For more than 100 years the Olympic Movement has conceived of itself as promoting culture, human development, international education, and peace through sport. Founded mainly by writers, educators, scientists, and scholars, the Olympic Movement’s understanding of “culture” has shifted over the years among the fine-arts conception, the idea of general moral cultivation, and the anthropological understanding of total and distinctive ways of life. What hasn’t changed is the commitment, in the words of the 1995 charter, to “symbolizing the universality and the diversity of human cultures” through the Olympic Games, thereby serving intercultural understanding and détente.
Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
The goal of Olympism is to place everywhere sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.
—The Olympic Charter, “Fundamental Principles”
Public recognition that this organizational ideology of “Olympism” even exists, much less that Olympic sport is officially regarded as only a means to much larger intercultural ends, varies greatly from country to country and community to community.
In the United States, for example, the mass media treat the Olympic Games almost exclusively as a sports event, and American broadcasters provide many fewer hours of coverage than in all other developed countries. School curricula ignore the Olympic Movement, the United States Olympic Committee devotes itself solely to fund-raising and medal-winning, American IOC members are hardly national figures, and professional and college sports habitually dominate attention and conversation. Finally, the United States government is one of the tiny handful having no cabinet-level office of sport, associated in most nations of the world with national ministries of culture and education.
As a consequence, perhaps only the general populations of the recent American Olympic host cities of Lake Placid, Los Angeles, Squaw Valley, and Atlanta, a cross-section of American visitors to any Olympic Games, large segments of the Greek-American community, American tourists to ancient Olympia and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, as well as some few hundred American artists, producers, writers, diplomats, athletes, sports officials, and scholarly specialists are particularly conscious of even such obvious cultural manifestations of Olympism as the Cultural Olympiad. Studies clearly show that Americans in general are interested in much more than sports results and patriotic flag-waving at the Games, but they have few effective sources of information on the larger historical, institutional, and intercultural dimensions of the Olympic phenomenon.
By contrast, one can point to Greece, where national consciousness itself is inextricably intertwined with Olympic symbolism, ritual practice, and ideology. This is because the historical connection to the ancient Olympic Games has been promoted for 150 years by the national education system, by political agencies seeking to cultivate the goodwill of outside European powers, by arts, archaeology, and classical studies institutions, and by the all-important tourist industry. The Greek Olympic Committee and the Greek government also control and support the key Olympic flame-lighting ritual and the Olympic Movement’s most important educational agency, the International Olympic Academy.
Segments of Greek opinion regret what they see as this nostalgic, ahistorical, and nonproductive emphasis on a distant and artificially selected past. Not a few contemporary Greeks also wish that more time, money, and energy were spent in producing successful Olympic athletes than in further struggles among cultural, political, and economic elites over who best defends Olympic/Greek values and traditions against foreign corruption. The point, however, is the difficulty of finding any Greek citizen, whether critic or partisan, who does not understand the Olympic Games first and foremost in cultural-historical and cultural-political terms.
Unlike Greece and like the United States, Germany is a world power in athletics; but, like Greeks and unlike Americans, most Germans are quite familiar with the terms Olympism and Olympic Movement, including a younger generation more inclined to be skeptical than their elders. The German Olympic sports system is state-driven, IOC members and National Olympic Committee (NOC) leaders are public figures, and the news media pay as much attention to Olympic as to professional and club forms of sport. Elementary and secondary school curricula feature units on the history and humanistic aspirations of Olympism, and there are two universities devoted entirely to sport and physical education, with whole faculties specializing in Olympic affairs, including arts and cultural history.
More scholarly and popular writing has appeared in German than in any other language on the topic of sport, art, and culture. German film director Leni Riefenstahl’s pioneering, and in the opinion of many still the finest, documentary film Olympische Spiele (1938; Olympia) was a masterfully artistic celebration of cultures of the body at the 1936 Berlin Games. The 1972 Games in Munich meant to celebrate the connections of sport to art and culture. In world memory, however, Berlin and Munich immediately invoke images of political horror. Their tragic juxtaposition with the presentation of German civilization on the world stage is responsible in great part for the continuing importance of Olympic affairs in German cultural debates today.
In the developing world the Olympic Movement has typically attracted attention for its historical, cultural, and political content long before the emergence of any national sports heroes at the Games. For example, nations in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Central Africa have regarded appearance in the Olympic opening ceremonies parade as a critical ritual of recognition and incorporation in the global system of nation-states and as one of the very few opportunities to attract even a small measure of public and media attention from the rich countries.
These are matters of human dignity and cultural presence in most cases, not illusions of economic development or North-South income transfer. Sometimes they are even conceptualized as a process of reverse colonization of the European-dominated and American-financed Olympic Movement. Whether they desire them or not, Third World athletes, IOC members, and NOC officials carry mandates to represent their home cultures, or at least the nationalized version, well beyond the requirements of athletic performance. Few Olympic sports heroes and fans from the wealthy and politically powerful countries can even remotely imagine the social and cultural significance of marathon gold medalists Abebe Bikila and Nawal el-Moutawakel or Olympic hurdler Josiah Thugwane in Ethiopia, postapartheid South Africa, and Morocco, respectively. Such facts lead scholars to believe that Olympism as such tends to be more persuasive today in the Southern than in the Northern Hemisphere, just as actually having the “Olympic experience” (a sense of personal joy and dignity gained from competition) tends to be inversely proportional to competitive success for today’s Olympic athletes.
But the dialectic of cultural expression, political freedom, and economic development is hardly unknown in the industrialized world. Because of its status as a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rico cannot be a member of the United Nations, conduct an independent foreign policy, or sign its own commercial treaties. But it has an independent NOC, so Puerto Rico appears as a nation among nations, a culture among world cultures, in (and only in) the Olympic and Pan American Games. Therefore, for many Puerto Ricans Olympic sport stands with literature, music, and art as a key site of production of specifically Puerto Rican national culture, so valued that the political forces promoting 51st-statehood have been blocked for decades by popular refusal to lose the independent Olympic team.
These few illustrations scarcely hint at the complexity of Olympic intercultural relations, differences, and interactions among the 197 member countries of the present-day Olympic Movement. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games and the IOC, wrote in 1934, “To ask the peoples of the world to love one another is merely a form of childishness. To ask them to respect one another is not in the least utopian; but in order to respect one another, it is first necessary to know one another.” Besides ongoing educational institutions such as the International Olympic Academy and the Olympic Museum, intercultural information is generated and exchanged through the host city bid competition, intensive world press scrutiny of each Olympic host culture, the gigantic broadcast audiences for the opening ceremonies with their world and local cultural performances, the real or fanciful associations of certain cultures with certain sports in the athletic program, the face-to-face interactions among festival-goers, and the formal arts programs of the Cultural Olympiad that accompanies every Games.
How substantial is such information and how effective is its communication? It seems impossible to generalize across all aspects of the Olympic phenomenon. Researchers are showing, for instance, that while certain Olympic host cities and nations do effectively promote positive images of themselves throughout world media, the depth of the cultural information conveyed is typically very shallow. Moreover, media attention turns away as soon as an Olympics are finished so that there is little consolidation of knowledge. How many of the millions who learned to distinguish Catalan from Spanish culture through the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona have kept up with the development of cultural autonomies in that region? Millions of Olympic partisans around the world came to understand how the total Korean cultural mobilization for the 1988 Games in Seoul hastened the end of military rule in that country. How many, a decade later, can say very much about subsequent Korean cultural politics?
Being there instead of depending on mass media can make a very great difference. Though national and international media barely noticed, most Atlantans at the 1996 Games were certainly aware that eight winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature had convened under Cultural Olympiad auspices in their city the year before to discuss the role of the artist in the newly globalized world. While television viewers heard “background music” punctuated by a terrorist’s bomb, visitors to the Atlanta Olympics nightly partook of the single most important festival of Southern music in American history. Though scarcely publicized beyond the arts community, the legacy of this Olympic Arts Festival also includes an incomparably valuable online database of Southern folk and popular artists and arts organizations in dozens of craft, genre, and performance fields.
Culture is of course active and emergent as well as stable and reproductive. In 1996 approximately 30 million Americans came out to see the Olympic flame and to engage in the open-ended and largely unscripted process of linking its imagined “global” meanings with those of thousands of local American places and traditions. Hardly any of them knew of the extraordinary dramas that had led to that passage of the flame, not only because American television once again refused to broadcast the flame-lighting ceremony at the ruins of ancient Olympia, Greece, but because, to close the circle of this essay, American and Greek perspectives on Olympic culture are so very different as to have led to almost incomprehensible events in the past.
There was a legitimate Olympic flame for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics only because 15,000 Greek troops sealed off access to the sanctuary at ancient Olympia against 30,000 Greek demonstrators who angrily vowed that the Americans would not have the sacred flame. Greek President Konstantinos Karamanlis concealed himself in some bushes, preparing to throw himself between the soldiers and demonstrators if need be. The American Olympic officials helicoptered directly into the cordoned-off site, took the flame as soon as it was lit (by a chief priestess who received scores of deaths threats for doing so), skipped the rituals at Coubertin’s memorial, and to the chanted curses of the crowd lifted off back to a waiting U.S. government plane at a military airport near Athens. Needless to say, the traditional relay from Olympia to Athens, part of what is nothing less than a national ritual of the Greek people, had been canceled long before.
What had caused such developments? The Los Angeles Olympic Committee had sold the rights to carry the Olympic flame in this country for $3,000 per kilometre. To majority Greek opinion this was sacrilegious commercial pollution of a symbol sacred to the world and to the Greek nation. To the Americans responsible, this attitude was incomprehensible since much of the money raised was to go to youth charities. In Greece there are few private charities and the state is responsible for youth development, so Greek authorities and journalists imagined this rationale to be a fig leaf for the same naked marketing for which the Los Angeles leaders were already infamous. In frustration at these attitudes and absolutely unable to understand the true cultural sources of their intensity, the Los Angeles authorities put it about that the Greek Olympic Committee was just trying to extort exorbitant fees for putting on the ceremonies. This canard inflamed Greek public opinion still further. Thus, in a perfect horror of intercultural ignorance and misunderstanding, the situation spiraled so very nearly out of control that the Olympic Movement was fortunate to escape its worst episode since Munich.
As if this terrible legacy was not enough of a challenge to American Olympic organizers as they prepared to come for the flame in 1996, Atlanta had beaten out Athens for the right to host the Centennial Olympics. For many Greeks it was a national tragedy and humiliation that the 1996 Games would not be held “in the country of their origin” as the first modern Games of 1896 were, and the situation was further inflamed by defensive and widely popular claims that the IOC had sold out these Games to Atlanta-based multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola and the Cable News Network (CNN).
While the American people continued to be uninformed about these 1984 events, and Los Angeles and some IOC Olympic officials continued to promote their distorted version in Olympic backstage circles, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) commissioned their own studies of what had gone wrong in 1984. Led by ACOG top officials Billy Payne, Charles Battle, and Andrew Young, ACOG began a five-year campaign to familiarize itself with Greek Olympic cultures, to consult widely with Greek leaders in many fields, and to make themselves increasingly accessible to Greek journalists and groups of ordinary citizens. Faced with these very different kinds of Americans, Greek officials and publics in turn worked harder to respect ACOG’s efforts and to understand its points of view.
The astonishing result of these truly Olympian efforts at intercultural understanding and cooperation was an April morning in 1996 in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens when Payne received a standing ovation from the 15,000 Greeks present as he lauded Greece’s contribution to world civilization and to the Olympic Movement and vowed—in Greek and through a popular Greek proverb—to go blind rather than to bring any harm to the Olympic flame.
