By JAMES MARKIN
Last month, the Paris 2024 Olympics began amid counter-protests. Working-class people around the world are concerned about the impact of the Olympics on local communities and the hypocrisy of allowing the Israeli team to participate while banning Russia and Belarus.
Indeed, the Olympic movement has a long history of reactionary politics. The movement was founded by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in order to advance French militarism. Coubertin’s idea was that sporting competition would raise the physical abilities of the French upper classes and in so doing improve the quality of French military officers. He even invented the sport of modern pentathlon explicitly as a way to train skills that he saw as necessary for a cavalry officer. Due to this motivation, Coubertin also dismissed women and women’s sports, arguing that the role of women in the Olympics was only to have sons and crown the medalists with olive wreaths. However, Coubertin’s militarist and chauvinist Olympics were not the only emergent international sporting movement at the time.
Indeed, the Olympic Movement was only one of several movements competing to form new international sporting competitions. The large Socialist Workers Sport International (SASI), affiliated with the social democratic workers movement and the smaller Red Sport International (Sportinern), affiliated with the Communist movement, held rival events, known as Workers Olympiads and Spartakiads respectively. Both events promoted socialist politics and had a goal of promoting working-class independence in sports.
The politics of the events also reflected the broader movements they were connected with. The SASI reflected the reformist outlook of social democracy while the Sportintern came to reflect the Stalinist politics of the Soviet Union. However, unlike the Olympics, which promoted militarism and crude nationalism, both SASI and the Sportintern promoted internationalism and the idea of worker-athletes from all over the world coming together in friendly (but intense) competition.
The contrast between the Olympic Movement and the workers’ sports movements could not have been starker. Indeed, in 1936, the year that Hitler hosted the Olympics in Berlin, an Olimpiada Popular was proposed in Barcelona to counter the Nazi games. While the Berlin Olympiad was dreamed up by Goebbels to highlight the might of fascist Germany, the Popular Olympics highlighted international solidarity against fascism, as well as the struggle against imperialism by organizing teams for nations that had not yet achieved independence.
While the naming of the “Olimpiada Popular” echoed the recent formation of the “popular fronts” in Spain and France, which undermined the idea of workers’ independence through collaboration with political parties of the capitalist class, the event carried the torch of the workers’ sports movement. Unfortunately, the organizers of the Olimpiada Popular were forced to cancel the event due to the uprising by reactionary military forces. Nevertheless, hundreds of worker-athletes stayed behind in Catalonia to help organize battalions to fight the pro-fascist rebellion.
Ultimately, following a final joint Workers Olympiad/Spartakiad in 1937, both SASI and the Sportintern passed into history; the Soviet Union dissolved the Sportintern during Stalin’s great purge, and SASI did not remerge after the carnage of World War II. Ultimately, the Soviet Union, which had previously boycotted the Olympics, decided to join the Olympic Movement and participated for the first time in the 1952 games in Helsinki.
Steadily increasing commercialism
With competing working-class events having faded into history, the Olympics have only revealed their orientation towards the capitalist class more and more openly. In the lead-up to the 1968 Mexico City games, the Mexican ruling PRI party decided to crush the student protest movement in order to give the impression of “social peace” during the games. This led to the Tlatelolco massacre on Oct. 2, 1968, when police, in continuous contact with the CIA, opened fire on student demonstrators at Tlatelolco plaza in Mexico City. This brutal shooting killed hundreds of students and injured thousands, ultimately crushing the protest movement just in time for the games, as the CIA and Mexican government had wanted. These games are now more famous for the Black Power protest of U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, which represented the positive political potential of international sports.
Since then, the games have only gotten more and more commercialized, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) now levies a back-breaking series of demands against any potential host city. During the 1976 Montreal summer games, the city was forced to spend $1.5 billion in order to build the infrastructure that the IOC demanded. This princely sum was so huge that it ended up taking around 30 years for Montreal to pay it off.
The fiasco of the 1976 games was so damaging to the Olympic brand that the 1978 games, which were supposed to be hosted in Denver, ended up being called off. The venue was moved to Austria instead following immense public pressure led by environmental activists in Colorado.
This is why, according to Olympics scholar Jules Boykoff, in 1984, the mayor of Los Angeles, looked to corporate America for help with the funding, which was the first time the Olympics relied on big money donors to sponsor the majority of the event. This “breakthrough” resulted in the IOC’s Olympic Partner Program, which has since given major corporations like Proctor and Gamble, Visa, Samsung, Toyota, and Coca Cola huge influence and control over the Olympic Movement.
Environmental & social justice criticisms of the Paris events
The issue of cost, lack of transparency, and corporate control are still very much at play when it comes to this year’s Olympiad in Paris. Indeed, despite the aid of these major corporations, activists have demonstrated that around 10 billion euros of public funds have been spent on the Paris games, including on construction projects like the athletes’ village and aquatic center. The activist group Saccage24 is skeptical that the athletes’ village can be converted to practical and desirable housing, as the Parisian city administration claims it will do, and points out that the plan to convert the aquatic center into a public pool intends to put this facility under private management.
A bigger issue with this new construction is the displacement it has caused for local working-class Parisians. The construction of the Olympic village required the destruction of a workers‘ hostel, three schools, a public garden, and two apartment blocks. In addition, the “media village” was constructed in the L’Aire des Vents Park, which violated European environmental rules. These new construction projects also came with the forced removal of unhoused people, who were bused to other parts of France, and the erection of massive new urban security infrastructure—which has the potential to be used against the working population of the city when the games are done.
In the same vein, the IOC’s bold claims that Paris 2024 is “the most green Olympics ever” have proven to be a mirage. One source of the claim was the integration of “self-cooling” technology into the athletes’ village. The idea of this technology was that it would prevent the need for traditional air-conditioning systems and reduce electricity consumption. However, with Paris in the midst of a heat wave, delegations have been purchasing portable AC units for their athletes. This has undermined the environmental motivation for the self-cooling systems and raised fairness concerns, given that wealthier countries are more able to afford the AC units than poorer ones. Environmentalists have also pointed out that the IOC has sponsorship arrangements with major polluters like Air France, Toyota, and the steel company ArcelorMittal, which undermines a lot of their environmentalist rhetoric.
The Olympics has begun to become synonymous with these kinds of unpopular changes to the urban landscape of host cities, which has spawned an international anti-Olympic movement along with its own “Anti-Olympics, Anti-Poverty Torch,” which has been handed off between anti-Olympic campaign groups in Vancouver, London, Sochi, Rio, Pyeongchang, Tokyo, and now Paris.
The games have also become the spotlight of criticism due to the fact that Israeli athletes were allowed to participate even as Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian people. The IOC denied Palestinian requests to ban Israel from the games, despite agreeing to similar requests to ban Belarus and Russia. While the banning of Russia and Belarus from the games is merited, given Russia’s brutal and murderous invasion of Ukraine with Belarusian support, the rank hypocrisy of the IOC is clear, especially when it comes to Belarus. Given U.S. and British support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, should the U.S. and Britain not also be banned from the games alongside Belarus? The decisions of the IOC clearly reflect a bias towards the politics of the European capitalist class, which it ultimately represents.
Toward a working-class-led movement in sports
Despite the many issues that the Olympics both face and cause, workers all around the world cherish the games, and they serve as a moment to celebrate athletes, even in sports that normally are overlooked. As sports ultimately are a universal celebration of human potential and accomplishment, this kind of international moment to celebrate sports is certainly positive.
However, the many problems with the Olympic Movement scream out for an international movement that is more democratically accountable to the residents of the cities that host the games, as opposed to major international corporations. Some critics have even suggested that to minimize the waste of constructing new Olympic facilities, the Olympics should build its own permanent Olympic village while going forward.
Although this might help with some of the issues around urban development, it does not get to the heart of what is rotten about the Olympics. What is needed is an international sporting movement less like the Olympics of today and more like the Sportintern and SASI of the 1920s and ’30s. It would be a sporting movement in which the voices of ordinary working-class people have more weight than the opinions of mega-corporations and murderous governments, mediated through unaccountable IOC bureaucrats.
Only through this kind of working-class-led movement can sports really be celebrated without having the celebration tainted by the stench of gentrification and imperial violence. Building such an international workers’ movement, however, will require mass workers’ organizations that do not currently exist. Such a project is deeply connected with the continued fight for workers’ class independence in the political landscape and the trade unions.
