In the run-up to Paris 2024, the Olympic spirit has been in demand. It is, according to the International Olympic Committee, making the journey from Olympia to Paris in the form of the torch relay. The Louvre, which will be hosting yoga and workout sessions, will be getting a visit. French illustrator Ugo Gattoni has, according to the organizers, captured the spirit in the official posters he has created for Paris 2024, while many think that the decision of World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, to use some of its Olympic money to reward gold medalists with a $50,000 bonus is against it. Is the Olympic spirit something about excellence and striving, as the Olympic motto “faster, higher, stronger” would suggest?
Or perhaps the Olympic spirit refers to the idea of international peace that the Olympic truce embodies. Or maybe it encapsulates the moral superiority of participation over winning? We are all going to hear a lot more about these ideals over the next month, but I wonder if any of us will be much the wiser.
Does the Olympic spirit even matter anymore? After all, most of us will be consuming the spectacle and enjoying the show, without worrying too much about the Olympics’ founding ideals, myths or theology. On the other hand, if the claims of the IOC, that the Olympics is about more than sport, and is a force for good in the world, then it matters a lot. The IOC’s current definition of the Olympic spirit is sport, carried out with “mutual understanding … a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” Not exactly rousing prose, but who could disagree with this? Well, Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic movement, for one.
Praising the spirit of the 1912 Stockholm Games, he wrote, in his most concise account of what the Games should be, that “we must continue to try to achieve the following definition: the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism, with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, art for its setting, and female applause as its reward.” Clearly, the meaning of the Olympic spirit and the purposes of the Games have changed a lot over the last century. If we are to make sense of what purposes actually animate the Olympics today, we need to take a step back and understand how the Games were first invented by de Coubertin in the late 19th century, and how, again and again, they have been transformed.
In an increasingly fragmented world, there is still a deep need for cosmopolitan festivals of a collective humanity. The Olympics, whatever their faults, are unquestionably this.
For de Coubertin, the model sportsman was an amateur athlete. On a trip to England in the 1880s, he had visited the leading public schools and universities and undergone a kind of spiritual awakening. In these institutions, sport had become a central element of the curriculum, designed to produce the kind of physically and morally upstanding muscular Christian gentlemen who would go on to rule the British Empire. It was a version of sport that excluded commercial and political forces, and venerated the amateur (which conveniently ensured that the lower classes, without time or money to train, would be excluded from these upper-class social spaces). At an international level, this would create the opportunity for athletes to socialize and form friendships, and, in so doing, contribute to more peaceful and tolerant relations between states. Quixotic as this might appear now, de Coubertin was drawing on an established tradition of aristocratic diplomacy, where the crowned heads of Europe held summits separately from their governments, and coalitions of notables met to discuss public matters. But what would be the form in which this version of sport could be realized and shown to the world?
In de Coubertin’s reading of the ancient Olympics, participants were all amateurs, politics was excluded from the Games, and the Olympic truce brought peace to the Hellenic world for the duration of the Games. None of this is entirely true. While athletes did not receive monetary prizes at Olympia, there was a well-established circuit of Games in ancient Greece, at which many of the participants did receive prizes, and not a few could sustain what was, in effect, a professional career. Participation in those races didn’t disqualify athletes from the ancient Games. In any case, Olympic fame was often rewarded by city-states who gave victorious athletes cash bonuses and pensions. Politics, too, it seems, was never absent from Olympia. Herodotus wrote that the Athenian Kylon, emboldened by his victory in a sprint race in 640 B.C.E., went on to launch a coup d’etat at home. Later, Kimon, an Athenian aristocrat, exiled by the city’s ruler, Peisistratos, happened to take the Olympic prize in the four-horse chariot. At the next Olympic Games he won with the same horses, but permitted Peisistratos to be proclaimed victor, and by resigning the victory to him he came back from exile. As to the Olympic truce, it was in fact just the guarantee of free passage to Olympia. Wars continued regardless.
Historically accurate or not, de Coubertin took what he needed from antiquity and, at the five Olympics over which he presided between 1896 and 1924, broadly achieved his objectives. Initially bound to the World’s Fairs — which de Coubertin thought vulgar and commercial — the Olympics became a free-standing event in Stockholm in 1912. Its athletes were overwhelmingly male, white and from the upper classes of Europe, Britain and its Empire, the United States and Canada. Professional athletes were excluded, or, as in the case of Jim Thorpe, who won the decathlon at the Stockholm Games, subsequently stripped of their medals. Formats and rituals — from the parade of nations to the Olympic hymn — created the symbolic trappings of a spiritual, quasi-religious occasion. The presence of commercial and political actors was nugatory. Audiences for the Games, male or female, were generally rather small, but they were, on the whole, polite. But almost as soon as this combination had been achieved, the character and the meaning of the Games began to change.
Play and sport are a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and encoded in their rules and rituals is a better version of ourselves and our world.
By 1932, the Olympics were all business. The Los Angeles Games were run by an alliance of real estate developers, movie studios and the oil industry. Coca-Cola was a visible presence, while Standard Oil was giving away promotional posters of Discobolus.
Berlin 1936 showed just what could happen when you fell in with bellicose ultranationalists ready to spend serious money to disguise their aggressive intentions. The small and relatively austere Olympics of the immediate postwar era, like London 1948 and Helsinki 1952, eschewed bombastic grandeur and dialed down the overt politics, but even these Games provided a stage for the first stirrings of Cold War sports conflicts. The next decade or so — Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964 and Munich 1972 — were the soft power coming out parties for the defeated Axis powers, now returned to international respectability, while Mexico City 1968 was used by the government to celebrate the country’s breakneck economic development. Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 were transparently stages for late Cold War rivalries as first the Americans and their allies boycotted Moscow after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and then the Soviets and their allies reciprocated.
If, by the late 1980s, the IOC had come to an accommodation with both soft power and politics, and the commercial worlds of sponsorship and television, it still held fast to the virtues of amateurism, until 1992. That’s when IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch simply deleted amateurism from the Olympic charter and opened the door for the U.S. Dream Team to play in Barcelona.
This was, perhaps, the final break with the original de Coubertin version of Olympism. While this certainly ensured great TV ratings, and underwrote the increasing value of the Olympics’ sponsorship deals and media rights, it left a gaping ideological and moral hole in an organization that continued to see itself as a force for good in the world. Having made its peace with commercialism, television, state power and elite sport, what made the Olympics any different from the other global sporting spectacles? Samaranch’s response was to reinvent Olympism by aligning it with some of the emergent concerns of post-Cold War international politics, such as gender equality, universal human rights and environmentalism. To this, his successors, Jacque Rogge and Thomas Bach, have added the Olympics’ role in promoting healthier, active lifestyles and raising levels of participation in sport, fighting their own war on drugs against the increasingly prevalent use of performance enhancing substances, and the claim that hosting the Games can leave a positive legacy of urban transformation. These are all worthy notions, and together they might plausibly add up to a new Olympic philosophy, but the reality of the Games is so far from the promise that it is hard to see it as a useful model at all.
In de Coubertin’s reading of the ancient Olympics, participants were all amateurs, politics was excluded, and the Olympic truce brought peace to the Hellenic world. None of this is entirely true.
So, what is left of modern Olympism? What kind of Olympic spirit do the Games now evoke? Can a commercial and highly politicized sporting spectacle possibly live up to the practical and moral claims made on its behalf? In an increasingly fragmented world, there is still a deep need for cosmopolitan festivals of a collective humanity. The Olympics, whatever their faults, are unquestionably this. More than that, it touches on the widespread sense that play and sport are a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and encoded in their rules and rituals is a better version of ourselves and our world. The Olympics might not always live up to these ideals, but the global sporting public still cherishes the notions it appears to represent. Most believe that international sport is a space in which an alternative vision of global politics and conflict can be imagined. The Olympic truce may not, practically, be up to much, but that such an idea, backed by the U.N., can exist at all is a precious thing.
Paris 2024 offers all this, alongside some important shifts in the way the Games are staged. It has built just two new major facilities and an Olympic village, located them in literally the poorest region in France, and made significant efforts to turn this into a balanced and more socially just regeneration program than many previous Olympic efforts. It has done so on the lowest budget for a Summer Games since Sydney 2000, and though some public money has been required for some of the infrastructure, the staging of the Games has been covered by sponsors, ticket sales and the IOC. Given that Tokyo 2020 cost more than $30 billion, keeping the tab down to around $9 billion is an achievement.
Above all, the global public is still thrilled and awed by Olympians. After three decades of open professionalism, the application of enormous amounts of public money to elite sports programs, not to mention significant technological advances in equipment, medicine and training, modern athletes have made themselves into extraordinary human beings, who are capable of extraordinary things. Records in athletics and swimming continue to tumble. Gymnasts and skaters are capable of moves more complex and challenging than previous generations. New, more viewer-friendly formats and modern camera technologies have made accessible the cool brilliance of archery and shooting. Across all of these sports, the Olympics are more diverse than they have ever been. They are, finally, in terms of competitions and events, gender-balanced and they have and continue to give a showcase to women’s sport and women athletes that they still rarely receive. In this regard, the Games, alongside the Paralympics, are one of the very few, perhaps the only occasion when a realistic portrait of humanity stares back at us from our screens. Is this enough to compensate for the shortcomings of the Olympics? Is it the material out of which a new version of the Olympic spirit can be fashioned? That is the challenge that faces the IOC, its hosts and stakeholders, and we, the global viewing public, who in the end decide whether or not to connect with and animate that spirit.
David Goldblatt is a British sports writer and the author of “The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.”
This story appears in the July-August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.