Ghosts of Olympics Past

I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of elation on 24 September 1988 as I watched Ben Johnson cross the line at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium, pointing to the sky with his right hand. It was a moment of celebration across Canada. The CBC-TV announcers reminded us of the humiliation of our own Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, when our national team did not win a single gold medal. Eight years later, after skipping the Moscow games, Canadian athletes had brought ten gold medals home from Los Angeles, but those were won in a competitive field depleted by a Soviet-led boycott, and in events like swimming, canoeing, and rhythmic gymnastics.

The men’s’ 100m sprint, however, was the marquee track and field event, the most prestigious sport on the program. The world record holder is celebrated as “the fastest man in the world,” and Johnson’s 9.79 second dash had obliterated the record. Moreover, no Canadian had won gold in the event since 1928, when 19-year-old Percy Williams pipped Britain’s Jack London on the line at the games in Amsterdam. Williams would beat the world record two years later at a track meet in Toronto, and become “the fastest man in the world” himself.

My euphoria lasted for a little less than three days. On 27 September, the International Olympic Committee announced that Johnson had tested positive for the illegal performance-enhancing drug Nandrolone. He was stripped of his medal and sent home; American silver-medalist Carl Lewis was elevated to the top step of the podium. Canadian swimmer Mark Tewksbury hung a banner reading “Hero to zero in 9.79” from the balcony of his apartment in the Olympic Athletes’ Village. On the CBC and in Canadian newspapers, Johnson was transformed from a “Canadian athlete” into a “Jamaican-born athlete.”

It was a devastating shock and it was the moment when I stopped paying attention to the Olympic Games. Not even the national redemption of Donovan Bailey’s 9.84-second world record at the 1996 games in Atlanta could bring me back to the Olympics because, when I reflect on it, my alienation was not just about Johnson’s or Canada’s disgrace. It was merely the moment of epiphany when the Olympic sham was laid bare to me, but it was a long-time coming.

***

I had grown-up enthralled by the Olympics, from the stories of heroics on the playing field, to the very ideals of the Olympic Movement founded by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896. Just before the 1976 games in my hometown of Montreal, my father gave me a souvenir book full of pictures, details, and records from all of the games up to, and including, Munich in 1972. It had little spaces where I could paste in the adhesive pictures that he would collect for me at the gas station.

In my imagination, the athletic heroes about whose exploits I read became almost friends. They were people like Wilma Rudolph, who overcame polio to win three gold medals in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay in Rome in 1960, and Abebe Bikila, the unheralded Ethiopian runner who won the marathon barefoot in the same games. There was Paavo Nurmi, “the Flying Finn,” and the “Czech Locomotive” Emil Zátopek, who decided at the last minute to enter the marathon at the 1952 games in Helsinki – and won.

I sat with my father in the still-uncompleted Olympic Stadium in Montreal and cheered as Lasse Viren, the “Flying Finn” of my generation, ran twelve laps around the central field where the decathletes contested the last day of their event, and won the 5,000m race. I remember standing with my father at the side of the road, the very next day, wearing a plastic poncho against the rain, to watch the marathoners flash by. I was amazed at their speed, and I cheered for Viren while my father, a runner himself, cheered for Frank Shorter. We heard later on the radio that East Germany’s Waldemar Cierpinski won the gold medal. We were both only slightly disappointed, but I resolved at that moment that I would be a distance runner like Viren, Shorter, Cierpinski, Nurmi, Bikila, and my father.

To my young mind, there seemed to be something so pure and good about the Olympics. Baron de Coubertin promoted an Olympic ideal that would bring the nations of the world together in harmony and friendly competition. “Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other,” he declared in 1894.  “We shall not have peace until the prejudices that now separate the different races are outlived. To attain this end, what better means is there than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility?”

Standing at the side of the road in Montreal in 1976, I believed it. I was then only dimly aware of the horror that had visited Munich in 1972, or that the reason why there was no Bikila, or Mamo Wolde in the group that ran past was because 29 African countries were boycotting the Montreal Games. My unblemished faith in the Olympic ideal and in the purity of the games was a function, above all, of my ignorance and youth.

There were no Olympics for Canada in 1980 when 65 countries led by the United States boycotted the Moscow games protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was sporadic coverage on the CBC, and I wondered why Sebastian Coe, representing Britain, was able to race in the 1500m while there were no Canadian athletes in attendance; but it was mostly a non-event.

By the time the 1984 Olympic Games opened in a display of trashy excess, with 42 pianists in blue tailcoats playing 42 pianos pianos in a deafening rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue” in L.A. Coliseum – a scene right out of The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T – I was already pretty much over it. The continuous onslaught of American self-promotion, even filtered through the smarmy folksiness of the CBC’s Brian Williams, was too much to bear. The omnipresence of sponsors like McDonalds and 7-Eleven seemed to speak to ideals far removed from Coubertin’s.

The 1984 Olympic Games were just another entertainment spectacle, and the only thing that I remember of the event was getting high in a friend’s basement and watching Coe beat Steve Cram in the 1500m by 13 seconds. We had another beer, ate some nachos, and immediately switched over to Much Music (Canada’s version of MTV) to watch an interview with Bruce Springsteen, whose Born in the USA album had just been released.

So, I was already on the cusp of disillusionment by the time Johnson ran off the track and into infamy in 1988. Yet, I was also getting deeper into the sport of running that I had resolved to take up twelve years earlier; I had joined a running club, competed in some cross-country races, and I clutched Alan Silitoe’s novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner to my chest as the bible of my post-punk rebellion. I wanted to see my cross-country hero John Treacy of Ireland kick ass in the marathon, and I was carried along in the Johnsonmania that swept across Canada. I gave the games one last chance.

All of that turned to dross against a backdrop of showbiz extravagance and keening American jingoism. Amid Johnson’s fall from grace, Carl Lewis’s nauseating narcissism – it was later revealed that he was doping, too – and all the late-Cold-War, nationalist chest thumping, my final emotional connection to the Olympic Games just snapped. I didn’t even watch to see Treacy abandon the marathon under Seoul’s hot summer sun. I was done.

***

The “Olympic Ideal” first articulated by Baron de Coubertin is a potent myth and, as much as it has lost what little connection to reality that it once had over the last 125 years, it still has the power to seize the imagination. “Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind,” the baron declared. “Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”

Elsewhere, he promoted Olympism as a universal panacea to the problems of the late-19th century world. “May joy and good fellowship reign,” he wrote in the enthusiastic tones of an eager high school drama student, “and in this manner, may the Olympic Torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure.”

It is a pretty vague prescription, and one that basically boils down to “let’s put on a show, and everything will be better!” yet, that explains part of its appeal to a vast range of people, from many different cultures, in countries around the world. Even today, the International Olympic Committee, the “guardian of the Olympic Games and the leader of the Olympic Movement,” declares its purpose in the simplest, most direct terms: “The vision of the International Olympic Committee is to Build a Better World through Sport.”

Who wouldn’t want to build a better world through something as joyful, and fun as sport; why work for improvement when you can play? Olympism is an idea that pretty much everyone can get behind. It is a vision of an idealized future of peaceful liberalism that resonates as loudly today as when Baron de Coubertin articulated it in the progressive age of the late-19th century. The historian Charles Beard would observe that it had become a matter of certainty and faith “that mankind, by making use of science and invention, can progressively emancipate itself from plagues, famines, and social disasters, and subjugate the materials and forces of the earth to the purposes of the good life – here and now.”

It was settled doctrine that humanity could – and would – perfect itself using the technology, science, and new ideas of organization then emerging. And for this aristocrat, whose family reached back to feudal seigneurs in 15th century France and was elevated to a barony by King Louis XVIII in 1822, the perfect future looked a whole lot more like the distant past of Ancient Greece than the technological, and rapidly industrializing present.

“It was Hellenism, above all else, that advocated measure and proper proportion, co-creators of beauty, grace, and strength,” he said on the eve of the 1936 Berlin games, hosted by the Third Reich. “We must return to these Greek concepts to offset the appalling ugliness of the industrial age through which we have just lived… We used to believe that Hellenism was a thing of the past, a dead notion, impossible to revive and inapplicable to current conditions. This is wrong. Hellenism is part of the future.”

The comment landed well with his hosts, who celebrated the ancient Greeks as their “racial ancestors,” cultivated the neo-Hellenistic aesthetic of artists like Arno Breker and Josef Thorak, and promoted sport and physical fitness as a path to the Aryan ideal. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue and racial theorist, gushed that “the most beautiful dream was the dream of Nordic mankind in Hellas.”

It is perhaps unfair to lay all of this at the good baron’s feet; he was no Nazi, even if he praised Adolf Hitler as a statesman and condemned his critics. “Our memories will also be of courage,” he wrote in his closing message to the 1936 games, “because it took courage to deal with the difficulties to which the Führer had already responded with the by-word of his will, Wir wollen bauen…”

Yet, Baron de Coubertin was a European aristocrat whose cultural roots reached deep into the white supremacist soil of the late-19th century. European and American high imperialism was at its zenith – the Berlin Conference had legitimized the “scramble for Africa” a little more than a decade before the first modern Olympiad, and the United States seized the Philippines and Hawaii just two years later.

The American racialist Madison Grant would echo the baron’s condemnation of the “appalling ugliness of the industrial age” and warned, in The Passing of the Great Race, of the flood of “inferior” immigrants to industrial cities who adopted “the language of the native American; they wear his clothes… and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.” Grant praised the Greeks as a “pure race” of heroes and commanded a return to what he imagined was their ideal of racial purity.

To be fair, Baron de Coubertin, more the starry-eyed idealist, believed that the inferior races could be improved through sport and, above all, through Europe’s mission civilizatrice and the Hellenistic principles of Olympism.

Speaking in 1923 to a conference hosted in Rome by Italy’s new Fascist regime – enthusiastic neo-classicists themselves – Baron de Coubertin revealed his grand Olympic plan for Africa. “And perhaps it may appear premature to introduce the principle of sports competitions into a continent that is behind the times and among peoples still without elementary culture-and particularly presumptuous to expect this expansion to lead to a speeding up of the march of civilisation in these countries,” he said. “Let us think however, for a moment, of what is troubling the African soul. Untapped forces – individual laziness and a sort of collective need for action – a thousand resentments, and a thousand jealousies of the white man…”

For all of its liberal idealism, the modern Olympic games grew out of a foundation of anti-modernism, aristocratic conservatism, and European chauvinism and racism. In addition to athletics and swimming – both fixtures of 19th century European and American private schools and colleges – the only event that has appeared in every Olympic games since 1896 is the aristocratic sport of fencing. Equestrian events were added in 1900 and the modern pentathlon in 1912, both sports based on the skills of an aristocratic cavalry officer. Women’s sports – tennis, yachting, croquet, show riding, and golf – were added over Baron de Coubertin’s objections in 1900.

It is difficult, in fact impossible, to separate the ideal from the racism, and the liberal internationalism from the imperialism baked into the origins of the Olympic games; the best we can do is to look away, and pretend that they aren’t there. But the games are a palimpsest, still promoting the vision of Olympism rooted in Baron de Coubertin’s aristocratic conservatism and Hellenistic myths of white supremacy, and these, too often, seep through to the surface.

***

For all of their aspiration to find something universal and eternal in sport – though filtered through classical Greece – the Olympic games have always been deeply rooted in their historical moment. For example, the first modern games, held in Athens in 1896, were an expression of the insular world of late-19th century Europe. All of the participating countries were either European, or one-time European settler colonies like the United States and Australia (and maybe Chile, although there is scant evidence of this).

The athletes – all white men – embodied an ideal of gentlemanly competition. As the rules demanded, they were all amateurs who did not benefit financially from their sports, and most were men of independent means. Sumner Paine, the American gold medalist in pistol shooting, was the son of Charles J. Paine, a railroad tycoon and retired general; he just happened to be hanging around in Paris, living off his trust fund, when the games were announced. His teammates Ellery Clark and Thomas Burke were scions of Boston Brahmin families. August von Gödrich, a silver medalist in cycling, was a German Junker.

Britain’s George Stuart Robertson, the descendant of a long line of British civil officials and magistrates who had just completed his studies at Oxford University, composed a Pindaran ode in classical Greek for the games’ closing ceremonies after winning a bronze medal in tennis. Later, writing in London’s Fortnightly Review, he sniffed that the athletes from non-Anglo-Saxon countries “did not reach a very high standard,” and were poor competition. “In fact, wherever an Anglo-Saxon appeared as a competitor, he defeated his foreign opponents in practically every case.”

There was a hiccup for the next two Olympiads, in Paris in 1900 and Saint Louis in 1904, where the games were tacky, sensationalist sideshows to those cities’ world’s fairs. The Paris organizers held no opening or closing ceremonies, awarded trophies rather than medals, and allowed professionals to compete alongside amateurs. The Saint Louis games, promoted as the World’s Fair Olympic Games, and which Baron de Coubertin would recall in his memoirs as a “misfortune,” were far worse.

“The ‘star attraction,’ so to speak, was incontestably what the Americans called, in their picturesque language, the ‘anthropological day,’” he wrote. “In the course of these singular athletic meets, competitions were held in the Stadium pitting the Sioux against the Patagonians, the Cocopa of Mexico and the Moro of the Philippines, the Ainu of Japan, the Pygmies of Africa, the Syrians, and the Turks – the latter flattered, no doubt, at being included in such company. All these men competed in the usual civilized contests, foot races, rope climbing, shot put and javelin throwing, jumping, and archery.”

These “savage Olympics” both reflected the social-Darwinist, racialist thinking at the heart of 19th century progressivism, and were meant to demonstrate the racial superiority of white Europeans and Americans. The organizers set up the athletes of “inferior races” to lose and most of them – ill-equipped, untrained, and not fully informed of the rules – did, much to the spectators’ amusement. Yet Peter Deer, a Mohawk athlete from Kahnawake, finished sixth in the 1500m, in the top-10 of the 800m, and placed third in the unofficial mile run, and a team from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario won bronze in lacrosse.

Following those debacles, the Olympic games settled into a rhythm of three great generational cycles in which they fully embodied the spirit of their times. Perhaps unconsciously, the games held between 1908 and 1936 (with a pause for the slaughter of the Great War in 1916) were global celebrations of nationalism that reached their apogee with the 1936 games in Berlin.

Hitler envisioned his games as a demonstration of German and, above all, Aryan supremacy and, although we like to remember Jesse Owens’ four gold medals as a rebuke of Nazi racism, that narrative emerged only long after the fact. For Americans, it was all about America, and for Germans, it was all about Germany. More importantly, American Olympic Committee (now the US Olympic Committee) President Avery Brundage went to the greatest lengths possible to appease his Nazi friends. Appeasement, after all, was in the air.

Less than a year before the games were scheduled to begin, the Nazi government proclaimed the Nuremburg Laws which, among other things, stripped German Jews of their citizenship, making them ineligible to compete on the German Olympic team. American Jewish community leaders demanded the AOC take a stand by boycotting games held under such oppressive conditions. Brundage declared that such issues were irrelevant. “The committee considers nothing but sport and its requirements,” he said. “Germany’s political policy, within or without its borders, has no bearing on the subject.”

For Brundage, the subject was closed, and he would brook no dissent. Five months later, he presided over a purge of the AOC’s Jewish members, culminating in the expulsion of Charles Orenstein, a representative of the Jewish Welfare Board who had been spearheading the boycott campaign.

Far from finding “Germany’s political policy” irrelevant, however, Brundage was an enthusiastic cheerleader for National Socialism in the United States and, on his return home, the New York Times reported, he told a German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden that “we can learn much from Germany… We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.” The 20,000 Nazi sympathizers in his audience “rose to their feet cheering in an outburst of enthusiasm when he paid his tribute to the Reich under Adolph Hitler.”

In coming years, Brundage would be, along with Charles Lindbergh, a leading voice in the America First movement, and the Citizens Committee to Keep America Out of the War. Like the aviator, he advocated for American “cooperation” with the Third Reich. Indeed, he demonstrated his eagerness to cooperate with Hitler at the games in Berlin when he had Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller removed from the US 4x100m relay team, which was widely-tipped to win gold, to spare the Fuhrer the embarrassment of shaking hands with the Jewish athletes.

A 12-year caesura imposed by the Second World War followed, during which time Brundage’s Nazi friends murdered 10 million people, including 6 million Jews, in the death camps and killing fields of the Holocaust. They including Jewish athletes like Attila Petschauer, who won gold in fencing for Hungary in 1928 and 1932, and Lili Henoch, who had helped the German women’s 4x100m team set the world record in 1926. Henoch had been stripped of her German citizenship under the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, and was not eligible to compete in the Olympic Games the following year. She was murdered in the liquidation of the Riga Ghetto in 1942.

***

When the Olympics resumed with the games of the XIV Olympiad in London in 1948, the world had been radically transformed. Baron de Coubertin was dead, and the universalist faith in progress that had animated Olympism lay in ashes in the crematoria and mass graves of the camps. These were the “austerity games,” organized and mounted on the cheap as Great Britain dug out from the rubble of the German Blitz. The hosts renamed a few sites – Wembley became Empire Stadium for the duration – slapped a new coat of paint on the bleachers, and used forced-labor gangs of German prisoners of war to build whatever needed building.

Fanny Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old mother of two, won four medals for the Netherlands in track and field, and Zátopek won his first gold in the 10,000m. But the defining moment came on the fourth day of competition when Marie Provazníková, the Czech president of the International Gymnastics Federation, defected to the West. For the next 36 years, the Olympics would be the games of the Cold War.

It can be difficult today to imagine the extent to which the Olympic games became a vehicle for superpower rivalries, though there was a subtle hint of that on Friday, when the hosts of NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies in Tokyo took time out to draw attention to the civil rights records of US rivals like China, while ignoring the misdeeds of its allies. Yet, the postwar Olympic games were utterly dominated by the “us vs. them” binary of West vs. East.

The big story of the 1956 games was the “blood in the pool” water polo match in Melbourne between Hungary and the USSR one month after Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Budapest. But that was also the year when the Soviet Union replaced the United States at the top of the medal table. The Americans congratulated the Soviets through gritted teeth and for the next six Olympiads, the two countries remained locked in mortal combat, willing to do anything to win.

The Soviets had already begun experimenting with the use of synthetic testosterone in weightlifting at the 1952 games in Helsinki, and expanded the program to other sports throughout the following two decades. US team medical director John Ziegler began injecting American weightlifters with the anabolic Dianobol, and two of them – Bill March and Lou Riecke – set world records in Melbourne.

Doping had become an open secret. Danish cyclist Knud Jensen collapsed midway through the team time-trial in Rome, suffering in the heat from the effects of the stimulant Roniacol, and probably also amphetamines, but no one talked about it. Media outside of Italy and Denmark barely mentioned the story. Throughout the decade, the International Olympic Committee continued to discuss whether or not they should consider starting the process of developing a doping policy.

The stakes were high in the Cold War clash of civilizations and, while team organizations and media in the West made dark insinuations about how the East German women swimmers “were physically built like men, with massive shoulders and tapering waists instead of Botticelli curves,” they obliquely credited this fact to “sports medicine.” American sports medicine doctors like H. Kay Dooley and Pat O’Shea were conducting experiments of their own with Dianobol, Stazonolol, and Nandrolone at the US Olympic Team High Altitude Training Camp throughout the 1960s.

No team on either side of the Iron Curtain could afford to lose, and they were willing to do anything to win.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1964, the city of Tokyo hosted games that approached, even if they did not quite attain, the lofty goals set down in 1896. The first games to be held in Asia, the games of the 18th Olympiad were Japan’s coming-out party, finally rehabilitated from the memory of the Second World War. They were also the games of decolonization, where 30 of the 93 teams marched under the flags of new nations which had gained their independence from European empires in the previous decades. Bikila put a seal on that, becoming the first athlete to win back-to-back gold in the marathon, defending his medal from Rome four years before.

Cold War reality soon returned, as the United States intervened in the Vietnam War and Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Eager to clamp-down on rising domestic dissent before inviting the world to the 1968 games in Mexico City, Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz imposed martial law and ordered mass arrests. Ten days before the opening ceremonies, Mexican soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas against the exorbitant cost of the games, killing 400 and injuring a thousand more.

The soldiers were armed with weapons and equipment supplied by the US government, which was worried that the demonstrations, which they claimed were organized by “communist agitators,” would ruin the games. Brundage, now the chairman of the IOC, insisted that there was “no connection” between “the student manifestations” and the Olympics. Nobody would raise the issue again until 1972, when Brian Glanville, reviewing a coffee-table book commissioned by the IOC to celebrate the Munich games, remarked on the elision of the massacre in la Plaza de las Tres Culturas. “I shall not be in Munich,” the veteran sports journalist concluded. “Mexico was enough for me.”

The Munich Olympics were the games of Black September. Eleven Israeli athletes and officials and one German policeman were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The Olympic organizers lowered flags to half-staff, and when on with the games. The games of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal were held in incomplete facilities and left a $1.6 billion debt that would not be paid-off for 40 years, a crumbling stadium that has since been abandoned, and helped precipitate the city’s decade-long decline.

The East-West superpower Olympic rivalry culminated in the dueling boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles games, proving that, if nothing else, Baron de Coubertin’s Olympic ideal was an absurdity during the Cold War.

***

Olympic harmony was restored by late-stage consumer capitalism, rather than progressive idealism, after 1984. Even before the Olympic flame was extinguished at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 games, the New York Times noted that “after Los Angeles, the Olympics will never be the same.” After the troubles of Montreal and Moscow, the media and the IOC declared that LA was a spectacular success.

Peter Ueberroth, the Los Angeles Organizing Committee president, was determined to make his Olympics the first privately-funded, “free enterprise games.” And, after tallying-up the revenues from commercial sponsorship and the sale of broadcasting rights, he found that his Olympics had produced a $250 million surplus. In the absence of America’s traditional Cold War rivals, Ueberroth’s innovation was to emphasize the games as a media product rather than as a sporting event, and to pitch that to potential broadcasters and sponsors.

ABC Television won the bidding war for the American broadcast rights and, after having aired the blockbuster miniseries The Thorn Birds and The Winds of War in 1983, the network knew how to capitalize on their prize. By packaging the games as a two-week-long drama, ABC raked-in more than $484 million in ad revenues, more than double the $225 million it had paid for the rights. As Ueberroth has envisioned, the Olympic games were transformed overnight into a media product beholden to the tastes of the world’s wealthiest media market.

The Olympic games have been largely defined by this reality throughout their third era. The 1996 Atlanta games, for example, marked an apotheosis of commercialization, when the IOC itself sold Coca Cola and Visa four-year global title-sponsorship rights. Around the world, they became The Games of the XXVI Olympiad, presented by Coca Cola and Visa.

The sponsors and broadcasters demanded a return on their investments and this, more than anything else, transformed the Olympic Games into the media spectacle that it is today. In order to attract the greatest number of viewers in the wealthiest media markets every four years, the IOC finally abandoned any pretense of amateurism. The amateur rule had always been observed more in its breach by the major sports powers, anyway, but for 1992, Team USA lobbied to allow professional NBA players to represent their country on the basketball court. It came as no surprise that the Dream Team utterly dominated the tournament and won the gold medal; what commentators questioned was why it defeated Germany with a margin of only 111-68 in round-robin play.

Domination is the point, and it has become the defining point of broadcast sports, and not only in the Olympic Games. Americans became rabid fans of professional cycling, for example, between 1999 and 2005, when Lance Armstrong not only won a record seven Tour de France titles in a row, but utterly crushed his rivals on the way to doing so. Since Armstrong’s retirement and subsequent disgrace, the American audience for cycling has dwindled to a fraction of its former size. By contrast, the British audience swelled as Britons like Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome came to dominate the event.

We want to see our team win, and only our team. In the logic of late-stage capitalism, this is what drives fans’ unquestioning devotion to and identification with their teams. Their loyalty to the New England Patriots, the Montreal Canadiens, Manchester United, Barça, or any other team is fierce, often generational, and profoundly informed by personal identity. The sports-entertainment media complex derives vast profits from fans more than willing to pony-up for exorbitant ticket prices, streaming video subscriptions and merchandise that allows them to feel “part of the team.” So, when the Yankees or Arsenal win, the fans say “we won.”

This has become a defining feature of the Olympic Games as a media product. Licensed broadcasters – NBC in the United States, the CBC in Canada, Discovery in Great Britain, CCTV in China – know their business well; fans will tune-in to watch their national teams win, as proxies for their national identities, but they are less inclined to see anyone else at the top of the podium. The mediatized Olympic games have thus become less a sporting event than reality television tailored to the home audience, with a predictably triumphant narrative arc featuring just enough adversity, and plenty of sex-appeal, to keep it interesting.

Over the last few Olympiads, as the number of visible participating nations has dwindled to us – whoever that might be in the NBC, Discovery, and CCTV coverage – and a few handpicked rivals, with an increasing emphasis on telegenic bikini bottoms and bare midriffs, the thread that had bound the Olympic Games to friendly competition and “joy found in effort” had become strained. That filament finally snapped, and the 2020 Tokyo Games, held by necessity in 2021 without even the benefit of a live studio audience, bears little resemblance to international sport, let alone to Baron de Coubertin’s hackneyed, aristocratic idealism.

Looking back, it is worth asking if it ever really did. Yet, perhaps the disaster of Tokyo offers an opportunity to finally put Olympism, the Olympic ideal, and the Olympic Games themselves away, and to imagine international competition unburdened by its Olympic past, which can “build a better world through sport.”