Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

More Than Simply Sport

The 2010 Winter Olympics are approaching fast, and news stories about it are beginning to appear more frequently. Trolling for Olympics-related news recently I noted several that deal with politics, community, and the social and business impacts of the games: petrochemical companies sponsoring the games hope to get "green" points with the public, even as they continue to support environmentally destructive tar sands mining in Alberta; NBC, which has an exclusive contract to broadcast the games on US television, expects to lose money on the deal, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is merely expecting to break even; renters have been evicted to make way for tourists; critics complain that the B.C. government is not using available resources to estimate the economic impact of the games; and Olympic tourists may be lucky enough to encounter Captain Condom, a superhero who will be on hand to encourage people to practice safer sex. Clearly there's a lot more going on here than sport. And it's nothing new for the Olympic Games to have a huge social impact.

The most famously controversial modern Olympics is probably the Berlin Games in 1936. Adolph Hitler's government placed great importance on the Games's ability to showcase the success of Nazi ideology and fortify Germany's place in the world scene – and German officials and amateur sports promoters went to great lengths to manipulate the International Olympic Committee to arrange the games to suit their purposes.  The United States and other countries considered boycotting the Berlin Games because of Nazi policies on racial purity, but Jewish athletes who had been prohibited from competition by the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country to prove Germany was playing fair, and the U.S. backed down. Spain, which had recently elected a left-wing government, did boycott the games, and they set up their own People's Olympiad, to be held in Barcelona. Guy Walters details the fascinating history of this unusual and complex chapter in modern Olympic history in his readable but detailed book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. What I found most intriguing about Berlin Games, really, was how much the controversies of 1936 have been echoed by conflict and turmoil around more recent Olympiads.

David Maraniss argues that the 1960 games in Rome were a watershed Olympics, and the evidence he presents in his book Rome 1960 are pretty convincing. The 1960 Rome games ushered in the first Olympic doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, and the first apparel sponsorship contract for an Olympic athlete. Rome in the summer of 1960 was also a hotbed of international intrigue, with rumors of defections circulating everywhere and the intensity of cold war conflict rising sharply all the time. Maraniss's history offers a personal look into these questions (and many others more directly related to the actual sporting competitions) with information gleaned from dozens of interviews with athletes, coaches, journalists, and many other people whose work made the games happen – and on the whole it is quite a compelling story.

If you're wondering how the modern games compare to their ancient predecessors, check out The Naked Olympics. Tony Perrettet takes readers through the games chronologically, beginning with athletes' pre-games training, administrative and religious preparations before the games began, and spectators' journey to Olympia, and moving on to cover each stage of the festival and its aftermath. It's a lively, entertaining history, and Perrettet's focus on details (and the book's many illustrations) allow readers to get a sense for what it might have been like to actually have been present – at the sporting events, the religious ceremonies, and of course, at the parties and the political fights.

I can't leave you without recommending my favorite fictional Olympics story: Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. In this episode of the long-running comics series, Asterix and his companion Obelisk travel to Greece to compete for the Gauls in the Olympic Games – with the help of the magic potion created by their village Druid, Getafix, which makes them incredibly, ridiculously strong. Naturally this leads to a doping scandal (though our heroes comport themselves most honorably), and many pages are taken up with jokes and situation comedy at the expense of the self-righteous and irritating Romans. If you find this comic suits your reading tastes, there are many other Asterix and Obelisk books for you to enjoy!