The Global Sport Monopoly

Abstract

ATHLETES MARCHED INTO RICE-ECCLES STADIUM at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in early February 2002, as they will two years later in Athens, Greece. Spectators around the world marvelled at the costumes, the carefully choreographed ceremonies, and the inspiring musical scores, even as they pined for a better look at the burning torch. Generally losing themselves in the proceedings, they tended to forget the brief, public outcry against the ruling administrative body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), when money, plane tickets, gifts, promises changed hands in the incestuous process of determining which city would host the Olympic Games. More significantly, they do not recognize any other major sporting event as more important than the Olympics, with the possible exception of the World Cup of soccer, because more than one hundred years of creative political exertion, as carefully contrived and methodically choreographed as the ceremonies themselves, has made it so. So far reaching is the influence of the so-called modern Olympic movement that we do not or cannot imagine any alternatives for sport. Such ideological pervasiveness endows a singular institution with the capital not just to organize events, but also to define, delineate, and sustain particular meanings about sport, competition, and how human bodies are to be trained, presented, and understood. For these reasons, the modern Olympic movement has a social trajectory, an essence however nebulous, that appeals to a significant range of citizens.In spite of nostalgic connections to the ancient world, the modern Olympics emerged from 19th century thought and practice. In a variety of forms, sport itself was a project of the 19th century, popularized during an era of nation-state building, wide-scaled military organization, and the beginnings of international exchange and competition. At the national level, sport was utilized to rejuvenate masculine identities and invigorate the youth of the nation after the ravages of both Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian wars. Countries like Germany, Denmark, and Sweden initiated uniquely styled gymnastics movements to train young men, perhaps future soldiers, to summon deeper feelings of national identity and culture, inextricably linked to military fitness on a large scale. Britain invoked and harnessed the passions of virile, sometimes violent, but value-laden masculinities through sports and games, seeking to build a nation of strong men and boys committed to the nation's imperial and colonial foreign policies. It was a time of competition between countries, symbolically played out through a few sporting exchanges and at the more formal and wondrous venues of world's fairs and expositions. State leaders became significantly interested in measuring cultural capital, in advertising their nations, through competitions that assessed the quality of manufactured goods, raw materials, wildlife exhibits, and scientific advancements. Sport, too, became an index of cultural, political, and economic progress.Moved and inspired by the defeat of his country at the hands of the Germans, in the Franco-Prussian wars, Baron Pierre de Coubertin sought to enhance the military and cultural status of France to counteract what he viewed as a 'softening' of men. In his travels far and wide to assess formalized programmes of physical training, he was most impressed by the British model of sports and games in the public schools.(1) A young boy indifferent to the perils of a football scrimmage, he thought, would be unlikely to retreat from the mouth of an enemy cannon.(2) Coubertin's pleas for the introduction of a more exuberant physical culture within the schools of France were immediately rebuffed, and he was forced to turn his creative energies elsewhere. He was acutely aware of the massive gymnastics competitions at the German Turnfests, the Scottish Highland Games, the English Olympick Games at Much Wenlock, and the Olympic games of 19th century Greece, among other sporting festivals. …