Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hi, Scheren, Hi James, I was alarming. Yeah, I went
Speaker 2: into like twenty tens YouTube boys.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, Hi James is excited today I am excited.
Speaker 2: I'm always excited to make a podcast, you know, I
Speaker 2: love to cast a pod, but today I am especially
Speaker 2: especially with an X like Espresso, the coffee drink. I
Speaker 2: am especially excited to talk to you, Serene, because we
Speaker 2: are talking about a subject which I have wasted far
Speaker 2: too much of my life reading and writing about. What
Speaker 2: are we talking about, Sharen sports? Sports? Olympics. Yeah, sports,
Speaker 2: I'm going to explain to Sharen sports why they're fun.
Speaker 2: I did too many of them. Okay, we're talking about
Speaker 2: the Olympics, the Olympic Games specifically. I guess they're happening
Speaker 2: in Paris this year. They may be happening in Paris
Speaker 2: by the time you listen to this. But I'm want
Speaker 2: to talk a little bit about the history of the
Speaker 2: Olympics because I wrote a book about it, and so
Speaker 2: I get to drawing on about it for half an
Speaker 2: hour and you have to listen to me. Where you
Speaker 2: drive your cars to work?
Speaker 1: Cool?
Speaker 2: The mon Olympic Games is it draws links to ancient Greece, right,
Speaker 2: And it does that because at the time that the
Speaker 2: modern Olympic Games in the late nineteenth century were being
Speaker 2: created by a guy called Baron Pierre de Kuberta, the
Speaker 2: aristocracy of Europe were obsessed with drawing links to the
Speaker 2: classical period.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is the same time when we see all those
Speaker 2: like neoclassical buildings going up, like people were trying to
Speaker 2: draw links between themselves and the ancient Greeks and to
Speaker 2: sort of posit themselves as the new Greco Roman font
Speaker 2: of civilization.
Speaker 3: And hey, I took our history and I minor to that,
Speaker 3: so I know stuff too.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, because I did not take our history. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm sure you know more all kinds of stuff about
Speaker 2: like impressionists and shared own understand So if we're looking
Speaker 2: at like to understand the Olympics, we have to understand sport, right,
Speaker 2: And to understand sport, we have to understand play.
Speaker 3: So I was right about sports.
Speaker 2: You don't have to yeah, no, no, you agree, you're
Speaker 2: right on it. Yeah, but first we do play, right.
Speaker 2: So if we're looking at like kind of the classic
Speaker 2: text on this, it's a book called Homo Ludins. But
Speaker 2: we probably don't need to read that. It's not a banger.
Speaker 2: We very few academic books are bangers. I like to
Speaker 2: think mine's in a sort of semi banger category. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's also overpriced and you shouldn't buy it. Just go
Speaker 2: to your library and get it for free. Play is
Speaker 2: it's pretty obvious what play is. But it's the difference
Speaker 2: between play and sport is that sport is bounded. It
Speaker 2: happens in a certain place, within a certain set of rules.
Speaker 2: Play doesn't. So the archetypal kind of example of transitioning
Speaker 2: from play to sport would be folk football in Britain.
Speaker 2: So back in the day, in the place where I
Speaker 2: come from, for holidays, the Saints Days and other days
Speaker 2: when people didn't work, they would have a game of
Speaker 2: football which consisted of a ball inflated pigs bladder or
Speaker 2: a similar similar device, and you have to get it
Speaker 2: from one village into the other village. And those are
Speaker 2: about all the rules, right. Sometimes they had specific rules
Speaker 2: against stabbing. There have been like an outbreak of stabbing incidents,
Speaker 2: but other than that, it was pretty much you do
Speaker 2: what the fuck you wanted, right, You want to go
Speaker 2: on a five mile detour and come around, people come
Speaker 2: in the back way, No problem. You're on a form
Speaker 2: of phalanx of all your mates and just kind of
Speaker 2: go through like a wedge style. Not a problem at all.
Speaker 2: You know you want to start hitting people with sticks, Yeah,
Speaker 2: not an issue. It was very loose, right, and every
Speaker 2: village or pair of villages that would play had their
Speaker 2: own kind of understanding of the rules. But it wasn't
Speaker 2: a codified set of rules. They existed across all incidences
Speaker 2: of folk football. And then we go from there to
Speaker 2: association football. Right, that's where soccer comes from. Right, as
Speaker 2: soccer soccer, association becomes assoc us sock becomes our soccer,
Speaker 2: that becomes soccer.
Speaker 3: Does that makes sense kind Yeah, I'm going to say yes.
Speaker 2: It's a very like nineteenth century posh British effect that
Speaker 2: takes the word association football and comes out with soccer.
Speaker 3: That's so funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's where it comes from. So association football
Speaker 2: codifires the rules. Right, there's a pitch that pitch its
Speaker 2: the same size as a goal. The goal is the
Speaker 2: same size. You can't pick it up now, and from
Speaker 2: that comes rugby football, right, So rugby football is type
Speaker 2: where you pick up the ball. There's a kind of
Speaker 2: founding myth for rugby football that this guy called William
Speaker 2: ware bellis with a glorious disregard for the rules. Quote,
Speaker 2: picked up the ball and ran with it. It's a
Speaker 2: bit weird that, like they've created a founding myth for
Speaker 2: dude who effectively just like sucked at football, so he
Speaker 2: picked it up and ran with it. Like, it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem like he deserves a literal statue that he has. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that happened at Rugby School, right, which was one
Speaker 2: of these English boarding schools that existed to prepare young
Speaker 2: men to be officers and administrators in the British Empire.
Speaker 2: And that is really what's the codification of sport as
Speaker 2: far as we can sort of create, like a reason
Speaker 2: for it is to prepare young men and just men
Speaker 2: to be administrators in the British Empire. Right, it's supposed
Speaker 2: to make them physically strong. It's supposed to make them
Speaker 2: obey the rules and learn to do what they're told
Speaker 2: even in stressful situations. Right, it's part of an idea
Speaker 2: called muscular Christianity. And like, as far as we can
Speaker 2: attribute this whole combination of things to one person. It
Speaker 2: would be Thomas Arnold, right, Thomas Arnold being the headmaster
Speaker 2: at Rugby School, and he develops his idea of educating
Speaker 2: young Christian men and doing so using sport as well
Speaker 2: as academia and sports very quickly develop a set of
Speaker 2: rules around amateurism. Amateurism like sometimes we just use amateur
Speaker 2: now to me not very good, but at the time
Speaker 2: it's specifically meant not paid to do the sport. And
Speaker 2: so yeah, this is the early Olympics. Actually, the Olympics
Speaker 2: still relatively recently have an amateurism rule, right that people
Speaker 2: can't participate if they are paid to do the sport.
Speaker 2: They have exemptions for fencing coaches, which I think tells
Speaker 2: you about everything you need to know that this isn't
Speaker 2: This isn't there for any like purity reason. It's there
Speaker 2: to serve as a class barrier, right, And we see
Speaker 2: it used as a class barrier first of all in football, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's why we have rugby league and rugby union
Speaker 2: because the rugby league people tended to be working people
Speaker 2: and they needed to be paid. It's the rugby league
Speaker 2: allowed for professionalism, Rugby union did not, and those tended
Speaker 2: to be wealthier people, right, but it's used at the
Speaker 2: Olympics extensively to police class. Like probably the most prominent
Speaker 2: example would be Jim Thorpe. You familiar with Jim Thorpe.
Speaker 2: Jim Thorpe's the cool guy. Actually, I got to read
Speaker 2: some of his correspondents. He actually wrote a history of
Speaker 2: the Olympic Games, which is very sad when you consider
Speaker 2: that Jim Thorpe himself he's a member of the Sacond
Speaker 2: Fox Nation, right, so he's indigenous to North America. He
Speaker 2: won a medal for the United States in the nineteen
Speaker 2: twelve Summer Olympics. Who went to gold medals actually won
Speaker 2: in pentathlon and won decathlon. So like decathletes are kind
Speaker 2: of like the uber athletes, right, Like you're doing ten
Speaker 2: ten different sports that you have to just be good
Speaker 2: at exercising. And Jim thoughte was good at exercising. He
Speaker 2: also played collegiate and professional football, professional baseball, and professional basketball. See,
Speaker 2: he's an all around sport to dad. Unfortunately, he lost
Speaker 2: his Olympic title because he had been paid at some
Speaker 2: point for playing baseball, even though he didn't do baseball
Speaker 2: in the Olympics. That's a fucked yeah, It's very clearly
Speaker 2: used as a way to class and race police the games. Right,
Speaker 2: And I think this gets to a point about what
Speaker 2: the Olympics are. So the early Olympics tend to coincide
Speaker 2: with what are called World's fairs. Familiar with World's Fairs, Shreen? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: people sort of get together have these big exhibitions and
Speaker 2: they show off there, you know if you really got
Speaker 2: yeah whatever, Yeah, look what I stole from this country
Speaker 2: that I have colonized and under force extracted these the
Speaker 2: following things. If you're in Britain, like the most famous
Speaker 2: sort of World's Fair site would be Crystal Palace, right,
Speaker 2: Crystal Palace was built, burned down, but it was built
Speaker 2: for the World's Fair. If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park, right,
Speaker 2: was built fourteen Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Feel like I knew that somewhere in my head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you go to Balboa Park, little niche San
Speaker 2: Diego diversion for the millions of you are not in
Speaker 2: San Diego, you can just tune out for ten seconds.
Speaker 2: Those are little cottages like the International Cottages and the
Speaker 2: Palestine House and yeah, Palestine House school that they got
Speaker 2: recognition in San Diego at least those are from the
Speaker 2: World's Fair. Each country would have a little exhibition in
Speaker 2: their house right and all down the Prado. So that's
Speaker 2: actually has zoos started as well. Someone in their exhibition
Speaker 2: had lions and then fucking left them when they left
Speaker 2: and they were like, uh, I guess we start a zoo.
Speaker 2: Got a couple of lines on our hands. Yeah, incredible,
Speaker 2: incredible vibes. So the Olympics happen at the same time
Speaker 2: as world for it's for a long time, and that
Speaker 2: is because the Olympics are essentially a gathering of transnational bourgeois.
Speaker 2: He that's not a phrase I came up with myself.
Speaker 2: It's from my friend David Goldblatt, who's written a really
Speaker 2: excellent history of the Olympics that's called The Games. And if
Speaker 2: you're going to read one book about the Olympics, it
Speaker 2: should be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure
Speaker 2: he's not listening hello, David. If you are, I would
Speaker 2: recommend his book because I think his analysis is great. Right,
Speaker 2: that what these become is a place where the sort
Speaker 2: of the people who make money from finance capital all
Speaker 2: around the world can gather together and share the little
Speaker 2: ideas and play their little games. And we see that,
Speaker 2: for instance, in the nineteen oh four s In Lewis
Speaker 2: Olympics Saint Louis. In addition to like the World's Fair,
Speaker 2: they have the Olympics and they have something called the
Speaker 2: Anthropological Days. Have you heard about this? Sharing? Oh?
Speaker 3: Will you?
Speaker 2: No? It's one of the more funck they happening in St. Louis,
Speaker 2: which I think is saying a lot. They essentially kidnapped
Speaker 2: people from around their various imperial possessions, brought them to
Speaker 2: Saint Louis, which in itself is a crime, and then
Speaker 2: forced them to compete in events that they didn't fully
Speaker 2: explain to them what the fuck yeah like, and then
Speaker 2: concluded from this that like white people were better.
Speaker 3: It's like some gladiator shit that's like, yeah, yes, what
Speaker 3: are you doing? That's too modern, that's too hard.
Speaker 2: This is nineteen oh four, yeah, not so long ago. Yeah,
Speaker 2: very yeah. And this kind of exhibits what the world's
Speaker 2: fairs were and to agree to a degree like what
Speaker 2: the Olympiads became, which was like a way for the
Speaker 2: colonizing powers to get together, right right, Ian, do you
Speaker 2: know what will not kidnap you from your home country
Speaker 2: and fly you to Saint Louis and then force you
Speaker 2: to compete in games that you don't understand.
Speaker 3: Gold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you probably right. Well, indirectly it will, you know,
Speaker 2: because as a sort of source of wealth.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, okay, whatever, I was trying to make a
Speaker 3: trying to think of something that I might hear next.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's properly gold. You're right way back, and
Speaker 2: we hope you have bought your gold, the only the
Speaker 2: only metal that you can make an Olympic medal out of. Incidentally,
Speaker 2: really I will over to gold. Oh really, you turn green?
Speaker 3: I get like ear like it's it's not good for
Speaker 3: my skin. Well, I'll get like infections, but like I'll
Speaker 3: get like an exema kind of reaction.
Speaker 2: Oh well, what do you u? Did you have an
Speaker 2: alternative jewelry?
Speaker 3: I don't wear a lot of jewelry. I wear rings
Speaker 3: the most, but I can't wear ear rings anymore. They're
Speaker 3: two My ears are too sensitive. I usually like stick
Speaker 3: with silver if I have to. But yeah, I don't know, not.
Speaker 2: Meant to be rich, no shame or maybe maybe platinum
Speaker 2: is what's Oh yeah, platinum? Yeah, okay, listeners sen Cherine
Speaker 2: Platinum do hikis, well, yeah to where Yeah gold they're
Speaker 2: the Olympic metals are not solid gold, they're just gold coated.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's a little cheap. Yeah yeah, right, like you
Speaker 2: spend your whole life training something and then they did, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you drop it and it's just plastic in the middle.
Speaker 2: I guess they have more value sing pick medals than
Speaker 2: they do as lumps of gold. Anyway, you can sell them,
Speaker 2: and people have sold them online because, as it turns out,
Speaker 2: like spending your entire youth exercising and then getting to
Speaker 2: a point where you're too injured or old to compete,
Speaker 2: it's sometimes not great for your future career prospects. And
Speaker 2: then I've unfortunately seen lots of friends take that path.
Speaker 2: And so I want to talk about like the Olympics
Speaker 2: in the twenty century, and specifically I want to talk
Speaker 2: about the Olympics in the nineteen thirties. Right, so when
Speaker 2: the Olympics. By the time we come to the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: the Olympics have really become like they're an American thing.
Speaker 2: The Los Angeles Olympics gives us a lot of the
Speaker 2: modern Olympics and the rest of the mother Olympics we
Speaker 2: get from friends of the podcast Adolf Hitler and his
Speaker 2: Nazi Party. Of course, yeah, I knew that you were
Speaker 2: expecting them. We never, never don't expect Hitler. So ninety
Speaker 2: thirty two is great. Like nineteen thirty two Olympic village.
Speaker 2: They build this Olympic village. They haven't patrolled by cowboys,
Speaker 2: just like Hollywood cosplay dudes on horses cowboying around. It's
Speaker 2: the first. It's very weird. It's the first Olympic village,
Speaker 2: and it's it becomes a real estate investment, right like
Speaker 2: as soon as the Olympics are done, there in classic
Speaker 2: Los Angeles fashion, flipping the houses for more than they
Speaker 2: were paid. So it also creates this idea of like
Speaker 2: the Olympics as a mass spectacle in nineteen thirty two
Speaker 2: is sometimes called the Hollywood Olympics, right, and it really
Speaker 2: changes the game from rich people getting together for rich
Speaker 2: people to a spectator event and a mass spectator event.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty one, Spain's Dicta Blander collapses. Dicta Blander
Speaker 2: is like a soft dictatorship as opposed to Dictadora as
Speaker 2: a hard dictatorship. Right, so, and Spain becomes a Republic
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty one. It's also the time when the International
Speaker 2: Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona, and for geographically challenged listeners, Barcelona,
Speaker 2: it's in Catalonia, but Catalonia is within Spain at this time,
Speaker 2: so the IOC is almost entirely comprised of very rich people,
Speaker 2: and many of them are like barons, counts, princes other
Speaker 2: people who like their job is being someone's kid, right,
Speaker 2: and they just do things like being on the IOC
Speaker 2: to occupy them what they spend their parents' money. So
Speaker 2: they're in Spain at the time when Spain has just
Speaker 2: deposed a monarch and it has this revolutionary republic, right,
Speaker 2: the anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin
Speaker 2: a campaign of two years of removing the church from
Speaker 2: its official position, like anti clericalism and of land reform.
Speaker 2: These are things which rich people do not like. And
Speaker 2: so the vote happens in Barcelona about where to hold
Speaker 2: the next Olympics, and the two leading candidates are Berlin
Speaker 2: and Barcelona. After Barcelona, I think a little weird happens.
Speaker 2: The IOC members all go home and not everyone has
Speaker 2: come to Barcelona, right, because because of the change in
Speaker 2: the situation and instead of being like, okay, well we
Speaker 2: had a vote in Barcelona one, the IOC makes an
Speaker 2: interesting and relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram,
Speaker 2: and in the telegram vote, they instead of going for
Speaker 2: the unstable Spanish Second Republic, up for a more stable
Speaker 2: and liberal democracy, which is of course Yamar Germany. Oh
Speaker 2: of course, yeah, good choice by their better rich folks.
Speaker 2: They really helped us out there, and it's very interesting,
Speaker 2: like I've spent a lot of time with these telegrams,
Speaker 2: like the actual paper telegrams in the International Olympic Committee
Speaker 2: archive in Lausanne, trying to ascertain did they just like
Speaker 2: did the vote happen? And then they were like no, fuck,
Speaker 2: we can't go to Barcelona, like we got to redo,
Speaker 2: We've got to work out a way to jig this,
Speaker 2: like we can't go to this republican place, or that
Speaker 2: they claimed that there weren't enough votes, right, that they
Speaker 2: didn't have like a quorum. But I've looked at previous
Speaker 2: and subsequent votes and there are there are plenty of
Speaker 2: other votes that have fewer participants, and it was relatively
Speaker 2: normal at this time for not everyone to show up
Speaker 2: at a meeting right, because it's nineteen thirty one, Like,
Speaker 2: traveling is hard, and so I can't categorically say what's happened.
Speaker 2: But maybe that's what I suspect has happened. I can't
Speaker 2: really see any way I could find out now, And
Speaker 2: so went to every member of the International Olympic Committee
Speaker 2: at the time and looked in their personal archive. But
Speaker 2: either way, they decided to give the Olympics to this
Speaker 2: little place called firemar Germany. In between ninety thirty one
Speaker 2: and nineteen thirty six. History fans will know that the
Speaker 2: Nazis came to parent Germany. Nazis not very nice people
Speaker 2: and no bad Many people are saying, yeah, many people
Speaker 2: are saying.
Speaker 3: The mosquitoes of the world not sorry, we just recorded
Speaker 3: the Mosquito episode.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, in any ways, like the mosquito could be eradicated,
Speaker 2: maybe wouldn't be bad. Yeah, my favorite George Orwell line,
Speaker 2: one of my favorite joints or world lines. I joined
Speaker 2: the militia to kill a fascist because if all of
Speaker 2: us did so, then there wouldn't be any of them left.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very prescient. So the Olympics, then the Nazis
Speaker 2: going to power. First they want to do away with it.
Speaker 2: Right then when they're like, fuck this, this is some
Speaker 2: bougie shit, went on into it. We don't want to
Speaker 2: see other people, we don't care about other nations with arians.
Speaker 2: And then over time the administrators of the Olympics, including
Speaker 2: guy called Carl DM who would be classified, according to
Speaker 2: the Nazis owned sort of standards as a Jewish person,
Speaker 2: They persuade the Nazis that having the Olympics will be
Speaker 2: good for them. It will let them exhibit their shit
Speaker 2: on a world scale. And they are not wrong. Right,
Speaker 2: The Olympics turned into a massive boon for Nazi Germany.
Speaker 2: We don't have enough time in this short episode to
Speaker 2: explain the whole boycott movement. There was a substantial boycott movement,
Speaker 2: including in the United States. The United States very nearly
Speaker 2: boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but in the end it ended
Speaker 2: up not doing so. You had opposition from really interesting groups.
Speaker 2: Actually had opposition obviously from Jewish groups, right, because Nazis.
Speaker 2: You have opposition from elements of an NAACP, but not
Speaker 2: from other elements because they have this very reasonable objection.
Speaker 2: They're like, well, America is also racist as fuck. Actually,
Speaker 2: like we also like this is a time all week
Speaker 2: exclude black folks from a lot of yeah not yeah,
Speaker 2: And so you have black folks boycotting, and you have
Speaker 2: black folks being like, now fuck it, like we'll take
Speaker 2: the chance, you know. And then you have the opposition
Speaker 2: from an interesting group like the liberal Catholics, right, because
Speaker 2: the Nazis had their own ideas on religion, and so
Speaker 2: a lot of Catholics were anti Nazi at that point,
Speaker 2: and including Jeremiah Mahony, who was president of the Amateur
Speaker 2: Athletic Union at the time, who was kind of leading
Speaker 2: the boycott movement. The United States decides not to boycott,
Speaker 2: lots of other places in the world decide that they
Speaker 2: are going to boycott, right, and lots of other people
Speaker 2: around the world. And that's where Barcelona. They had a
Speaker 2: conference in Paris. Actually they're the international conference sort of
Speaker 2: respect of the Olympic ideal, and that is the conference
Speaker 2: out of which the bars that remember Barcelona applied in
Speaker 2: thirty one, right, so they have all their shit together.
Speaker 2: They actually have the site of a former World's Fair
Speaker 2: and that's what they're going to use. So the Catalans
Speaker 2: come to this conference in April of thirty six, and
Speaker 2: are like, hey, we can have another Olympics, which isn't shit,
Speaker 2: And they go ahead and have their Olympics and shit,
Speaker 2: now first happened the Nazi Olympics, Right. The Nazi Olympics
Speaker 2: give us so much of what we consider to be
Speaker 2: the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay, you know, the
Speaker 2: torch relay. They go to Olympia and bring the flame. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's a Nazi thing. Actually, it comes from the Nazis.
Speaker 2: The idea of drawing a link from ancient Greece to
Speaker 2: Berlin was a Nazi idea.
Speaker 3: Why don't we still do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question, Sharen, isn't it the good question?
Speaker 2: As we entered the Paris Olympics, one thing they have
Speaker 2: done away was is the Olympic salute because it bears
Speaker 2: an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazis. They also start in no,
Speaker 2: the Olympics salute predates it. So you have these interesting
Speaker 2: mark people march like were they the parade at the
Speaker 2: opening ceremony of the Olympics, right, and lots of these
Speaker 2: The pageantry of the opening ceremony also comes from the Nazis,
Speaker 2: by the way, and We got people walking in and
Speaker 2: the come in and they're doing a salute, and people like,
Speaker 2: is that the Nazi salute they're doing? It's at the
Speaker 2: Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure it's the Olympic salute. I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure.
Speaker 3: If it's too close, I think it's bad. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think getting confused for something else. I think I think
Speaker 3: you should stop.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I just tried to not do things that little
Speaker 2: like gunsy kilink like that is how I live my life.
Speaker 2: You have other nations who don't do it, right. You
Speaker 2: have the Americans. The Americans traditionally in the they're supposed
Speaker 2: to dip their flag. The Americans have never dipped their
Speaker 2: flag in opening ceremonies. So sometimes you'll see this written
Speaker 2: as like yeah, the Americans said, fuck, hey, they didn't.
Speaker 2: They just did what they'd always done, which was to
Speaker 2: not dip their flag, and that that Olympiad is a
Speaker 2: great success for Hitler, right, Like this is where a
Speaker 2: lot of this like, oh, but yeah, he's very efficient.
Speaker 2: He makes a trains run on time. Kind of shit
Speaker 2: comes from.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They use it as a pageant and they downplay their racism.
Speaker 2: They include a couple of Jewish athletes on their team,
Speaker 2: which is one of the demands of Avery. Brandage, head
Speaker 2: of the America Olympic Committee. Brandage Brandish is an interesting dude. Brandage.
Speaker 2: You can read more about Brandage in my book Robert
Speaker 2: Did Behind the Bastards on Brandage. I don't think he
Speaker 2: begins the nineteen thirties of the anti Semite, but after
Speaker 2: the boycott campaign, which he calls a Jewish Communist conspiracy,
Speaker 2: well yeah, he absolutely becomes an anti Semite, like he
Speaker 2: grows closer to hit that when other because like his
Speaker 2: idea is that politics shouldn't influence the games, which is
Speaker 2: inherently a political choice when the games have been given
Speaker 2: to fucking Adolf Hitler. Yeah, so the ninety thirty six
Speaker 2: Olympics go ahead in Germany, lots of fascism, lots of
Speaker 2: zieg Heiling, a real success for Hitler. Ninety thirty six
Speaker 2: Olympics in Barcelona don't go ahead because the Spanish Civil War.
Speaker 2: The Barcelona Olympics are like an alternative to the Berlin Olympics. Yeah.
Speaker 2: At this time, also, it should be pointed out that
Speaker 2: you got the Winter Olympics when you've got the Olympics.
Speaker 2: So the Nazi had already had their garmentge part in
Speaker 2: Kirschen Winter Olympics and had predicted to me that a
Speaker 2: bunch of Nazi shit, right, which didn't stop anyone going
Speaker 2: to the Summer Olympics. Sharan, do you know what won't
Speaker 2: do a bunch of Nazi shit? What? James, it's the
Speaker 2: products and services that support this show, Saran, I founder.
Speaker 3: It's easier instead of trying to come up with something
Speaker 3: just to give you the question right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, damn foiled again way back. So yeah, these Olympics,
Speaker 2: they're supposed to happen in Barcelona. They don't happen because
Speaker 2: the Spanish Civil War starts at the same time, right,
Speaker 2: Lots of these anti fascist athletes go on to participate
Speaker 2: as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, about four hundred
Speaker 2: of them. The popular Olympics are cool. The main reason
Speaker 2: they're call is because I've written a book about them,
Speaker 2: but other reasons include that they had like elite amateur
Speaker 2: and then provincial races, so like you could just show
Speaker 2: up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to
Speaker 2: fucking check my hand the ring one hundred meters, let's
Speaker 2: see how I do. And there would be a place
Speaker 2: for you to compete, right, It wasn't about who was
Speaker 2: a freak athlete. They were really interested in working class health.
Speaker 2: So for that reason, they also had like these mass
Speaker 2: relay events where you'd have like the fifty by twenty
Speaker 2: five meters or the ten by fifty meters and you
Speaker 2: couldn't have all runners. So the idea was that the
Speaker 2: country that would win or the nation that would win.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They competed as nations rather than states, So the exiled
Speaker 2: Jews of Europe competed together for the obvious reason that like,
Speaker 2: if you're a German Jew in nineteen thirty six, you
Speaker 2: don't want to compete for fucking Germany, you know. So
Speaker 2: even at the Populalympics they competed to Jewish workers sports associations.
Speaker 2: And you have exiled and anti fascists from Germany and
Speaker 2: Italy competing under their own banners. And you have Glicia,
Speaker 2: Catalonia Scady, the Basque country competing as their annual nations, right,
Speaker 2: and the same with the colonized people of North Africa.
Speaker 2: And you have the women students of the world with
Speaker 2: their own old team, which is nice. They also made
Speaker 2: a big deal of including women, allowing women to do
Speaker 2: sports that men do at the time. In the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty six women can run more than two hundred meters. Well,
Speaker 2: but they actually could, as it turns out, Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: they just weren't allowed to. Yeah, shocking discovery. They didn't
Speaker 2: just evolve that capacity since thirty six. But these Olympics
Speaker 2: don't go ahead beause the Spanish Civil War starts. Lots
Speaker 2: of the anti fascist athletes who came state to fight, right,
Speaker 2: including people I've written about in my book. We did
Speaker 2: a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this.
Speaker 2: So you can listen to more if you want to.
Speaker 2: In Margaret's feed. I'm sure if you search popular Olympics
Speaker 2: will be there. By the way you sometimes see it
Speaker 2: translated as People's Olympics. I prefer popular because it's inherently
Speaker 2: tied to the idea of a popular front right, which
Speaker 2: is a policy of like united front between everyone from
Speaker 2: the liberals to the communists to the anarchists against fascism.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular front because
Speaker 2: it is dominated by communists. Communists, in fact, love to
Speaker 2: kill anarchists a lot more than they love to kill fascists,
Speaker 2: and they use the popular front as cover for doing that,
Speaker 2: as we see in Spain. But the anarchists did participate
Speaker 2: in workers or popular sport in Barcelona at least to
Speaker 2: an extent. So these games, so that said, they don't happen.
Speaker 2: You can read about that my book, or you can
Speaker 2: listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But I want to
Speaker 2: talk about what the Olympics represent today, the modern Olympics. Right,
Speaker 2: they have become as they always were, Right, they continue
Speaker 2: to be a spectacle that they've been since thirty two,
Speaker 2: and they continue to be a vehicle for capitalism as
Speaker 2: they have been forever. Right, if we look at their
Speaker 2: recent Olympic games, right, we look at London, we look
Speaker 2: at Rio. I think Rio is a really great example, right,
Speaker 2: the Olympics that they were able to clear areas of
Speaker 2: the city using the potential Olympics. Right, displace favela communities,
Speaker 2: displace poor and excluded and marginalized people, and take advantage
Speaker 2: of incredibly underpaid labor. And there's probably it's a bit
Speaker 2: rarer now, but for like most of the last eight years,
Speaker 2: you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana mostly right, the US
Speaker 2: has been especially racist and bigoted towards Haitians, and you can.
Speaker 2: I wrote a piece for NBC about Bidens hypocracy on
Speaker 2: Haitian immigration. But there were people who had worked on
Speaker 2: the Olympic Stadium in Brazil, right, So they've gone from Haiti,
Speaker 2: like after the earthquake or the economic and political issues,
Speaker 2: so they've had ever since the earthquake, they've gone to Brazil.
Speaker 2: And then they've worked in Brazil building the stadia, getting
Speaker 2: paid fuck all and doing dangerous work. And then eventually
Speaker 2: I've been able to find work that visas had run
Speaker 2: out or that they'd otherwise chosen to come north to
Speaker 2: the United States, and they often end up not being
Speaker 2: able to They end up stuck in Tijuana or living
Speaker 2: in Tijuana and finding work there. So often Olympics take
Speaker 2: advantage of migrant labor. They are used as a means
Speaker 2: of like reshaping the city in to like sculpting it
Speaker 2: under capitalism. Yea right, pushing folks out of their neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: They don't do the Olympics in bougie neighborhoods. They use
Speaker 2: it as an excuse to gentrify a neighborhood, to remove
Speaker 2: in trench working class communities. Yeah, like it's really sad.
Speaker 2: It's when I read so much of the stuff about,
Speaker 2: like specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games, Like we see these
Speaker 2: people who are unquestionably good people, right, Like they genuinely
Speaker 2: believe that through what they see is the ideal of
Speaker 2: the Olympics, they can liberate women. They the Barcelona organizers
Speaker 2: so like, they didn't have much money, right, they were
Speaker 2: putting people up. And I found these forms in the archives.
Speaker 2: They'd go around people's houses and be like, hey, do
Speaker 2: you have a spare bedroom? And in the form you
Speaker 2: can tick I have one, two, three spare bedrooms. I
Speaker 2: can serve breakfast. I can't serve breakfast. And that's how
Speaker 2: they would bill at the athletes, right. The athletes didn't
Speaker 2: have an Olympic village. They had a hotel and then
Speaker 2: any surp plus you would just stay with a local person.
Speaker 2: It was a very different vision of what the Olympics
Speaker 2: could have been, right, And they believed in the youth
Speaker 2: of the world coming together. They really thought that at
Speaker 2: the popul Olympics they could show the strength of anti fascism,
Speaker 2: that anti fishing wasn't just a talking point, that it
Speaker 2: was that it was young and it was healthy and like,
Speaker 2: most importantly that they could fucking kill you, right like
Speaker 2: that that sport all Well again double or Well quote
Speaker 2: episode or Well called sport War without the shooting, and
Speaker 2: I think he's spot on. Actually it is good. He's
Speaker 2: got some bangers sharene you do say that. Yeah, he's
Speaker 2: a word guy, George or Well. People do love to
Speaker 2: misquote George your Well, but I like to quote him correctly.
Speaker 2: You know you can. You can always when someone miss
Speaker 2: quote George your Well, you can always just quote tweet
Speaker 2: them with the I had joined the militia to kill
Speaker 2: a fascist, right or the other absolute banger from all Well.
Speaker 2: I have no particular love for the idealized worker as
Speaker 2: he exists in the mind of the bourgeois communists. But
Speaker 2: when I see a real flesh and bug worker in
Speaker 2: conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I don't have
Speaker 2: to ask myself which side them on. Ooh it's a banger.
Speaker 3: That's that's poetry.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. It's great. Like it's something that when
Speaker 2: I get around, will have tattooed on my body. Maybe,
Speaker 2: like maybe when I have to cross fewer borders. It's
Speaker 2: probably not something you want to be showing off to
Speaker 2: the intelligence agencies of various countries. Yeah, it's really sad
Speaker 2: to see this thing. And I think it does have potential.
Speaker 2: I think it's a potential. What I want to end
Speaker 2: on is, like, I think we can recover that potential,
Speaker 2: Like we can take the Olympics away from the people
Speaker 2: who did nineteen oh four and the people who did
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty six, and like it doesn't mean to have
Speaker 2: to use that obviously that the IOC is not fucking
Speaker 2: coming with us, Right, I've been to the IOC, very
Speaker 2: nice building, but like this is the you know, the
Speaker 2: the interests of finance, capital and the interesting iOS here
Speaker 2: inherently tied.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Coca Coat, every massive corporation in the world is a
Speaker 2: massive spot for the Olympics, Right, And it's also been
Speaker 2: a platform for some really good things that we think about.
Speaker 2: Tommy Smith and John Carlos right at the ninety sixty
Speaker 2: eight Olympics giving the raise fist salute on the podium.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen it. There's a statue of them,
Speaker 2: several statues of them, I think, actually, but yeah, very
Speaker 2: famous Olympic moment. The whole ninety sixty year Olympics actually
Speaker 2: kind of gave a platform for protest, and Parisians have
Speaker 2: been protesting against this Olympics, and Angelino's are already protesting
Speaker 2: against what it's going to happen in twenty eight. You
Speaker 2: can look up no Olympics LA for those folks, and
Speaker 2: I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I
Speaker 2: don't think that the idea is inherently bad, the idea
Speaker 2: of coming together to play and like sports are where
Speaker 2: we decide who's on our team and who's not on
Speaker 2: our team, right, And what the Popula Olympics did was
Speaker 2: said working people are all on the same team, and
Speaker 2: they've played that out right. The day the games were
Speaker 2: supposed to start, some of those athletes were in the
Speaker 2: streets killing fascists and they weren't. Right that day that
Speaker 2: minitary coup failed in Barcelona, a lot of them left
Speaker 2: really feeling like they got something out of the games
Speaker 2: that they couldn't have got. All that they came to play,
Speaker 2: and then they saw like what they were playing for
Speaker 2: acted out. And I think there's still something really powerful
Speaker 2: in that, but we can only get there by acknowledging
Speaker 2: how fucked up the Olympics have always been. I see
Speaker 2: this like liberal narratives that the Librics, the Olympics are
Speaker 2: once great and about sportsmanship and now they're about capitalism.
Speaker 2: No fuck that, Like they have always been inherently about capitalism.
Speaker 2: They have been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics. Right, the
Speaker 2: medal table. We don't do the medal table for shits
Speaker 2: and giggles. The medal table is there to prove like
Speaker 2: the superiority of one race. Like that is why Hitler
Speaker 2: is obsessed with the medal table. Right, He's extremely worried
Speaker 2: that like either the black folks in the United States
Speaker 2: or like god forbid, the Japanese do well in the Olympics.
Speaker 2: It's like and then the Olympics trying to sort of
Speaker 2: posit itself as inherently pro human rights, I think is
Speaker 2: very problematic when we look at like how Olympics Stadia
Speaker 2: get constructed, by whom they get constructed, and where they
Speaker 2: get constructed, yeah, the effect and yeah, and who who
Speaker 2: they're for and who who they take from. So I know,
Speaker 2: I'm not saying don't watch the Olympics. Like when I
Speaker 2: was a kid, the Olympics were like fucking formative in
Speaker 2: me wanting to do sport, and when I was an
Speaker 2: athlete the Olympics beginning, I wanted to do. I have
Speaker 2: friends who are going to be at the Olympics, and like,
Speaker 2: I guess I wish them the best, but still a
Speaker 2: bad thing. And like I certainly don't blame folks who
Speaker 2: come from like resource poor settings for taking that chance.
Speaker 3: Of course not, but it is like, yeah, the way
Speaker 3: it currently is and the way it's always been is
Speaker 3: just doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. But
Speaker 3: maybe there's a different timeline where I don't know, Barcelona's
Speaker 3: idealism of an Olympics is like true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I think we can bring it back.
Speaker 2: I think like antio fascism is having a moment that
Speaker 2: it probably hasn't had them to nineteen true the last
Speaker 2: four years. We can get together and we can have
Speaker 2: our own institutions too, Like I don't think we should
Speaker 2: abandon sport to the chuds, just of course the chance
Speaker 2: of like sport, Like yeah, there's a way, but.
Speaker 3: I also don't want anyone to use it as a
Speaker 3: way to like not sports wash, but like kind of
Speaker 3: focus on something that is not as relevant as the
Speaker 3: bigger picture. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: Like yeah, totally. Like, yeah, it shouldn't be used to distract.
Speaker 3: Exactly, that's what that's the short wordsode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like it has been like global sports are
Speaker 2: increasingly going to like Petro states in the Middle East. Yeah, right, like,
Speaker 2: and that is a problem. I think if you're an athlete,
Speaker 2: I would encourage you to really consider what your role
Speaker 2: is and some of my friends listen who are still
Speaker 2: like professional athletes, and just think about what you can do.
Speaker 2: And like, I will tell you that when you stop
Speaker 2: getting paid to exercise, all of it seems very unimportant
Speaker 2: and like you suddenly realize that in my case, but
Speaker 2: there's important shit that you can do if you have
Speaker 2: a chance to do it, and you should do it
Speaker 2: if you get the chance. But yeah, I think hopefully,
Speaker 2: you know, if people want to know more about the Populalympics,
Speaker 2: I will fucking talk your eer of me an email. Yeah,
Speaker 2: my book. I think it might be on libcom now
Speaker 2: as well. I think you can. I think it's been pirated,
Speaker 2: which is good to see. You can get it from
Speaker 2: your library. I'd love you to get it from a
Speaker 2: library because it's for someone else libraries. Yeah, I do
Speaker 2: love a library. Yeah, we should do a library episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was trying to get the library San Diego Library
Speaker 2: Association on because we've been defunding the libraries here in
Speaker 2: San Diego to have more cops. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I love the libraries are just this I
Speaker 3: don't know, pure little place. We got to do some
Speaker 3: library episodes. Yeah, we'll do, and we we'll get them back.
Speaker 3: We'll get the library. So if you work in a
Speaker 3: library and the police are taking away the money you
Speaker 3: used to read books to little children, you can you
Speaker 3: can DM me on dot com. Yeah, and we will
Speaker 3: fight the good fight for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, that's uh, that's that's been the Olympics. No,
Speaker 2: go go forth, do an little decathalon. Here's a fin
Speaker 2: Olympic fact for you, a fun fun facts end the episode.
Speaker 2: A general pattern, right. American war guy entered the pentathlon
Speaker 2: at the Olympics and used such a large pistol that
Speaker 2: they were unable to determine the size of his grouping
Speaker 2: of shots on the target because he just viscerated the
Speaker 2: whole target his hand cannon. Yeah. So, embody that the
Speaker 2: pentathlon a sport that was designed to train offices. Right,
Speaker 2: you have to run, swim, ride a horse, sword, find
Speaker 2: and shoot. Yeah, so make a better pentathlon, make make
Speaker 2: our anti fascist to cathalon. Yeah, send us your You
Speaker 2: can tag us with your your decathlon ideas on on
Speaker 2: x dot com. We both use at I write Okay,
Speaker 2: bizarrely we have the same the same Twitter handle. Yeah,
Speaker 2: send us your sporting ideas. Enjoy your little Olympic viewing.
Speaker 2: Now that I've ruined it all for you.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah, no, I mean it's it's good to
Speaker 3: know context. But yeah, until next time, Until the next
Speaker 3: time you and dreams talk about something either terrible or fun.
Speaker 2: Or somewhere in between. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll yeah, we'll
Speaker 2: be back seeing you with something else. You'll never know
Speaker 2: what these are always fucking just these must just come
Speaker 2: out of left field for people, like, what the fuck
Speaker 2: are they talking about today?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, I guess I'll ever know until you listen.
Speaker 2: That's listen every day. Bye bye bye.
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