommend his book because I think his analysis is great. Right, that what these become is a place where the sort of the people who make money from finance capital all around the world can gather together and share the little ideas and play their little games. And we see that, for instance, in the nineteen oh four s In Lewis Olympics Saint Louis. In addition to like the World's Fair, they have the Olympics and they have something called the

Anthropological Days. Have you heard about this? Sharing? Oh?

it's sometimes not great for your future career prospects. And then I've unfortunately seen lots of friends take that path. And so I want to talk about like the Olympics in the twenty century, and specifically I want to talk about the Olympics in the nineteen thirties. Right, so when the Olympics. By the time we come to the nineteen thirties, the Olympics have really become like they're an American thing.

The Los Angeles Olympics gives us a lot of the modern Olympics and the rest of the mother Olympics we get from friends of the podcast Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Of course, yeah, I knew that you were expecting them. We never, never don't expect Hitler. So ninety thirty two is great. Like nineteen thirty two Olympic village. They build this Olympic village. They haven't patrolled by cowboys, just like Hollywood cosplay dudes on horses cowboying around. It's

the first. It's very weird. It's the first Olympic village, and it's it becomes a real estate investment, right like as soon as the Olympics are done, there in classic Los Angeles fashion, flipping the houses for more than they

were paid. So it also creates this idea of like the Olympics as a mass spectacle in nineteen thirty two is sometimes called the Hollywood Olympics, right, and it really changes the game from rich people getting together for rich people to a spectator event and a mass spectator event. In nineteen thirty one, Spain's Dicta Blander collapses. Dicta Blander is like a soft dictatorship as opposed to Dictadora as a hard dictatorship. Right, so, and Spain becomes a Republic

nineteen thirty one. It's also the time when the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona, and for geographically challenged listeners, Barcelona, it's in Catalonia, but Catalonia is within Spain at this time, so the IOC is almost entirely comprised of very rich people, and many of them are like barons, counts, princes other people who like their job is being someone's kid, right, and they just do things like being on the IOC

to occupy them what they spend their parents' money. So they're in Spain at the time when Spain has just deposed a monarch and it has this revolutionary republic, right, the anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin a campaign of two years of removing the church from its official position, like anti clericalism and of land reform.

These are things which rich people do not like. And so the vote happens in Barcelona about where to hold the next Olympics, and the two leading candidates are Berlin and Barcelona. After Barcelona, I think a little weird happens.

The IOC members all go home and not everyone has come to Barcelona, right, because because of the change in the situation and instead of being like, okay, well we had a vote in Barcelona one, the IOC makes an interesting and relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram, and in the telegram vote, they instead of going for the unstable Spanish Second Republic, up for a more stable

and liberal democracy, which is of course Yamar Germany. Oh of course, yeah, good choice by their better rich folks. They really helped us out there, and it's very interesting, like I've spent a lot of time with these telegrams, like the actual paper telegrams in the International Olympic Committee archive in Lausanne, trying to ascertain did they just like

did the vote happen? And then they were like no, fuck, we can't go to Barcelona, like we got to redo, We've got to work out a way to jig this, like we can't go to this republican place, or that they claimed that there weren't enough votes, right, that they

didn't have like a quorum. But I've looked at previous and subsequent votes and there are there are plenty of other votes that have fewer participants, and it was relatively normal at this time for not everyone to show up at a meeting right, because it's nineteen thirty one, Like, traveling is hard, and so I can't categorically say what's happened.

But maybe that's what I suspect has happened. I can't really see any way I could find out now, And so went to every member of the International Olympic Committee at the time and looked in their personal archive. But either way, they decided to give the Olympics to this little place called firemar Germany. In between ninety thirty one and nineteen thirty six. History fans will know that the

Nazis came to parent Germany. Nazis not very nice people and no bad Many people are saying, yeah, many people are saying.

And then over time the administrators of the Olympics, including guy called Carl DM who would be classified, according to the Nazis owned sort of standards as a Jewish person, They persuade the Nazis that having the Olympics will be good for them. It will let them exhibit their shit on a world scale. And they are not wrong. Right, The Olympics turned into a massive boon for Nazi Germany. We don't have enough time in this short episode to

explain the whole boycott movement. There was a substantial boycott movement, including in the United States. The United States very nearly boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but in the end it ended up not doing so. You had opposition from really interesting groups. Actually had opposition obviously from Jewish groups, right, because Nazis. You have opposition from elements of an NAACP, but not from other elements because they have this very reasonable objection.

They're like, well, America is also racist as fuck. Actually, like we also like this is a time all week exclude black folks from a lot of yeah not yeah, And so you have black folks boycotting, and you have black folks being like, now fuck it, like we'll take

the chance, you know. And then you have the opposition from an interesting group like the liberal Catholics, right, because the Nazis had their own ideas on religion, and so a lot of Catholics were anti Nazi at that point, and including Jeremiah Mahony, who was president of the Amateur Athletic Union at the time, who was kind of leading

the boycott movement. The United States decides not to boycott, lots of other places in the world decide that they are going to boycott, right, and lots of other people around the world. And that's where Barcelona. They had a conference in Paris. Actually they're the international conference sort of respect of the Olympic ideal, and that is the conference out of which the bars that remember Barcelona applied in thirty one, right, so they have all their shit together.

They actually have the site of a former World's Fair and that's what they're going to use. So the Catalans come to this conference in April of thirty six, and are like, hey, we can have another Olympics, which isn't shit, And they go ahead and have their Olympics and shit, now first happened the Nazi Olympics, Right. The Nazi Olympics give us so much of what we consider to be the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay, you know, the torch relay. They go to Olympia and bring the flame. Yeah,

that's that's a Nazi thing. Actually, it comes from the Nazis. The idea of drawing a link from ancient Greece to Berlin was a Nazi idea.

the Olympics salute predates it. So you have these interesting mark people march like were they the parade at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, right, and lots of these The pageantry of the opening ceremony also comes from the Nazis, by the way, and We got people walking in and the come in and they're doing a salute, and people like, is that the Nazi salute they're doing? It's at the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure it's the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure.

They just did what they'd always done, which was to not dip their flag, and that that Olympiad is a great success for Hitler, right, Like this is where a lot of this like, oh, but yeah, he's very efficient. He makes a trains run on time. Kind of shit comes from.

Did Behind the Bastards on Brandage. I don't think he begins the nineteen thirties of the anti Semite, but after the boycott campaign, which he calls a Jewish Communist conspiracy, well yeah, he absolutely becomes an anti Semite, like he grows closer to hit that when other because like his idea is that politics shouldn't influence the games, which is inherently a political choice when the games have been given

to fucking Adolf Hitler. Yeah, so the ninety thirty six Olympics go ahead in Germany, lots of fascism, lots of zieg Heiling, a real success for Hitler. Ninety thirty six Olympics in Barcelona don't go ahead because the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona Olympics are like an alternative to the Berlin Olympics. Yeah. At this time, also, it should be pointed out that you got the Winter Olympics when you've got the Olympics.

So the Nazi had already had their garmentge part in Kirschen Winter Olympics and had predicted to me that a bunch of Nazi shit, right, which didn't stop anyone going to the Summer Olympics. Sharan, do you know what won't do a bunch of Nazi shit? What? James, it's the products and services that support this show, Saran, I founder.

of them. The popular Olympics are cool. The main reason they're call is because I've written a book about them, but other reasons include that they had like elite amateur and then provincial races, so like you could just show up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to fucking check my hand the ring one hundred meters, let's see how I do. And there would be a place for you to compete, right, It wasn't about who was a freak athlete. They were really interested in working class health.

So for that reason, they also had like these mass relay events where you'd have like the fifty by twenty five meters or the ten by fifty meters and you couldn't have all runners. So the idea was that the country that would win or the nation that would win.

Italy competing under their own banners. And you have Glicia, Catalonia Scady, the Basque country competing as their annual nations, right, and the same with the colonized people of North Africa. And you have the women students of the world with their own old team, which is nice. They also made a big deal of including women, allowing women to do sports that men do at the time. In the nineteen

thirty six women can run more than two hundred meters. Well, but they actually could, as it turns out, Yeah, yeah, right, they just weren't allowed to. Yeah, shocking discovery. They didn't just evolve that capacity since thirty six. But these Olympics don't go ahead beause the Spanish Civil War starts. Lots of the anti fascist athletes who came state to fight, right, including people I've written about in my book. We did a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this.

So you can listen to more if you want to. In Margaret's feed. I'm sure if you search popular Olympics will be there. By the way you sometimes see it translated as People's Olympics. I prefer popular because it's inherently tied to the idea of a popular front right, which is a policy of like united front between everyone from the liberals to the communists to the anarchists against fascism. Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular front because

it is dominated by communists. Communists, in fact, love to kill anarchists a lot more than they love to kill fascists, and they use the popular front as cover for doing that, as we see in Spain. But the anarchists did participate in workers or popular sport in Barcelona at least to an extent. So these games, so that said, they don't happen. You can read about that my book, or you can listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But I want to

talk about what the Olympics represent today, the modern Olympics. Right, they have become as they always were, Right, they continue to be a spectacle that they've been since thirty two, and they continue to be a vehicle for capitalism as they have been forever. Right, if we look at their recent Olympic games, right, we look at London, we look at Rio. I think Rio is a really great example, right, the Olympics that they were able to clear areas of

the city using the potential Olympics. Right, displace favela communities, displace poor and excluded and marginalized people, and take advantage of incredibly underpaid labor. And there's probably it's a bit rarer now, but for like most of the last eight years, you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana mostly right, the US has been especially racist and bigoted towards Haitians, and you can. I wrote a piece for NBC about Bidens hypocracy on

Haitian immigration. But there were people who had worked on the Olympic Stadium in Brazil, right, So they've gone from Haiti, like after the earthquake or the economic and political issues, so they've had ever since the earthquake, they've gone to Brazil. And then they've worked in Brazil building the stadia, getting

paid fuck all and doing dangerous work. And then eventually I've been able to find work that visas had run out or that they'd otherwise chosen to come north to the United States, and they often end up not being able to They end up stuck in Tijuana or living in Tijuana and finding work there. So often Olympics take advantage of migrant labor. They are used as a means of like reshaping the city in to like sculpting it under capitalism. Yea right, pushing folks out of their neighborhoods.

They don't do the Olympics in bougie neighborhoods. They use it as an excuse to gentrify a neighborhood, to remove in trench working class communities. Yeah, like it's really sad. It's when I read so much of the stuff about, like specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games, Like we see these people who are unquestionably good people, right, Like they genuinely believe that through what they see is the ideal of

the Olympics, they can liberate women. They the Barcelona organizers so like, they didn't have much money, right, they were putting people up. And I found these forms in the archives. They'd go around people's houses and be like, hey, do you have a spare bedroom? And in the form you can tick I have one, two, three spare bedrooms. I can serve breakfast. I can't serve breakfast. And that's how they would bill at the athletes, right. The athletes didn't

have an Olympic village. They had a hotel and then any surp plus you would just stay with a local person. It was a very different vision of what the Olympics could have been, right, And they believed in the youth

of the world coming together. They really thought that at the popul Olympics they could show the strength of anti fascism, that anti fishing wasn't just a talking point, that it was that it was young and it was healthy and like, most importantly that they could fucking kill you, right like that that sport all Well again double or Well quote episode or Well called sport War without the shooting, and I think he's spot on. Actually it is good. He's

got some bangers sharene you do say that. Yeah, he's a word guy, George or Well. People do love to misquote George your Well, but I like to quote him correctly. You know you can. You can always when someone miss quote George your Well, you can always just quote tweet them with the I had joined the militia to kill a fascist, right or the other absolute banger from all Well. I have no particular love for the idealized worker as

he exists in the mind of the bourgeois communists. But when I see a real flesh and bug worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I don't have to ask myself which side them on. Ooh it's a banger.

I think it's a potential. What I want to end on is, like, I think we can recover that potential, Like we can take the Olympics away from the people who did nineteen oh four and the people who did nineteen thirty six, and like it doesn't mean to have to use that obviously that the IOC is not fucking coming with us, Right, I've been to the IOC, very nice building, but like this is the you know, the the interests of finance, capital and the interesting iOS here inherently tied.

famous Olympic moment. The whole ninety sixty year Olympics actually kind of gave a platform for protest, and Parisians have been protesting against this Olympics, and Angelino's are already protesting against what it's going to happen in twenty eight. You can look up no Olympics LA for those folks, and

I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I don't think that the idea is inherently bad, the idea of coming together to play and like sports are where we decide who's on our team and who's not on our team, right, And what the Popula Olympics did was said working people are all on the same team, and they've played that out right. The day the games were supposed to start, some of those athletes were in the

streets killing fascists and they weren't. Right that day that minitary coup failed in Barcelona, a lot of them left really feeling like they got something out of the games that they couldn't have got. All that they came to play, and then they saw like what they were playing for acted out. And I think there's still something really powerful in that, but we can only get there by acknowledging

how fucked up the Olympics have always been. I see this like liberal narratives that the Librics, the Olympics are once great and about sportsmanship and now they're about capitalism. No fuck that, Like they have always been inherently about capitalism. They have been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics. Right, the medal table. We don't do the medal table for shits and giggles. The medal table is there to prove like the superiority of one race. Like that is why Hitler

is obsessed with the medal table. Right, He's extremely worried that like either the black folks in the United States or like god forbid, the Japanese do well in the Olympics. It's like and then the Olympics trying to sort of posit itself as inherently pro human rights, I think is very problematic when we look at like how Olympics Stadia get constructed, by whom they get constructed, and where they get constructed, yeah, the effect and yeah, and who who

they're for and who who they take from. So I know, I'm not saying don't watch the Olympics. Like when I was a kid, the Olympics were like fucking formative in me wanting to do sport, and when I was an athlete the Olympics beginning, I wanted to do. I have friends who are going to be at the Olympics, and like, I guess I wish them the best, but still a bad thing. And like I certainly don't blame folks who come from like resource poor settings for taking that chance.

And like, I will tell you that when you stop getting paid to exercise, all of it seems very unimportant and like you suddenly realize that in my case, but there's important shit that you can do if you have a chance to do it, and you should do it if you get the chance. But yeah, I think hopefully, you know, if people want to know more about the Populalympics, I will fucking talk your eer of me an email. Yeah, my book. I think it might be on libcom now

as well. I think you can. I think it's been pirated, which is good to see. You can get it from your library. I'd love you to get it from a library because it's for someone else libraries. Yeah, I do love a library. Yeah, we should do a library episode.

pentathlon a sport that was designed to train offices. Right, you have to run, swim, ride a horse, sword, find and shoot. Yeah, so make a better pentathlon, make make our anti fascist to cathalon. Yeah, send us your You can tag us with your your decathlon ideas on on x dot com. We both use at I write Okay, bizarrely we have the same the same Twitter handle. Yeah, send us your sporting ideas. Enjoy your little Olympic viewing. Now that I've ruined it all for you.