Sweat, slow motion and solidarity: Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad in Ireland

Abstract

Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is widely recognised as one of the greatest Olympic films ever made, though it remains overshadowed by Riefenstahl's record of the ‘Nazi Olympics’, Berlin Olympia (1936). My father saw Tokyo Olympiad as a teenager in a provincial city in Ireland in the 1960s, and he credits it with inspiring him to become an athlete. This paper draws together my father's memories of seeing the film and the national context in which he saw it in light of wider critical commentary on Ichikawa's controversial film. Using two sequences in the film as examples – Abebe Bikila's gold medal marathon and Ranatunge Karunananda's 29th place finish in the 10,000 metres – I focus in particular on the ways in which Tokyo Olympiad works to transcend the patriotic nationalism that global sporting events tend to promulgate and, instead, asks viewers to construct imaginatively affinities that are humanist rather than nationalist.