Five Ring Circus: Money, Power, and Politics at the Olympic Games

"Yes, it’s a mixture because it has eight different contributors plus Tomlinson and Whannel, who do the introduction and also write individual chapters. When it was published in 1984, it was pioneering to have a collection of essays by top scholars, looking at the commercialism of the Olympics and at the boycotts. It touched on subjects, although sometimes rather superficially, about which hardly anything had been written from a critical perspective. One of the contributors, Sam Ramsamy, was himself central to the boycotts of South Africa as an athlete and sports administrator in South Africa. There are chapters on the Workers’ Games and the Women’s Olympics. These were challenges to the Olympic industry way back in the 1920s, and at the time Five Ring Circus was published, they had been very under-researched and unrecognised. Both of these events, in their time, were more successful than the “real Olympics” until the IOC stepped in and said to the Women’s Olympics, ‘You can’t use the word Olympics, its ours’. The Workers’ Games petered out for a variety of reasons, but were enormously successful in Europe as an international sporting event while they lasted, and both attracted huge numbers of participants. “Espy covers the threat that posed to the IOC and the way the IOC then tried to bring under their wing all the Asian countries. That all fitted very nicely with Pierre de Coubertin’s plan of using the “sportification” of the world . . . as a civilizing influence” The women’s competitions in track and field were very extensive compared to the timid and deliberately restrictive way that the IOC organized women’s events in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. The official games had a very narrow range of events that women were allowed to participate in, because they were considered “too fragile” and all those kinds of arguments. So, this book is an excellent representation of the state of critical Olympic research at the time. A lot of these people, particularly Tomlinson and Whannel, went on to write very important books on their own or to edit other anthologies. So, I like this book because it shows where the current range of research on these issues came from. When I looked at this book and that one by Simpson and Jennings again in the last few weeks, I could see two things. First that they were pioneering these kinds of critiques. Second, that 30 or even 40 years later, some of their arguments and some of their voices have tragically just been silenced, ignored or neglected, so that we now have a situation where—although I wouldn’t say the Olympic industry is thriving, because there’s a lot of external threats to it—those who were critics, voices in the wilderness in the 1980s, still haven’t really had their voices heard and not as much has changed as all of us would have liked. Well, the Olympics were organized by Europe’s and UK’s elite. They were not the “common man’s games” and the amateur rule meant that in theory, anyway, you couldn’t devote your whole working life to training and getting paid for it because you weren’t meant to accept any money. There were certain categories of men, in particular in England, who were among the social elite, particularly those who had access to horses and could train for equestrian events and who could spend their leisure time practicing various forms of marksmanship involving guns or archery. Military men, particularly in Europe, excelled in the Olympics. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The average working man couldn’t integrate training for an Olympic sport into his working life, didn’t have time for it, and didn’t really have the same kinds of access to some sports that the more privileged classes did. That was one of the motivating forces for setting up the Workers’ Games. But there was also the concept of solidarity among the workers of the world, joining in a sporting event in friendly competition. It was a political act in many ways. Yes. Well, as the book explains, culture was the second pillar of the Olympic “movement”. Sport was the first and culture the second, and now we have environmentalism, which is a very recent addition. So, culture still is involved in that there are some art exhibits, not competitions. On the early Olympic program, on the sporting side, there were more than a dozen tests of marksmanship, maybe 20-something, some of which involved shooting pigeons, other birds or other live animals. They were very fond of shooting small things. Precisely."