2024 is an Olympic Games year. Held every four years (with the exception of during the World Wars and Covid-19 restrictions), the modern Olympics is the largest international sporting event in the world. However, historically it has not always been just the sports that are played and the athletes’ performances that make an impact. The modern Olympics have been the focus for international politics, tensions, prejudice, acts of resistance and acts of violence.
To mark the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, being held in Paris this summer, we have brought together five academics to give five talks on a social, cultural or political aspect of the Games. All the talks are available to listen to live for free.
Program
Tuesday 11 June
The British Olympics – London as an Olympic host city in 1908 and 1948
This summer, Paris will become the second city to host the Summer Olympics for a third time. London holds the record so far, with the Games of 1908, 1948, and 2012 all being hosted here. This talk will delve into London’s first two Olympics as a way of exploring the themes of continuity and change in Olympic history. It will look at the venues, the sports, and the competitors of the Olympics of 1908 and 1948, and think about the legacies that these Games created for the city and for the Olympic movement.
Professor Martin Polley is the Director of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University and is the author of The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic heritage 1612-2012 (English Heritage, 2011).
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Monday 24 June
The Olympian Politics of Civil Rights
The World Record that American athlete Tommie Smith set at the Olympic Games in Mexico in October 1968, stood for the next 11 years—and it would be 15 years before another US athlete beat his time. But the image of Smith and fellow athlete John Carlos, on the podium, shoeless and sombre, fists raised, heads bowed, endured for far longer. It surely ranks among the most resonant expressions of the US Black Power movement, and a symbol of the vexed relationship between politics and the modern Games. The image was the result of the mobilization of Black athletes in the US, who organized around the Olympic Project for Human Rights that formed in 1967, and international media’s saturation of this sporting pageant, televised for the first time in colour, and, at least for US audiences, broadcast live and at prime time. As a global event based on national teams, the Olympics in the ‘60s was a main stage where the politics of race and decolonization played out. While the retreat of European imperialism brought thirty new competitors to the Games between 1964 and 1968, the organizing that Black American athletes carried out around the event was notable for the way it held together both the racism that denied them access to America’s prestigious athletic clubs, and disempowered them and others on US campuses, and the apartheid regime of South Africa. The stance was one that spoke to the ways in which the Olympic Village was transformed in these years into something akin to what communication theorist Marshall McLuhan called a ‘Global Village’.
Andrew Fearnley is an historian of the twentieth-century United States at the University of Manchester, and the programme director for American Studies. He has wide-ranging interests in African American intellectual history, urban studies, and the histories of leisure and sport. He has published on the financing of activism among Black Power groups; the design and international circulation of Black Power books; and the role of periodization in Anglo-American historiography. He co-edited a collection with Daniel Matlin about the changing place and profile of Harlem, New York, entitled Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol (New York, 2018). He is currently working on a project looking at the remaking of sports spectatorship and the presentation of live sports in the US from the 1980s on.
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Thursday 4 July
Sport in NATO: Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games during the Cold War
In response to the appearance of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, NATO imposed travel restrictions on East Germans, including preventing athletes representing East Germany from entering NATO member states to compete. When East Germany was not allowed to compete at world championships in the United States and France, the rest of the Soviet bloc states withdrew their athletes in support of the communist German state. These disruptions to international sporting events prompted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to demand a government guarantee from all cities bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games to ensure they would allow all athletes and officials to enter their country if selected to host the games. This request prompted diplomats from the four NATO countries with cities bidding for the 1968 Summer or Winter Olympics – the US, Canada, France, and Norway – to form a working group at NATO headquarters in Paris to figure out how to reply to the IOC. The four governments did not want to hurt their cities’ Olympic aspirations, but they also needed to maintain alliance policies. The Berlin Wall thus brought the Cold War into sport, and diplomats became intimately involved in the affairs of international sport.
In response to the appearance of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, NATO imposed travel restrictions on East Germans, including preventing athletes representing East Germany from entering NATO member states to compete. When East Germany was not allowed to compete at world championships in the United States and France, the rest of the Soviet bloc states withdrew their athletes in support of the communist German state. These disruptions to international sporting events prompted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to demand a government guarantee from all cities bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games to ensure they would allow all athletes and officials to enter their country if selected to host the games. This request prompted diplomats from the four NATO countries with cities bidding for the 1968 Summer or Winter Olympics – the US, Canada, France, and Norway – to form a working group at NATO headquarters in Paris to figure out how to reply to the IOC. The four governments did not want to hurt their cities’ Olympic aspirations, but they also needed to maintain alliance policies. The Berlin Wall thus brought the Cold War into sport, and diplomats became intimately involved in the affairs of international sport.
Dr Heather L. Dichter is associate professor of sport history and sport management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University in Leicester. She is the author of Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (Massachusetts, 2021) and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: Football and International Relations Since 1914 (Kentucky, 2020), which was a finalist for the Football Book of the Year at the Telegraph Sports Book Awards. She has also co-edited Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945 (Kentucky, 2014) with Andrew Johns and Olympic Reform Ten Years Later (Routledge, 2012) with Bruce Kidd. Her published articles and book chapters focus on international sport, Germany, diplomacy, and the Cold War.
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Monday 8 July
The 1972 Munich Olympics and the German Politics of the Past
This paper will discuss the Munich 1972 Olympics in relation to the German politics of the past in two ways: as the pinnacle of symbolic attempts to distance the Federal Republic from the Nazi Germany by staging Games that were the photographic negative of the 1936 Berlin Games. This led directly to the lax security which made the massacre of the 11 Israeli athletes possible; and secondly, with respect to the memorialization of the terrorist attack and the torturous process of accepting partial German responsibility for it.
Kay Schiller is a historian of twentieth-century Germany. He has published articles and books on German cultural and sports history, including on the history of football, on modern German-Jewish history and on the history of the Federal Republic and the GDR. He has co-edited a volume on German sport history and the history of the FIFA World Cup, co-authored a monograph on the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, the award-winning The 1972 Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, and written a monograph on the 1974 FIFA World Cup in West Germany. His most recent book (2022) is a biography of the Jewish-German sprinter, antifascist activist, émigré to Britain and post-war journalist and writer Alex Natan (1906-71). He is currently researching (with Udi Carmi) the influence of German sports models in sports in Palestine and Israel, with a special focus on the activities of the Zionist sports functionary Emmanuel Ernst Simon (1898-1988).
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Wednesday 17 July
‘The Expulsion of White Supremacist States: The International Olympic Committee, Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa’
Dr Daniel Feather is a Senior Lecturer in History teaching in the areas of imperial, African, and international history. His research examines UK policy towards southern Africa. He is currently undertaking a British Academy (BA) funded project analysing British policy towards cultural relations with Rhodesia from 1965 to 1980. This follows on from a doctoral project which culminated in a monograph entitled ‘British Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa, 1960-1994’. He has published articles in leading international and diplomatic history journals and obtained multiple research grants from bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the British International Studies Association, and the British Society of Sports History. Dan has worked collaboratively with organisations such as the British Council and AM Digital and is also a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria and an Extraordinary Researcher at North West University, Mahikeng. Dan is also a founding member of the International History and Diplomacy research collective.
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