Abstract
Thematically, the second chapter aims to trace how the Olympics grew to become an international event that terrorists viewed as a viable target to attack. This chapter also displays how the concept of “security” changed over between 1896 and 1972. One of the key arguments in this section is that politics infiltrated the Olympic Games from the outset and were not a new phenomenon in Munich. Therefore, this chapter includes a brief overview of politically driven arguments that the IOC had to legislate.
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Notes
- 1.
Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 9. Guttmann contends the defeat “haunted” Coubertin and notes “young Frenchmen were on average less robust than their rugged counterparts on the other side of the Rhine.”.
- 2.
According to his biographer John J. MacAloon, Coubertin sought “action and distinction, and candidates were flocking to St.-Cyr in such number that peacetime distinctions were not easily achieved,” Quote found in This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 40.
- 3.
MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 44.
- 4.
The inspirational figure for Coubertin was the headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold. Guttmann argues that the actual Arnold “was far more interested in [his pupil’s] moral education than in their physical development,” The Olympics, 9.
- 5.
On Turnen see Arnd Krüger, “Turnen und Turnunterricht zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik–Die Grundlage der heutigen Schulsportmisere.” Ursachen der Schulsportmisere in Deutschland (1979): 13–31; For Jahn, see Horst Ueberhorst, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and his Time, 1778–1852 (Munich and Baltimore: Moos, 1982); Hans Kohn, “Father Jahn and the War Against the West,” in The Mind of Germany (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960): 69–98; on the conflict between sport and Turnen, see Gertrud Pfister, “Cultural Confrontations: German Turnen, Swedish Gymnastics and English Sport–European Diversity in Physical Activities from a Historical Perspective,” Culture, Sport, Society 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 61–91.
- 6.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 8. Guttmann wrote, “the English had apparently gone mad for sports.”.
- 7.
MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 138. There were other competing attempts to restart the Olympics. In Athens, Evangelis Zappas restarted a version of the Olympics but one that only included the Greeks. The series stopped in 1889. Guttmann notes the influence of another Englishman, William Penny Brookes, on Coubertin. Brooks held an “Olympian Games” in 1849 in Much Wenlock. Coubertin discussed reviving the Olympic Games with Brookes in 1890. The key difference between prior attempts and Coubertin’s was, as Guttmann argues, Coubertin’s ability at simply “getting people’s attention,” See The Olympics, 9–11.
- 8.
John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 172. The most commonly cited rationale for Coubertin’s change of heart was his experience traveling. Guttmann writes, “Travel may not broaden everyone, but it seems to have extended Coubertin’s horizons. At any rate, his youthful fantasy of revanche against the loathsome Prussians was gradually tempered by a more humane philosophy,” The Olympics, 11. MacAloon’s account of Coubertin’s travels to England evokes a similar image, This Great Symbol, 43–82.
- 9.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 12. Guttmann recounts the story of one attendee who assumed Coubertin spoke not of the ancient athletic contests but of a contemporary theatre production. See also MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 163.
- 10.
Quote found in MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 163.
- 11.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 15.
- 12.
Alfred Erich Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999), 22.
- 13.
Quote found in Guttmann, The Olympics, 19.
- 14.
For a full account of this debate, see MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 241–255.
- 15.
Quote found in MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 1.
- 16.
Richard Espy, The Politics of the Olympic Games With an Epilogue, 1976–1980 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), viii.
- 17.
Susan Brownell, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 78.
- 18.
Matthew Llewellyn provides a quite thorough list of the international incidents hindering the Anglo-American relationship in “The Battle of Shepherd’s Bush,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 5 (April 2011): 698–699.
- 19.
Llewellyn, “The Battle of Shepherd’s Bush,” 703.
- 20.
Ronald Renson, The Games Reborn: The VIIth Olympiad Antwerp 1920 (Antwerp: Pandora, 1996), 8.
- 21.
“U.S. Team Is Hissed By French When It Wins Olympic Title,” New York Times, May 19, 1924.
- 22.
Quote found in Sean Dinces, “Padres on Mount Olympus: Los Angeles and the Production of the 1932 Olympic Mega-Event,” Journal of Sport History 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 137.
- 23.
Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 38.
- 24.
Mark Dyreson and Matthew P. Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City: Legacies of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 14 (December 2008): 1991–2018. The duo also argue, “The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 threatened the survival of the Los Angeles Olympics and made advertising southern California to the world more difficult,” 1995.
- 25.
For more on the legacy of the Los Angeles 1932 Olympics, see ibid, 1995–1998. Dyreson and Llewllyn note, “Although Los Angeles, like the rest of the United States in the early 1930s, was fractured by ethnic and class divisions, the city boosters built an Olympic Village and organized tourist attractions that advertised Los Angeles as a land of frictionless unity,” 1995.
- 26.
David Goldblatt, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016), 152.
- 27.
Quote found in Los Angeles Olympics Organizing Committee, The Official Report of the Organizing Committee for the Games of the Xth Olympiad Los Angeles 1932, vol. 1, part 1, 218.
- 28.
David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 4–5.
- 29.
Quote found in Anton Rippon, Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games (South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword, 2006), 26.
- 30.
There is a wealth of literature on the Olympic participation debate. For future IOC president Avery Brundage’s role, see Carolyn Marvin, “Avery Brundage and American Participation in the 1936 Olympic Games,” Journal of American Studies 16, no. 1 (April 1, 1982): 81–206; Bruce Kidd provides a Canadian perspective in “Canadian Opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Germany,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 9, no. 2 (December 1978): 20–40. Further details on the boycott debate are found in Guttmann, The Olympics, 56–58; Allen Guttmann, “The “Nazi Olympics” and the American boycott controversy,” in Sport and International Politics, Pierre Arnaud and Jim Riordan, eds. (London: Routledge, 1998): 43–62. Berg, Kessler, and Hunt, “A Realist Perspective of Sport and International Relations: US Governmental Perceptions of Olympic Boycott Movements, 1936–2008”; Stephen R. Wenn, “A Suitable Policy of Neutrality? FDR and the Question of American Participation in the 1936 Olympics,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 8, no. 3 (December 1991): 319–35. For a more general overview of the 1936 Olympics see Bill Murray, “Berlin in 1936: Old and new work on the Nazi Olympics,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 9, no. 1 (1992): 29–49. Krüger and William Murray, eds. The Nazi Olympics: Sports, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); W.J. Murray, “France, Coubertin and the Nazi Olympics: The Response,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 1 (1992): 46–69; Large, Nazi Games.
- 31.
Mandell, Nazi Olympics, 233.
- 32.
“Guerillas Cut Olympic Torch Travel,” The Washington Post, July 9, 1948.
- 33.
The Hastings was originally a British destroyer named HMS Catterick but sold to the Greeks in 1946. J.J. Colledge and Ben Warlow, Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of All Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy from the 15th Century to the Present (Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2010), 71.
- 34.
A.C. Sedgwick, “Olympic Torch, Lighted in Greece, Starts On 2,000-Mile Trip to the Games in London,” New York Times, July 18, 1948.
- 35.
Erin Elizabeth Redihan, The Olympics and the Cold War, 1948–1968: Sport as Battleground in the U.S.-Soviet Rivalry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc, 2017), 76.
- 36.
“Three Britons Bid for the Next Olympics To Be Held in “Scarred, Battered” London,” New York Times, October 11, 1944.
- 37.
For the original text of Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri when he coined the phrase “iron curtain,” see “Winston Churchill Speech—Iron Curtain,” Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (hereafter CIA FOIA ERR), Document No. 5076e8f8993247d4d82b6367.
- 38.
Erin Elizabeth Redihan, The Olympics and the Cold War, 1948–1968: Sport as Battleground in the U.S.-Soviet Rivalry, 76.
- 39.
Jenifer Parks, The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 7–9. Jörg Krieger and Austin Duckworth. “‘Vodka and Caviar among Friends’—Lord David Burghley and the Soviet Union’s Entry into the International Association of Athletic Federations.” Sport in History 41, no. 2 (April 3, 2021): 260–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460263.2020.1768887.
- 40.
Gerald Chan describes the IOC’s approach to handling the two Chinas debate in “The “Two-Chinas” Problem and the Olympic Formula.” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 3 (1985): 473–490. For a concise explanation of the IOC’s role in these events, see Richard Espy, The Politics of the Olympic Games: with an epilogue, 1976–1980. Univ. of California Press, 1981, 32–40.
- 41.
Espy, Politics of the Olympic Games, 36.
- 42.
Tsu-Lin Yeh and Jörg Krieger, “Governance Reform of International Sport Federations and Its Implications for National Sport Associations: A Case Study of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the Chinese Taipei Athletics Association (CTAA),” Asian Sport Management Review, 14, (December 2019), 4–15.
- 43.
For a focused consideration of this episode see Chan, "The" Two-Chinas" Problem,” 473–490.
- 44.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 92.
- 45.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 92.
- 46.
R. Gerald Hughes and Rachel J. Owen, ““The Continuation of Politics by Other Means”: Britain, the Two Germanys and the Olympic Games, 1949–1972,” Contemporary European History 18, no. 4 (2009): 443–74. Espy notes the IOC was initially reluctant to allow the West Germans back into the IOC prior to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki but “considerable pressure from political sources in Europe (i.e., the Allied High Command the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland)” led the IOC to consider allowing the West Germans full recognition. Quote found in Politics of the Olympic Games, 32.
- 47.
Guttmann, The Olympics, 94–96. This section provides the best analysis of this sequence of events. Guttmann also notes the importance of the building of the Berlin Wall. He argues, “The physical as well as ideological separation of East and West Germany intensified Potsdam’s desire for an Olympic divorce from Bonn,” 96.
- 48.
Robert E Rinehart, ““Fists Flew and Blood Flowed”: Symbolic Resistance and International Response in Hungarian Water Polo at the Melbourne Olympics, 1956,” Journal of Sport History 23, no. 2 (1996): 120–39.
- 49.
These boycott movements are briefly discussed in Toohey, Kristine and A.J. Veal. The Olympic Games: A Social Science Perspective (Cambridge, Mass: CABI, 2007), 97.
- 50.
“Police To Man All Sea And Airports,” Mirror, March 17, 1956, National Library of Australia. In a larger study of the life of Australian code-breaker Captain Theodore Eric Nave, Ian Pfennigwerth provides an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation report that reads, “Never before has the R.I.S. [Russian Intelligence Service] congregated so many Intelligence workers in this country at one time as during the Olympic Games.” Quote found in Ian Pfennigwerth, Man of Intelligence: The Life of Captain Theodore Eric Nave Australian Codebreaker Extraordinaire (Kenthurst: Rosenberg, 2006), 254.
- 51.
“Police To Man All Sea And Airports.”.
- 52.
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), 165–166. Details behind the student fight against the police prior to Tlatelolco are found in Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games (Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 109.
- 53.
Accounts of this event are found in Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World, 104–105; Goldblatt, The Games, 266–267. There is no mention of the Olimpia Battalion in the Final Report of the Mexico City Organizing Committee.
- 54.
On that relationship Whannel writes, “Television transformed sport into a set of commodified global spectacles, producing huge audiences and massive new sources of income. Sport in turn provided television with an endless supply of major spectacular events and an enduring form of pleasurable and popular viewing,” Quote found in Gary Whannel, “Television and the Transformation of Sport,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625, no. 1 (August 20, 2009): 206.
- 55.
Whannel, “Television and the Transformation,” 206.
- 56.
Robert K. Barney, Stephen R. Wenn, and Scott G. Martyn, Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2002), 60–69.
- 57.
Mark Johnson, Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports (Boulder: VeloPress, 2016) provides an account of this evolution on 155–156.
- 58.
Espy, Politics of the Olympic Games, 73. CBS alone paid $394,000 for the rights to broadcast in the United States. See, Johnson, Spitting in the Soup, 155–156.
- 59.
Briggite L. Nacos, Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the World Trade Center Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 49.
- 60.
Oudeh was also known by his codename, Abu Daoud. Quote found in Aji, Albert. “Planner of Munich Olympics attack dies in Syria.” Sandiegouniontribune.com. August 31, 2016. Accessed July 10, 2017. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-planner-of-munich-olympics-attack-dies-in-syria-2010jul03-story.html.
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Duckworth, A. (2022). The Growth of the Olympics as International Spectacle. In: International Security and the Olympic Games, 1972–2020. Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05133-3_2
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