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The Anti-Olympics

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The Anti-Olympics jules boykoff THE ANTI-OLYMPICS alking along east Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver one crisp January morning in 2010, I came across a perplexing set of white panels on the outer flank of the refurbished Woodward’s building. WThe panels featured an explosion of repudiation: stark, black-lettered phrases like ‘hell no’, ‘i said no’, ‘no bloody way’, and ‘no way josé’. Four placards simply read ‘no’. Later I learned that this was a site-specific installation by Vancouver artist Ken Lum for Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery, challenging a ‘2010 Winter Games By-law’ passed by the City of Vancouver in the run-up to the Olympics. The by- law outlawed placards, posters and banners that did not ‘celebrate’ the 2010 Winter Games and ‘create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere’. The ordinance criminalized anti-Olympic signs and gave Canadian authorities the right to remove them from both public and private property. The following month I returned to Vancouver to see how anti-Olympic organizing was taking shape. Strolling near the Olympic Village in the days before the Games, one encountered a contradiction-laden mélange of genial sports enthusiasm and ostentatious surveillance state. The place was teeming with sprightly tourists, athletes, Olympics officials and journalists with cameras and press badges swinging from their necks; awash with teal, one of the perky, focus-group-tested colours of the 2010 Winter Games. At the same time, it felt like entering some sort of immaculate repression zone. Officers from the newly formed Vancouver Integrated Security Unit—headed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and comprising more than 20 policing agencies— hunkered together on every corner and patrolled the bustling footpaths around the False Creek inlet. Surveillance cameras were pegged to poles at regular intervals around the perimeter. Helicopters whirred new left review 67 jan feb 2011 41 42 nlr 67 overhead. cf-18 Hornet fighter jets zinged by. Ersatz Christo and Jeanne-Claude-style banners, also in Olympic teal, enveloped chain-link fences that channelled people into permissible zones while concealing chunks of so-called public space. Brawn and brass The Olympic Games has become the world’s greatest media and mar- keting event; huge corporations vie for association with the ‘Olympic brand’ in the hope of gaining a worldwide marketing audience of bil- lions. Somewhere between multinational corporation and global institution, the International Olympic Committee sits at the heart of a vast interlocking structure of national and international bodies, sport- ing associations and sponsoring firms; in recent decades the Games, Summer and Winter, have been receiving the blessing of the un, which ritually adopts a never-observed resolution on the Olympic Truce with every new Olympiad. The ioc weighs the bids for hosting the Games, put forward by the National Olympic Committees. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, where it is registered as a not-for-profitngo , and enjoy- ing tax exemptions wherever it touches down, the ioc made a profit of $383 million on the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, after routing a very substantial share of the $2.4 billion total revenue to other parts of the ‘Olympic Movement’. It is subject to no independent financial audit; the ultimate destination of much of the revenue that flows into its coffers remains mysterious, the salaries of ioc executives unreported.1 The modern Olympics are the brainchild of French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), an eccentric Anglophile who saw in the sport- ing culture of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School the magic formula for Britain’s imperial dominance.2 Here, in the mix of rigorous discipline with manly self-display, lay the means to reinvigorate the French nation 1 Tripp Mickle, ‘ioc cashes in on Beijing’, Sports Business Journal, 13 July 2009; Christopher Shaw, Five Ring Circus, Gabriola Island, bc 2008, p. 72. 2 ‘Arnold, the greatest educator of modern times, is more than any other respon- sible for the present prosperity and the prodigious expansion of his country. With him athletics penetrated a great public school and transformed it; and from the day on which the first generation fashioned by his hands was launched on the world, the British Empire had a new look’: Coubertin, ‘The Olympic Idea’, Discourses and Essays, Stuttgart 1967, p. 8; quoted in Ljubodrag Simonovic´, Fascism and Olympism, p. 14, available on the Cirque Minime website. boykoff: Anti-Olympics 43 after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Coubertin was a straight forward adherent to the Social Darwinism of his time: ‘The the- ory that all human races have equal rights leads to a line of policy which hinders any progress in the colonies’—‘the superior race is fully enti- tled to deny the lower race certain privileges of civilized life’. He was no less clear-cut on the Jewish Question: ‘clever and shrewd in business’, perhaps, but ‘deep in their hearts they remain Asians’ whose role in his- tory has been ‘insignificant’.3 His inspired move was to marry imperial athletics with the massive World Fairs of the time—the early Olympics actually took place as sideshows to the Fairs—and to add a topping of pseudo-classical hymns, banners and laurel leaves. In 1896 the ioc, with Coubertin as President, organized the first Games. From the outset, Thomas Cook was official Olympic travel agent; American sportswear entrepreneur, Albert G. Spalding, soon joined the ranks, thereby gaining plentiful opportunities for product placement. The Games were postponed during the greater display of manly virtue that erupted in 1914 and languished in the 1920s, though Winter Games were added in 1924. But Coubertin was delighted by the enthusiasm shown by Nazi Germany in its preparations for the Berlin Olympics of 1936: ‘illuminated with Hitler’s strength and discipline’, they should serve as a model for subsequent Games.4 Equally enthusiastic was Coubertin’s protégé, and later ioc President, the Chicago property tycoon Avery Brundage (1887–1975), who defied anti-fascist protests, telling a Madison Square Garden rally in 1936: ‘We can learn much from Germany. We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.’5 As ioc president from 1952–72, Brundage was an enthu- siast for the white-only teams of apartheid South Africa and had an 3 Pierre de Coubertin, ‘Histoire universelle’, vol. 2, p. 447. 4 Hans Joachim Teichler, ‘Coubertin und das Dritte Reich’, Sportswissenschaft, 1982, p. 12, quoted in Simonovic´, ‘Fascism and Olympism’, p. 3. 5 ‘Brundage extols Hitler’s regime’, New York Times, 5 October 1936. The 20,000-strong rally ended by singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ and the Horst-Wessel song. As he had told the Chicago Association of Commerce in 1929, Brundage looked forward to ‘the development of a new race of men, actuated by principles of sportsmanship learned on the playing field . a race physically strong, mentally alert and morally sound: a race not to be imposed upon.’ Cited in Maynard Brichford, ‘Avery Brundage and Racism’, University of Western Ontario paper, October 1998, p. 131. 44 nlr 67 evident fondness for Franco’s Spain, holding the ioc’s 1965 congress in Madrid where the Generalissimo himself read the opening speech. Brundage responded with fulsome praise for Franco’s excellent grasp of the principles of amateurism.6 Indeed Brundage’s favoured successor Juan Antonio Samaranch (1920–2010), the ioc president from 1980 to 2001, was a Falangist who regarded himself as ‘one hundred per cent Francoist’ up to the dictator’s death.7 The Games had been going through troubled times before Samaranch took over: the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City would be remembered for the Black Power salutes of the victorious us athletes, tear-gas traces lingering over the stadium as police brutalized protesting students out- side. Black African states organized anti-apartheid boycotts in 1972 and 76, and the massacre of the Israeli team and their Palestinian captors in a bungled operation by German police overshadowed the Munich Games. The response of Samaranch and his colleagues was to scale up the money by auctioning broadcast rights, proclaiming—of course— that politics has no place in sport. The 1984 ‘Reagan Olympics’ in Los Angeles set the trend: a globally televized feeding-frenzy for sponsoring corporations, with a Disney-designed official mascot. From this point on the ioc became the transnational giant that we know today, sailing on the vast streams of revenue generated by broadcasting contracts and by a corporate-sponsorship programme, top, which grants ‘The Olympic Partners’—Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Dow Chemicals, Visa, Panasonic—the rights to use the ioc’s trade-marked Five Rings and flood global markets with ‘authentic’ Olympic-brand merchandise. Inside the stadium, doping grew so prevalent that even the ioc was forced to take note and establish its own Ethics Commission. In tune with the times, recent Games have combined debt-fuelled credit bubbles with the oppor- tunity of a symbolic embrace by the ‘international community’. The 2004 Games in Athens incurred costs of nearly €7.2 billion, a significant 6 ‘Proclamation of Opening by the Head of the Spanish State, Generalissimo Franco’; and ‘Address by President Avery Brundage to 63rd Session of the ioc’, Bulletin of the International Olympic Committee, Lausanne 1965, pp. 64–66. 7 The son of a textile magnate, Samaranch married into old money and was rewarded in 1991 (by Felipe González) with an aristocratic title for his life’s work. See Andrew Jennings, ‘Why Juan Antonio’s right arm is more muscular than his left’, transparencyinsport.org; Dave Zirin, ‘Burying Juan Antonio Samaranch’, Huffington Post, 22 April 2010.
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