OLYMPIC GAMES

Between 1896 and 2004, Jews won 306 medals (137 gold, 79 silver, 90 bronze) in Olympic competition. (See Table: Jewish Olympic Medal Winners.) In addition, Alfred Hajos (Guttmann) of Hungary, a winner of Olympic swimming medals, was awarded a silver medal in architecture in 1924, and Ferenc Mezo (1885–1961) of Hungary received a 1928 gold medal in literature. As the official historian of the Olympic Games, Mezo wrote numerous articles and books on the subject. He served as a member of the International Olympic Committee and president of the Hungarian Olympic Committee.

[Jesse Harold Silver]

Olympic Games

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Olympic Games are an international sporting event held quadrennially in different venues. The date of inception remains a point of conjecture among historians, but it is generally accepted that the Olympic Games found their genesis in Olympia, Greece, in 776 BCE and survived in attenuated form until 393 BCE. Inspired by the ancient Greek festival, the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman who envisaged that the Games would foster a religion of patriotism by directing the new power of national identity into constructive and peaceful channels. Initially, only amateur athletes were permitted to compete in the Olympics; professional athletes were not allowed to compete until the 1970s when the amateurism requirements were extracted from the Olympic Charter. The revival of the Olympic Games was held in Athens, Greece. The Games attracted a relatively small competitive field, with about 240 athletes competing in 43 events.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the International Olympic Committee encountered an array of difficulties with the hosting of the Games. The subsequent two celebrations that followed the Athens Games failed to command popular support, partly because they were crossed with, and effectively eclipsed by, the World’s Fair Exhibitions in Paris (1900) and Saint Louis (1904). The 1908 Games, though originally awarded to Rome, were held in London. The majority of the competing countries selected national teams to participate in the London Games, and the athletes were paraded by nation at the opening ceremony. The Olympic Games had institutionalized the “nation” in international athletics. After the 1912 Olympic Games, held in Stockholm, the Olympic movement entered a period of upheaval. De Coubertin may have seen the Olympics as an agent of international peace in a world moving inexorably toward war, but the ideal of the Olympics as an event that could prevent war proved ill-founded. The Games scheduled for Berlin in 1916 were abandoned because of World War I, and two other Olympiads passed without Games in 1940 and 1944 as a result of World War II.

In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920 Games were awarded to Antwerp as a mark of respect for the Belgian people after the anguish that had been inflicted on them during the war. The 1920 opening ceremony was notable for the introduction of the Olympic flag, the release of doves as a symbol of peace, and the presentation of the athletes’ oath. The introduction of the flag, representing the unity of the five continents, and the symbolic release of doves also reflected the idyllic vision of the Olympic movement as standing for international peace and unity.

However, it was also in the interwar period that Olympic sport became symbolic of national struggle, with participants as representatives of their national groups. Throughout the twentieth century, John MacAloon argues, “a nascent athletic nationalism was already undermining the Olympic ideal” (1981, pp. 258–259). A notable instance of this was Adolf Hitler’s use of the 1936 Olympic Games to enhance his control over the German populace and legitimize Nazi culture. The opening ceremony designed for those games was a shrewdly propagandistic and brilliantly conceived charade that reinforced and mobilized the hysterical patriotism of the German masses. The Berlin Games have also become closely associated in the popular imagination with the African American athlete Jesse Owens. Against a background of Nazi efforts to manipulate the Games to demonstrate the racial and athletic superiority of the Aryan race, Owens won four gold medals at the first Olympic Games to be broadcast on a form of television. The Berlin Games demonstrated how the hosting of the Olympic Games could be manipulated to provide a benign and uncritical backdrop for the parade of national identity.

Another political incident involving African American athletes occurred at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Two African American track-and-field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved power salute on the victory podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” USA Olympics officials asserted that the athletes should not have used the Games as a platform to air their political grievances, and the two athletes were immediately suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic Village. Politics was also to cast its shadow over the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September. The terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes and one German police officer in an event that is conventionally referred to as the Munich Massacre.

The 1980 Olympics in Moscow were arguably the most political in the history of the Games and reflected the extremes of nationalism that had emerged as a result of the renewed cold war struggle. In 1980 the United States and sixty-four other Western nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics that year because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The boycott reduced the number of nations participating to only eighty, including only sixteen Western nations—the lowest number of nations to compete since 1956. The Soviet Union and fourteen Eastern bloc countries (Romania was the exception) retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

In the Olympic arena, encircled by flags of various nations, the political symbolism of sport is most evident. Young nations make use of the nationalist symbolism of sport to gain recognition on the world stage; established nations do so to demonstrate their strength and prowess. The media make use of sport to construct a “battle” among nations, giving individuals a public spectacle at which they can cheer on their compatriots. The central role of the Olympics as a forum where new nations can gain acceptance is also clear from the number of nations taking part. In Antwerp in 1920, twenty-nine nations competed; by the Athens Olympics of 2004, that number had risen spectacularly to 201. The importance of the Olympic Games to cultural unity and national identity lies not only within the event as staged but in the sporting occasion as an international spectacle. Beyond the demonstration of physical strength and skill, Olympic sport as collective ritual, highlighting concepts of leadership and heroism, has become part of the language of nationalism.

SEE ALSO Aryans; Black September; Entertainment Industry; Hitler, Adolf; Nationalism and Nationality; Nazism; Racism; Sports; Sports Industry; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coakley, Jay, and Eric Dunning, eds. 2000. Handbook of Sports Studies. London: Sage.

Cronin, Mike. 1999. Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer, and Irish Identity since 1884. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press.

Guttmann, Allen. 1984. The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.

Guttmann, Allen. 2002. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, 2nd edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hill, Christopher R. 1996. Olympic Politics. Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press.

Holt, Richard. 1993. Sport and the British: A Modern History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Houlihan, Barrie. 1994. Sport and International Politics. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

MacAloon, John J. 1981. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, David. 2003. Athens to Athens: The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, 1896–2004. Edinburgh: Mainstream.

David M. Doyle

OLYMPIC GAMES.

The modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896 as a result of the enthusiasm of the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His vision, based on the sporting models of elite British and American schools and colleges, was of a peaceful sporting and artistic competition between nations. At the outset the games were closed to professional athletes and only amateurs could compete. This was a core principle at the heart of the Olympic movement that would not be changed until the early 1990s. The beginnings in Athens were small: 14 nations competed in 43 events. By 2004, when the Games returned to Athens, over 10,000 athletes representing 203 nations took part in 300 events. In the years preceding World War I, the Olympic Games struggled to establish themselves because they were linked to, and effectively overshadowed by, the World Expositions in Paris (1900) and Saint Louis (1904). By the time of the last pre–World War I Games, a level of stability had been found. In 1912 in Stockholm, 28 nations came together to compete in 102 events. The number of athletes had risen from 241 in Athens in 1896 to 2,407.

INTERWAR GAMES

World War I marked a period of change for the Olympic movement. Its administrative body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), moved its headquarters from Paris to Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Games planned for Berlin in 1916 were abandoned. In the wake of the damage Europe suffered in the war, the 1920 Games were awarded to Antwerp to honor the suffering that had been inflicted on the Belgian people. The 1920 opening ceremony was notable for the introduction of the Olympic flag, the release of doves as a symbol of peace, and the presentation of the Athletes' Oath. The Olympic movement had, by virtue of staging the Antwerp Games, proved it had survived the war. The introduction of the flag, representing the unity of the five continents, and the symbolic release of doves also demonstrated that the Olympic movement considered itself a harbinger of peace and unity for the nations of the world. Such beliefs were, however, difficult to sustain. The more the Olympics grew in size and scale, the more readily were they used by nations in pursuit of their own ideological purposes.

In 1924 the Winter Olympics were introduced. These took place in Chamonix, France, and attracted sixteen countries competing in sixteen alpine events. The Winter Olympics have historically been dominated by European nations. Of the nineteen Winter Games that had been staged by 2002, only six had taken place outside of Europe. The medal winners for the winter sports have also been primarily European. Although the Japanese, Americans, and Canadians have performed well, it is the Nordic countries that have traditionally dominated.

In 1931 the Summer (Berlin) and Winter Games (Garmisch-Partenkirchen) were awarded to Germany. Although the German economy under the Weimar Republic lacked political stability, the other bidding city, Barcelona, was in an equally parlous state. The members of the IOC could not have foreseen the rise to power of the Nazi Party, and although there were debates about boycotting the Berlin Games, these were muted. The 1936 Berlin Games were dominated by the Nazi machine and every aspect was meticulously planned. Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia recorded the event and her footage was transmitted live to a series of receivers across Berlin, creating the first televised Games. The Berlin Games have become associated in many people's minds with the African American athlete Jesse Owens. Against a background of Nazi efforts to use the Games to demonstrate the supremacy of "Aryan" athletes, Owens won four gold medals. The Berlin Games demonstrated how the Olympics could be harnessed for political purposes. Although no host nation would ever again go to such extremes, the Games' political potential had been illustrated for all to see.

POSTWAR GAMES

World War II resulted in the abandonment of the 1940 Games, set for Tokyo, and those planned for Helsinki in 1944. The first postwar Games were staged in London in 1948, when rationing was still in force and much of the city was still being cleared of bomb damage. Although attended by athletes from fifty-nine nations, the IOC banned Germany, Italy, and Japan for their part in the war. As the IOC's remit became increasingly global, the Summer Games were staged in various nations across the continents. Of the fourteen summer Olympics held between 1952 and 2008, only six were held in Europe. The IOC itself has remained in Lausanne, and its postwar presidents, with the exception of the American Avery Brundage, have all been European nationals. The growing commercial and political power of the IOC has meant that many international sporting organizations have also chosen Switzerland as their administrative base. So although the Olympic Games are staged across the world, the IOC's location, elite personnel, and impact remain dominantly European.

Germany returned to the Olympic Games at Helsinki in 1952 and competed as a unified team until 1972, when it divided along political lines into two separate teams: the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The experience of Germany is indicative of one of the gravest problems for the Olympic Games in the years after 1945: the Cold War. Growing Cold War tensions produced an American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games (in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), and a reciprocal Eastern bloc boycott of the 1984 Los AngelesSummer Games. The need for each of the major sporting nations to prove its athletic (and therefore ideological) supremacy also led to widespread use of intensive training methods and drug abuse, particularly by the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. The 1972 Summer Games in Munich were also darkened by political activity when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped members of the Israeli wrestling team from the Olympic Village. The event culminated in a German attempt to free the hostages at Munich's Fuerstenfeldbruk airfield. The attempt failed and five of the eight Palestinians were killed, as were all of the Israeli hostages. IOC President Avery Brundage led a memorial service in the Olympic stadium and committed the Olympic movement to a policy of distancing itself from political events, stating "the Games must go on."

AFTER THE COLD WAR

The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s meant that the Olympic movement had to adapt rapidly to a wide range of new nations. At the 1992 Albertville Winter Games in France, the last to be held in the same year as the Summer Games, the former Soviet states competed under the title of the Unified Team and under the flag of the Olympic movement. The changing geopolitics of that era were also reflected in the first unified German team since 1972, in separate teams for the Baltic states, and in the wake of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in representation for Croatia and Slovenia.

In addition to dealing with the realities of post–Cold War politics, from the mid-1980s onward the Olympic movement also began adapting to the increasingly commercialized world of sport. Under the presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC underwent a series of radical changes. In 1992 it removed any vestiges of its earlier ban on professional athletes and from 1984 onward sold the commercial rights for the sponsorship of the Games and the use of the five-ringed Olympic logo. It also began selling exclusive television rights to the Winter and Summer Games for ever-increasing amounts of money. By 2004 the IOC's income was estimated at $2,236 million from television rights, $1,339 million from sponsorship, $608 million from ticket sales, and $81 million from product licensing.

By the time of the Athens Summer Games, the IOC was, without question, the single most powerful sporting organization in the world. It had successfully adapted de Coubertin's idea for an international sporting competition, charted its way through a plethora of complex political situations, adapted to new media technologies, adopted commercial models, and applied them to the selling of its sporting events.

See alsoCold War; Riefensthal, Leni.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guttmann, Allen. The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement. New York, 1984.

——. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games. Urbana, Ill., 1992.

Hill, Christopher. Olympic Politics: From Athens to Atlanta. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 1996.

MacAloon, John J. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago, 1981.

Miller, David. From Athens to Athens: The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC. Edinburgh, 2003.

Mike Cronin

OLYMPIC GAMES

Held for the first time in the modern era in Athens, Greece, in 1896, and then every four years until the sequence was interrupted by World War I, the Games were a nineteenth-century creation inspired by ancient Greek precedents. By the 1912 Games, held in Stockholm, Sweden, the organizers of the Games had begun to invent its modern traditions, but the Games still lacked the scale and most of the symbols associated with them later in the century.

The 1896 Games are often described as a continuation of the ancient Olympic Games, held from the eighth century b.c.e. (the year 776 b.c.e. is canonical) until either 393 or 424 c.e., when the pagan cults associated with the Games were suppressed by the Christianized Roman Empire. In fact, though the modern Games were inspired by the example of the ancient ones, and by the broader respect in which prewar Europe held ancient Greece, the differences between the ancient Games and those of 1896 are at least as important as their similarities.

The modern Games are, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, an "invented tradition," one of many institutions—including sports such as baseball—that were either "refounded" or made instantly traditional in the decades before World War I. These institutions filled a social need for new civic religions, a need caused by the changes associated with economic growth, the rise of mass politics, and the decline of the aristocratic elite.

Though credit for the modern Games is often given solely to Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) of France, he built on and benefited from a heterogeneous array of precedents, experiments, and efforts of other enthusiasts. The Cotswold "Olympick Games" were held from 1662 to 1852 in Britain, the Greek poet Alexandros Soutsos suggested reviving the Games in 1833, and a variety of so-called Olympic competitions were either planned or held across Europe during the nineteenth century. The most important of these were the Zappas Games, held in Athens in 1859, 1870, and 1875. But, like the other competitions, the Zappas Games were not sufficiently successful to be self-sustaining.

The modern Games began in the English village of Much Wenlock. There, in 1841, Dr. William Penny Brookes founded the Agricultural Reading Society to educate the local agricultural laborers. In 1859, the Society held the first Wenlock Olympics, which were followed by National Olympic Games in 1866. By this time, Brookes was corresponding with like-minded "founders" across Europe, including Coubertin. Inspired by Brookes, Coubertin urged the refounding of the Games at the International Athletic Congress in June 1894. This led to the formation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), with seventy-nine delegates from twelve nations, and to a decision to hold the first Games in Athens in 1896.

For reasons that remain unclear, Coubertin then lost interest in the Games for a time. Much of the organizational work for 1896 was done by the first president of the IOC, the Greek novelist Demetrios Vikelas. But Coubertin's backing was essential to the success of the Games. Coubertin came from an aristocratic family and was educated in a classical Catholic tradition that emphasized Greek philosophy. Like many contemporaries, he was humiliated by his country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871. He believed that France had lost because it was effeminate and excessively intellectual. Prussia's Turner organizations, which combined fervent nationalism with a form of gymnastics, gave it the physical culture that France lacked. This belief was fortified by Coubertin's respect for Britain, which was expanding its already vast empire while modernizing its domestic political system. Britain was adapting to the new era; France had obviously failed to do so.

Coubertin found the secret of Britain's success in the British system of public—in American terms, private—schools. He believed that the sporting ethic taught in these schools trained Britain's leaders. The Olympics would create this kind of aristocracy in all nations. But the Olympic aristocracy would be one suitable for a democratic age. It would be open to all, with membership granted on the basis of talent and effort. This aristocracy would become modern knights: playing by the rules as an example to others, competing for the love of the game and for female applause, and inspiring healthy patriotism and mutual respect for different nations in all competitors and spectators. While Coubertin wanted to

promote peace, he was not a pacifist: he believed that if the Olympic spirit prevailed, wars would not disappear, but would be less frequent and more humane.

The first Games were a success: three hundred athletes from thirteen nations competed in nine sports. The next two Games, in 1900, in Paris, and in 1904, in St. Louis, were near-disasters. The Paris Games were poorly organized; the St. Louis Games were so remote from Europe that most of the competitors were Americans. The Games were saved by the unofficial but professionally run Athens Games of 1906 and the London Games of 1908. In 1912, 2,500 athletes (including 57 women) from twenty-eight nations competed in thirteen sports. While medal winners continued to come primarily from the United States, Europe, and the British Empire, the future of the Games seemed assured.

While gold, silver, and bronze medals were first awarded in 1904, the 1906 and 1908 Games were—apart from those of 1896—the most important of the era. It was in 1906 that the athletes first entered the stadium in national teams; before then, they had competed as individuals. The 1908 Games, for their part, witnessed a series of nationalistic disputes between the Americans, eager to show their superiority on British soil, and the host nation, equally eager to ensure they retained pride of place. These Games thus proved that the Olympics had become a forum for competitive nationalism. This became increasingly important when the Games invented new traditions and expanded, both in scale and with the addition of the Winter Games, in the interwar years and after 1945.

See alsoAthens; Philhellenic Movement; Red Cross; Sports.

bibliography

Guttmann, Allen. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games. 2nd ed. Urbana, Ill., 2002.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1983. Reprint 1992.

MacAloon, John J. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origin of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago, 1981.

Wallechinsky, David. The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Athens 2004 Edition. Wilmington, Del., 2004.

Young, David C. The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival. Baltimore, Md., 1996.

Ted R. Bromund

O·lym·pi·an / əˈlimpēən; ōˈlim-/ • adj. 1. associated with Mount Olympus in northeastern Greece, or with the Greek gods whose home was traditionally held to be there. ∎  resembling or appropriate to a god, esp. in superiority and aloofness: the court is capable of an Olympian detachment.2. relating to the ancient or modern Olympic Games.• n. 1. any of the twelve Greek gods regarded as living on Olympus. ∎  a person of great attainments or exalted position.2. a competitor in the Olympic Games.