The Politics of the Olympic Games

"Yes, Espy was taking more of a political science or political economy perspective. Although there’s some historical background, he really starts with 1944, because the Olympics were suspended during World War II (and World War I). Other researchers had written about the Nazi Olympics of 1936, which were infamous on a number of fronts, but this period from 1944 to 1979 when Espy was writing was under-researched and a lot of international political controversies took place in that period. He goes through every individual Olympics and the ramifications of the political background of each. He’s particularly interested in the “two Chinas” problem and the fact that Taiwan was not recognized. The IOC had a problem if it recognized China or Taiwan. China was upset if it recognized Taiwan and Taiwan was upset if it recognised China. I’m oversimplifying, but there were those kinds of controversies. There were all sorts of Cold War conflicts and so on: the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, which wasn’t a complete boycott, just a partial boycott. On the issue of sport as a force for good, previous presidents like Juan Antonio Samaranch liked to boast about the soft diplomacy that goes on behind the scenes. Espy didn’t talk about this, but China’s 2008 Olympics was a prime example where organizers were saying, “we’re talking to the Chinese officials and the Olympics will help bring democracy to China”, and all sorts of gross exaggerations that of course never materialized. So Espy is covering in a very comprehensive way other issues like South Africa, Apartheid and the boycotts involving New Zealand [when 29, mainly African countries refused to participate at the 1976 Olympics, when the IOC failed to ban New Zealand from taking part, after their rugby team had toured South Africa] and so on. He discusses the countries that conformed or failed to conform to those boycotts, as well as the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), which were set up by “emerging countries”, many in Asia. 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 fit very nicely with Pierre de Coubertin’s plan of using the “sportification” of the world and particularly, the sportification of Africa, since he saw sport, western sport, as a civilizing influence. So, in a similar way, the IOC members of the 1960s and 1970s were looking at Asia as new ground for sport, to bring these countries into their fold. The idea was to impose the Olympic model of sport all around the world, and they have pretty much succeeded in that. Yes, it’s more of a cover, and the current term for that, which I discuss extensively in my new book, is “sportswashing”, following the example of “greenwashing”, which is presenting various kinds of developments and city building and that kind of thing as environmentally friendly when it only just scrapes the surface of the requirements for environmental sustainability. With sportswashing, the goal of the leaders in these regimes is to bring world attention to the sporting events. For example, last year Belarus had over 100 International sporting events, and these were organized by International federations, the vast majority of which have a direct link to the IOC in that their sports are Olympic sports. So, the link to the Olympic industry is very clear, and from way back, from the periods that Espy was writing about, there were countries where it was sort of mutually decided, maybe implicitly rather than explicitly, that the IOC and that country would promote sportswashing to get world’s attention away from human rights abuses and focus it on to the pure and wholesome international sporting competition among the youth of the world. All this kind of rhetoric is meant to disguise the reality, which is very dire in most of these countries."