‘Another world is possible’: recapturing alternative Olympic histories, imagining different games†

Abstract

During the long, tumultuous globalization of sports, particular approaches have become universal ones. What was once one of a number of different ways of playing a game or organizing an event has become the only way. What has become universally recognized as ‘baseball’ was known in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘the New York rules’; ‘hockey’ as the ‘Montreal rules’. In these and other sports, the rules that triumphed were championed by elites in the strongest and most influential metropolitan centres and reflected the interests and power of those elites. The disappearance of the alternatives and the naturalization of the present dominant forms not only eradicates some of the richness of sporting history but also closes off the possibilities for human action today. The same is true for the Olympic Games. While by far and away the most successful, the modern Olympics promoted by Pierre de Coubertin and his followers in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is just one variant of the many approaches to international multi-sporting events taken in the modern period. What would the Olympic Games look like if one of the other variants had triumphed? What lessons do the histories of these other games offer to the Olympic Movement and international sport today? This paper considered these questions with respect to the Women's Olympics, the Workers' Olympics, the Games of the Emerging Forces, the Paralympics, and the Gay Games. It was written in the summer of 2004 during the Athens Games, when the IOC and the Hellenic Olympic Committee strongly and brilliantly reasserted their claim to trans-historical universality.