Power Games. Jules BoykoffЧитать онлайн книгу.
would be conjecture to attribute Brundage’s obstinacy to personal resentment at losing to Thorpe in Stockholm. After all, in one letter he wrote, “Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes of all time, we were on the same Olympic team and I was subsequently American all-around champion, so that I naturally have a very friendly feeling toward him and would be happy to please him if it could be done.”196 In another letter he suggested, “Everyone has great sympathy for Thorpe,” so “instead of wasting time and energy on a couple of medals, whose intrinsic value is probably not more than $3.00 or $4.00 each, that you take up a cash collection for him, to which I and many others will be happy to contribute.”197 More likely Brundage’s opposition to restoring the medals emerged from his dogmatic commitment to amateurism, which for him was “an abstract, fixed quality that does not alter or change from day to day.”198 In the years ahead, Brundage’s “fixed” version of amateurism would be challenged and ultimately overturned.
But the early years of the Games are all about the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Thanks to his indefatigable vim, the Olympics were destined to be more than just a footnote on the page of history. He had a flair for the symbolic and a knack for the spectacular that lasted to the very end. In his will, he left clear instructions to slice his heart from his chest after he died and entomb it in Olympia. His wish was granted on March 26, 1938, when his heart was ceremoniously ensconced in a marble stele meters from the ancient stadium.199 Still Coubertin’s vision for the Games abounded with contradictions —peace and good will, bound up with sexism, racism, and class privilege. In response, sports-minded feminists and leftists would soon organize viable, vibrant alternatives.
“Will war someday shatter the Olympic framework?” Baron Pierre de Coubertin wondered in 1913. He answered his own question with plenty of bombast: “Olympism did not reappear within the context of modern civilization in order to play a local or temporary role. The mission entrusted to it is universal and timeless. It is ambitious. It requires all space and time.”1 The following summer, however, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a sequence of events that careened into World War I. Coubertin enlisted in the French military despite his advancing age (he was in his early 50s) and was assigned to the country’s propaganda service. Because the Baron believed the IOC should not be “led by a soldier,” he temporarily handed over the reins to his trusted colleague Baron Godefroy de Blonay.2 Once the war broke out, the IOC moved its headquarters from Paris to Lausanne, in neutral Switzerland.
World War I forced the cancellation of the Sixth Olympiad, which had been scheduled to culminate in 1916 at Berlin. But the Baron proved correct when he maintained that when it came to the Olympic Games, “war can merely delay, not stop, its advancement.”3 Sure enough, the Olympics returned after the Great War, to Antwerp in 1920. Having survived German invasion during the war, Belgian organizers played politics, declining to invite Germany and its wartime allies Austria and Hungary; the IOC looked the other way.4 Germany wouldn’t return to the Olympic fold until 1928. Russia was also absent in 1920 because of its recent revolution and the fighting that ensued.
For the first time, Coubertin’s five-ring Olympic flag flew overhead.5 The flag proved popular with athletes—so popular that many pilfered them as souvenirs. Coubertin wrote, “Unfortunately, the Police were on guard: arrests, trials, consular interventions, followed.”6 Another first: athletes took a symbolic oath, pledging allegiance to the Olympic spirit. Coubertin and the IOC oversaw the proceedings from their headquarters in Switzerland.7
Antwerp organizers had a mere year to prepare for the Olympics. As a consequence, many facilities, like the main stadium, were only partly built, and interest from everyday Belgians was minimal. Coubertin tried to deflect criticism, chalking it up to “a crotchety journalist” here and “a professional spoilsport” there. He insisted that the Games were “held with a mastery, a perfection, and a dignity matched by the strenuous and persevering efforts of its organizers.”8
Perhaps unsurprisingly, nationalism flared up at the Games. After a hard-fought water polo match between England and Belgium, the crowd booed and hissed the British national anthem. The heckling continued as the monarchs in attendance filed out of the arena. British Olympic officials lodged a complaint for what they described as a “national insult,” urging further exploration of the matter.9 Media accounts routinely adopted a nationalistic frame, echoing the prevailing spirit.10 American athletes hitched a ride to the Games aboard military vessels. Upon their return home, they complained bitterly of “the treatment they received at the hands of foreigners” in the Olympic city. Some athletes claimed that conditions in Antwerp were so terrible that they almost opted to withdraw entirely from the Games. They alleged Belgians “displayed the greatest hostility to the competing Americans and created feelings which greatly hampered the work of the men.”11
“Men” was the operative word. The Antwerp Games highlighted the lopsided gender relations that were typical of sports of the era. Twenty-two female athletes had taken part in the 1900 Olympics, and by Antwerp that number had climbed to sixty-three. But as a percentage of overall Olympic participants, this translated to a minuscule upward blip from 2.2 percent to 2.4 percent over the twenty-year period.12 Women’s participation had essentially flatlined. They were still not allowed to participate in track and field at the Antwerp Games. For that they would have to wait until the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.
In the early 1900s a worldwide women’s movement was demanding political inclusion, with some success. In 1906, Finland granted women full voting rights, followed in subsequent years by Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Georgia, and Luxembourg. The United States passed the Nineteenth Amendment to its Constitution in 1920, granting women full voting rights in that country. The times were changing, but they weren’t changing the Baron. Behind the scenes, some IOC members were quietly moving to expand women’s participation, but Coubertin was implacable, angling for the continued marginalization of women’s sports. After the 1912 Stockholm Games, he and many of his IOC colleagues believed “an Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”13 Other members of the Olympic family who wished to keep the lineage patrilineal included the Americans James Sullivan and Avery Brundage. But as we shall see, many condemned the exclusion of women.
The 1924 Olympics were awarded to Paris as a shout-out to Coubertin for his decades of dedication to the Olympic cause. The Baron had announced he would retire as IOC president after the Games, perhaps in part to ensure that the Olympics ended up in France, but perhaps also to fend off accusations of an “Olympic monarchy.”14 Coubertin had sent a letter to his IOC brethren notifying them of his impending resignation following the 1924 Games and urging them to award the Olympics to Paris. “At this moment when the reviver of the Olympic Games judges his personal task to be nearly at an end,” he wrote, “no one will deny that he is entitled to ask that a special gesture should be made in favor of his native city, Paris.” The IOC granted this “special gesture,” completing what Coubertin dubbed in his memoirs “a masterly coup d’etat!”15
But politics jeopardized his “masterly coup.” In 1923 the French government sent troops into Germany to enforce war reparations, raising the specter of another armed conflict. Moreover, in what was becoming a regular headache for the IOC, elected officials in the host city challenged the use of public funds on the Olympics. In March 1922, the Paris City Council voted to contribute only 1 million francs to the Games instead of the expected 10 million. But the Chamber of Deputies eventually came through with the funds, ensuring Coubertin’s dream.16 Still, the Baron wasn’t taking any chances. With the possibility of war, European economic collapse, or simple underfunding endangering the Paris Games, he had quietly forged a back-up plan with organizers in Los Angeles who were eager to debut as hosts of the Games. While the backdoor