A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo by Zlatko Jovanovic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo by Zlatko Jovanovic Bojan Aleksov Jovanovic, Zlatko. A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 2021. ix + 265 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £79.99. Western media outrage over Qatar's hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2022 rarely dwelled on the fact that the previous event was held in Putin's Russia, and others before that hosted by the Argentinian Junta (1978) and Mussolini (1934). The history of the Olympics has been even more controversial, however, from Hitler's infamous spectacle in Berlin 1936 to the Games being held to ransom throughout the Cold War. The Sarajevo Games remain the only Winter Olympics ever to have been held in the Balkans and the only Games organized by a Communist-run, non-aligned country. The event was exceptionally celebrated both in Sarajevo's host country, Yugoslavia, and hailed around the globe as a great sporting success devoid of controversies. Soviet and American athletes competed after a long series of boycotts. Probably the most iconic memory of the Games was Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's 'Boléro', which was awarded nine perfect scores for artistic impression and won the Ice Dance Gold medal. Eight years on, Sarajevo's golden moment was overshadowed by war and the longest siege of a city since World War Two by forces supported by Milošević's Serbia. While the Games made all Sarajevans proud, its bloody aftermath loomed large over their legacy. Unsurprisingly, a great deal has been written about these events. In the monograph under review here, Zlatko Jovanovic confronts and criticizes much of this literature, looking at the political, economic, and especially 'cultural' aspects of the Games, surveying their media, print and audio-visual coverage, and also personal letters and popular culture sources, notably song [End Page 185] lyrics. Driven by the local political elite's desire to modernize and strengthen the city economically, the Games, according to Jovanovic, made Sarajevans more aware of their city's particularity, and helped to position them in the popular-cultural space, both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Jovanovic charts his agenda first by showing the continuity of Sarajevo's development in Socialist Yugoslavia, which was hastened by the bid, initiating urban transformation, modernization of its infrastructure and a campaign to reduce pollution. It also turned the city, which had no winter sport tradition despite being nestled in mountains, into a potential bidder for the Olympics. Yugoslavia's unique geopolitical position and prestige in the Cold War provided an antidote to Sarajevo's 1914 notoriety, framing it as a 'truly Yugoslav city'. No longer relying on its heroic acts in World War Two, which had been a key tool of legitimacy in Tito's Yugoslavia, by the 1980s Sarajevo was promoted as a modern alpine destination. Locals, for example, began playing ice hockey and only a few years later became one of the top clubs in the Yugoslav league. While Jovanovic elaborates on numerous economic, infrastructural and cultural benefits, one is still left to wonder whether Sarajevo did in fact become a global winter tourism centre, as had been envisaged, before it fell victim to nationalist exclusivism. On the other hand, Jovanovic shows how Sarajevo's newly propagated image exposed it during the protracted political crisis and re-emergence of nationalism as a 'leftover oasis' of Yugoslavia. The image promulgated of Sarajevo was that of a meeting place of the old and the new, 'a mosaic of the preserved traces of various cultures and epochs' (p. 59), where even the city's Oriental heritage was reevaluated through the idea of a historic harmonious coexistence, even though the political and cultural elites in Socialist Yugoslavia had previously emphasized the country's Mediterranean and Central European cultural and architectural heritage. The Games in Sarajevo also provided the setting for the emergence of an authentic art and music scene driven by its youth — its own version of the 1980s global New Wave, known as Nju primitivizam (New Primitivism) — which by the end of the decade became a...