Reading the Olympic Games is a complex and potentially exhausting task:
twenty-eight sports, 300 events, over 200 countries and 10,000 athletes
offer no shortage of narratives. Host governments, the international media,
global NGOs and local protestors of every kind increasingly struggle to
shape and mould those stories, to cast the condensed meaning of the Games
into a moment or a message that suits their purposes. But a little
pre-tournament training can build stamina, broaden one’s view and arm one
against the hyperbole, myth-peddling and spin that will be coming from every
quarter.
All-round conditioning is provided by David Miller’s The Official History of
the Olympic Games and the IOC. It is a hybrid programme. On first glance it
looks ready for the coffee table, lavishly illustrated in colour and padded
out with long lists of Olympic records of all kinds. However, unlike most
illustrated books and nearly all official histories of sporting
organizations, it contains a remarkably concise, hard-nosed account of both
the Games themselves and the century of international politics and business
that has shaped and sustained them. It is a shame, therefore, that the small
print and large format pages make it so unappealing. One wonders if this was
a strategy to slip such a no-nonsense account of Olympic politics past the
censors of the International Olympic Commitee (IOC).
Miller has brought his book (originally published in 2003) up to date with
accounts of Athens, the hullabaloo of preparations for Beijing and the
opening gambits of the London 2012 saga to come. He has also added a new
introduction, in which he tackles some of the most contentious issues facing
the Olympic movement. For example, what is the relationship between elite
sport and mass participation? The correlations between the immensely high
cost of hosting the Games and sustaining a professional cadre of
inspirational athletes and producing a healthier, happier active population
are thin at best. Given that the Olympics have come to wield such
considerable influence as one of the world’s few genuinely cosmopolitan
festivals, how representative, accountable and transparent is the IOC that
holds them in trust for the rest of us? Not very, not at all and not enough
are the answers. Above all Miller and the IOC are worried about drugs. The
IOC has been forced to recognize their pervasive and entrenched presence in
late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century sport, whether administered
through state programmes or black markets, arranged by management or
individuals.
Once warmed up, more event-specific training is required, and for this we can
turn to Xu Guoqi’s Olympic Dreams: China and sports, 1895–2008, which offers
an overview of modern Chinese sports history. The central narrative of the
book is the interplay between the forces of tradition and modernization and
of nationalism and internationalism in the meaning and making of Chinese
sport. The arrival of Western sports in the late nineteenth century was
understood as both a threat to indigenous cultures and emblematic of
modernity – which to many was China’s only salvation from Western imperial
dominance. By the early decades of the twentieth century both Communists and
nationalists looked to sport to discipline and harden the nation for the
travails that awaited, and to represent the nation in international
competition.
The key moments in this history, at least those covered in the greatest depth,
are the diplomatic dispute with Taiwan over representation in international
sports bodies, the course of Mao’s ping-pong diplomacy and the long
international campaign to win the hosting rights to the Olympics. Guoqi is,
however, a much less reliable guide to domestic sport and politics. The
urban sports culture of the inter-war era and the disastrous impact of the
Cultural Revolution on sport, for example, receive a fraction of the
attention lavished on diplomatic history. Football, which has become without
question the most important domestic sport, barely merits any mention at
all. This is a shame, for the sport provides a window on both Chinese
nationalism – witness the anti-Japanese riots at the Asian Cup in 2006 – and
the shadowlands of the new Chinese economy; Chinese professional football is
notoriously corrupt.
Guoqi ends by asking which of the previous Olympic Games offer the closest
parallels to Beijing. He suggests three: Berlin 1936, the granddaddy of all
politicized Olympics, in which a rising authoritarian power seized the
opportunity to take gargantuan global showmanship to a new level; Mexico
City 1968, during which an authoritarian state brazenly crushed domestic
political protest in sight of the Olympic Village, only for this
“non-political” Olympics to be historically redefined by athletes making a
political protest from the medal podium; or Seoul 1988, in which the
Olympics served as a coming-out party for an insular society, celebrating a
successful process of capitalist development and helping secure through
intentional engagement both domestic democratization and a more stable set
of diplomatic relationships.
One thing that Beijing will not be is a new version of Berlin. For a Berlin,
beyond the über-bunting and the schlock-camp stage dressing, you need an
ideology of steel and people who believe it. The Chinese Communist Party
might have a plan and an agenda, maybe even a world view, but it checked out
on ideology a long time ago. The anodyne evasiveness of Beijing’s official
slogan – “One world, one dream” – is testament to this.
Mexico City looks a better bet. In a reprise of Tommy Smith and John Carlos’s
blackpower salute, athletes might take the opportunity to protest over any
number of Chinese foreign-policy indiscretions or domestic human-rights
issues; a number of NGOs have encouraged them to do so, while the Chinese
authorities have tried to stop them by getting them to sign gagging
agreements. On the other hand, the Mexican Army’s slaughter of student
protesters ten days before the Games is unlikely to be matched by a similar
incident in Tiananmen Square – though it is not impossible that the Chinese
state may have to repeat the kind of community policing we saw earlier this
year in Tibet.
Seoul 1988 is the optimist’s choice: a well-executed, television-friendly
affair in which all the really messy politics was carried out at a decent
interval from the Games. But the essential domestic motors of Korean
democratization – an organized working class and broad-based student
movement – are not present in China. Its most serious political challenges
from below come from secessionist, ethnic minorities and the desperate mob
into which its still impoverished peasants and migrant proletariat can be
transformed. China’s diplomatic reach is already global; the question
remains how China will use that reach.
Clearly, placing Beijing in its proper context demands some cross-training.
This has arrived in the shape of Rebecca Jenkins’s The First London
Olympics, 1908 and Janie Hampton’s The Austerity Olympics: When the Games
came to London in 1948. The comparisons they make available are
illuminating. Beijing 2008 has been twenty years in the making, and
accompanied by an infrastructural and architectural orgy that speaks of
grand and long-term ambitions. The London 1908 Games were organized at very
short notice, in less than two years after the favoured but financially
embarrassed hosts, Rome, pulled out. They were held next to the White City
in Shepherd’s Bush, which was an architectural theme park and Imperial
fantasy-land of stucco and plasterboard that constituted the core of the
Franco-British exhibition. Both attractions drew substantial crowds and gave
the Olympic Games a status and coherence as an event that had been lost in
the chaos and indifference of the Paris 1900 and St Louis 1904 debacles.
Beijing 2008 is quite obviously the sporting herald of a rising global
power. The first London Olympics briefly illuminated the twilight years of a
superpower’s declining rule. Perhaps the closest parallel will be political
rather than architectural. A hundred years ago there were calls to the
imperial hosts from an incorporated colony for their own team and their own
state – calls that found considerable support among the large and powerful
American team. For Ireland in 1908 read Tibet in 2008.
Hampton’s account of the 1948 Games certainly captures something reminiscent
of contemporary London’s attitude to the 2012 games. She describes Frank
Butler, sports editor of the Daily Express, in a mood of exasperation, as
Britain endured straitened economic circumstances, short rations and a harsh
winter: “England would be jolly well satisfied never to hold the Games
again”; while the Evening Standard argued that, “The average range of
British enthusiasms for the Games stretches between lukewarm and dislike”.
Analogies with Beijing 2008 are harder to find, in part because there is in
urban China and in the Chinese diaspora a genuine popular pride in and
enthusiasm for the Olympics, but more significantly because the economics of
the two events are so incomparable. The bill for Sydney 2000 was around $7
billion; Athens came in at $12 billion. Beijing, on current estimates, is
going to cost over $30 billion and will entirely remake the ancient imperial
capital. Hampton, by contrast, revels in the stripped-down, bare boards,
make-do-and-mend economics of the 1948 Games, run on a tiny budget and set
in a city still deeply scarred by the war.
London was so broke that the wooden parts of Olympic stadia could only be
refurbished with timber donated by Sweden and Finland. Almost the entirety
of the Games’ sporting equipment, down to the last hockey ball, was sold off
afterwards. The Government’s wartime stock of furniture for temporary
accommodation, mothballed since 1945, was wheeled out. Nissen huts in
Richmond Park and attic flats in Mayfair were kitted out as the dispersed
Olympic Village, though competitors were still asked to bring their own
towels. Sponsorship and television rights were sought and obtained – but the
numbers are Lilliputian. Lloyds Bank and the airline BOAC paid the princely
sum of £118 for a wooden kiosk outside Wembley Stadium; the BBC had to stump
up the unheard-of price of £1,000 for the right to broadcast the Games to
the world. For Beijing, NBC have paid over $1 billion for US television
rights alone, while Visa and Panasonic are paying hundreds of millions for
the twenty-first-century equivalent of the kiosk.
Hampton’s use of interview and memoir is particularly good, and one cannot but
be struck by the genuine amazement and optimism that the opening ceremonies
and the course of the whole Games generated. In a world so recently and for
so long at war, an international gathering of this kind was something truly
exceptional. Emil Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner, spoke for many
when he recalled, “It was as if the sun had come out. Suddenly there were no
more frontiers, no more barriers. Just the people meeting together”. For all
the money spent, Beijing is unlikely to evoke a similar cosmopolitanism
among either participants or spectators.
The collection of essays in Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the new China,
edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan, provides further sustained
reflection on the entire process of producing, reading and decoding the
meaning of the Olympics. Jacques de Lisle’s essay in particular pinpoints
the complex balancing act that the Chinese authorities are attempting,
seeking just enough international exposure and legitimacy to enhance their
status and place in the international order, but not so much that their own
rule should be challenged or jeopardized by international human-rights
standards or over-close scrutiny by the international media. Similarly they
must adhere to the increasingly ludicrous claim that the Games are
non-political while consciously mounting the biggest exercise in the
projection of soft power anywhere. How well the Chinese State is able to
tell these paradoxical narratives through the Games, how successfully its
political competitors, domestic and foreign, are in telling their counter
narratives, and how the glorious unpredictability of the sport itself
disrupts both will be the best of all the stories to follow this summer.
David Miller
THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES AND THE IOC
Athens to Beijing, 1894–2008
592pp. Mainstream Publishing. £35 (US $59.95).
978 1 84596 159 6
Xu Guoqi
OLYMPIC DREAMS
China and sports, 1895–2008
392pp. Harvard University Press. £19.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 02840 1
Rebecca Jenkins
THE FIRST LONDON OLYMPICS
1908
288pp. Piatkus. £16.99 (US $33.60).
978 0 7499 5168 9
Janie Hampton
THE AUSTERITY OLYMPICS
When the Games came to London in 1948
350pp. Aurum. £18.99.
978 1 84513 334 4
Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan, editors
OWNING THE OLYMPICS
Narratives of the new China
424pp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. $70 (paperback, $26.95);
distributed in the UK by NBN. £47.95 (paperback,£18.50).
978 0 472 07032 9
David Goldblatt’s book The Ball Is Round: A global history of football
was published in 2006.
