Fanfare

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. By David Goldblatt. W.W. Norton; 516 pages; $29.95. Macmillan; £20.

IN 1892, Baron de Coubertin, a French educator and historian, called for the restoration of the Olympic games, hoping that they would promote peace and also help achieve his decidedly conservative political aims. De Coubertin considered the games a way to promote ideals of manliness. He argued that women’s sport was “the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate” and that the games should be reserved for men.

The Olympics have always been intertwined with politics, as David Goldblatt shows in an elegant and ambitious new study. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has never wavered from its underlying conservatism. Taiwan preserved its place in the Olympics far longer than it did in the United Nations. Ludicrously, the IOC maintained the “hypocritical and ultimately forlorn” pretence of amateurism until 1988—even as Soviet athletes were amateurs in name only. From 1928—1960 there were no women's races longer than 200 metres as it made them look too tired. It took until 1984 for women to make up one-fifth of competing athletes.

If the Olympics have been a force for wider good, this has often been in spite of the IOC rather than because of it. In Mexico City in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-American athletes who had just won medals in the 200 metres, gave the Black Power salute. Avery Brundage, the American president of the IOC, ordered the delegation to expel the athletes. They did. South Africa had been excluded from the Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policy, but in 1968 the IOC at first gave the nation the all-clear, before protests forced it to back down.

At every turn, the Olympics has allowed itself to be manipulated by governments, including appalling regimes. Ahead of the 1936 games in Berlin, the chairman of the American Olympic Committee concluded that there was no case for a boycott as there was no discrimination in German sport. Nazi Germany, which had initially been reluctant to play host, soon realised the huge potential benefits: it is estimated that more was spent on the Berlin games than all the previous Olympics combined. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi entourage attended every day. More recently, the IOC has allowed governments to hide their problems from view during the games—after Atlanta submitted its bid for the 1996 games, homeless people were even locked up—and to trample over the rights of their citizens. Construction before the Beijing games in 2008 forced more than 1m people out of their homes.

In crude financial terms, hosting is a disaster: the 2004 games in Athens cost the Greek government about $16 billion (about 5% of the government’s total debt) and the swimming complex remains unused. Mr Goldblatt reckons that, of the 17 Olympic tournaments held between the second world war and 2012, only the one in Los Angeles, in 1984, actually made a profit. Moreover, the idea that the games makes a host nation more athletic has no foundation. In Britain, fewer people do sport now than did before the Olympics in 2012. Little wonder, then, that a “Nolympics” movement has built up, made of protesters against hosting the games.

Another dark side of the sport can be seen in the way athletes, often at the behest of their national Olympic committees, have used performance-enhancing drugs. This kind of cheating began in the 1930s, if not earlier, though the IOC did not introduce drug testing until 1968. As the recent Russian doping scandal highlights, drug use remains all too prevalent. So far, this has not undermined the popularity of the games. In 1912 de Coubertin created a poetry contest and chose as the winner a poem he had written himself, which included the words, “O sport you are justice!” His view of the Olympics was never accurate; now the games seem more imperilled than ever.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that between 1928 and 1968 there were no women’s races of more than 200 metres in the Olympics. The correct period should have been from 1928 until 1960.