American History Tellers - The Fight for the First U.S. Olympics | Passing the Torch | 4

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

The 1904 St. Louis Olympics were marred by controversy and poorly organized events like the marathon. But at least they took place as scheduled. In 1916, after the outbreak of World War I, they were canceled entirely. A century later, in 2020, the Olympics faced another kind of test: a global pandemic that forced the first postponement of the Games in their history. In this episode, Lindsay discusses troubled Olympics past and present with Dr. Susan Brownell, a former nationally ranked track-and-field athlete turned scholar and Olympic historian. They’ll look at how war, disease, boycotts and political turmoil have repeatedly threatened the Games throughout their history, and how the Olympics have survived such challenges to unite the world in its love of sport.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's July 1914. You're an American track and field coach, but for the past year, you've been in Berlin, training the German national team for the forthcoming Olympic Games. They're scheduled to be held in Berlin in 1916. But maybe not.

In your office at Olympic Stadium, you open a letter marked urgent. It's from Kaiser Wilhelm himself, and it confirms what you feared for weeks. Germany is about to go to war. As you're putting away the letter, there's a knock on your door. It's Karl Diem, your boss and head of the German Olympic Committee. His face is grim. I assume you've heard the news. I have. The Kaiser has advised me to get my family out of Germany immediately. He warns that once the war starts, we may be unable to leave. Hmm. Yeah, I understand your concern. But as your chairman, I urge you to stay. We need you here.

My contract says I'm to train the German athletic team for the Olympics. If war breaks out, there won't be an Olympics, and you and I both know it. No, no, no. This war will be over by the end of August. Well, if that's true, I'll come back. But in the meantime, I'm going to follow the Kaiser's advice and get my family out of here. Deem's eyes narrow. Is this about money? We'll pay you more. No, it's not about money. Look, even assuming I did stay, how many of my runners will be drafted? What's the point of me staying if I've got no one to train? I don't think you understand the importance of these Olympics to the German people.

1916 will be the first time they happen on German soil. And we brought you here at great expense because... Yeah, yeah, because of my German heritage. And to help you achieve a great triumph for Germany. I've heard this all before. I don't want to disappoint the German people, but... You hesitate. It does feel wrong to flee like this. You are an Olympian, a winner of four gold medals. You've never backed down from a challenge. Maybe Deem is right. Maybe you should stay. But then again, you think of your wife and children. There's talk of this war spreading to every corner of Europe. You can't risk that.

No. I'm sorry, sir. For my family's sake, I have to leave. Fine. If that's your decision, I won't take up any more of your time. Well, thank you. But look, if you're right, and the war is over quickly, let's discuss my return at a later date. No, there's no reason for you to come back. Deem spins on his heels and slams the door angrily on his way out. You start packing up your things. Paperwork from your desk,

your track cleats in the corner, and then you pull your office door closed behind you. On your way out, you pass through the track and field locker room. It's deserted and already feels like it'll stay that way. You cast your gaze over the names over each locker, wondering how many of these young men will never come back from the front lines. Then you sling your duffel bag across your shoulder and leave Berlin Olympic Stadium for the last time. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers,

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From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In 1913, a German-American athlete from Milwaukee named Alvin Krenzlein was hired by the German government to coach the nation's track and field team. The 1916 Olympics were scheduled to take place in Berlin, and Germany, which had always underperformed in the Games, was determined to make the most of them. They offered Krenzlein a five-year contract worth $50,000, an unheard of sum for an athletic coach at the time. But then, in June of 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, setting into motion a series of events that would lead to the First World War. Just days before Germany entered the war, Krenzlein and his family fled back to the United

States. As the conflict spread across Europe, for the first time, the Olympics were cancelled. They would not be held again until 1920. A century later, in 2020, the Olympics faced another kind of test, a global pandemic that forced the first postponement of the Games in their history. They've finally taken place in these past few weeks, but without spectators, as host nation Japan continues to grapple with low vaccination rates and the spread of COVID-19. Here to talk with me about troubled Olympics past and present, including the subject of our latest series, the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, is Dr. Susan Brownell. She's an Olympic historian, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St.

Louis, and editor of the book, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games, Sports, Race, and American Imperialism. She's also herself a formerly nationally ranked track and field athlete. Here's our conversation. So Dr. Susan Brownell, welcome to American History Tellers. Thanks so much for inviting me. I'd like to start our conversation with a discussion on just the general nature of sports. 117 years ago, at the time of the 1904 Olympics, America was closer to the end of the Civil War than it was towards the end of World War II. Modern American sporting culture, baseball on the radio, football on the TV, those were

all far off into the future. So I was wondering, what was it like to be a sports fan in 1904? Well, I think in 1904, sports was largely very localized. We didn't have the global networks that we have today, although some of them existed in some sports. And that was sort of an interesting part of that era, the emerging development of world records and international competitions. But that whole international system didn't really exist yet, which is why it made it so difficult to hold the Olympics back then, including in 1904, because the organizers weren't even sure who to contact in order to invite people to come. You know, you didn't have the whole system in place to contact a national Olympic committee or an international federation. All of that would come

slightly later. So I think in the U.S., really, baseball was the sport, and Spalding Sporting Goods was the major sporting goods company and the two of them sort of grew together. But what was interesting about the St. Louis Olympics was that was really the first time an Olympic Games was used as a platform by a corporation to promote its business. And Spalding Sporting Goods really did that big time in 1904 with a lot of advertising and providing a lot of really up-to-date equipment, the latest technologies, and making a big point of the fact that they were leading the wave in that respect. So 1904 then might have been one of the first commercializations of the Olympics, but the Olympics have always, almost always, had an amateur focus. It wasn't a professionalization of the sports themselves. Where did the amateur focus of the Olympics come from? Well, it is ironic that the 1904 Olympics were the first to be commercialized, and that was probably one of many reasons that the Europeans were a little put off by those games, because really the amateur focus in sport

came from Europe, and Britain was the biggest advocate of it. And it really had to do with preserving the class systems that existed in countries at that time, because they didn't want workers who were at the bottom of the social scale mixing with gentlemen who were at the bottom of the social scale, mixing with gentlemen who were at the top of the social scale. So there were professional sports, such as boxing, for example, but those athletes weren't allowed into Olympic Games. And in general, these international competitions, such as they were, were for gentlemen. And that would be men who didn't have to do manual labor for a living. The nominal excuse was that they had an unfair advantage because they did manual labor, and that was somehow equivalent to training.

But the real reason was just to maintain the class structure. So I'm interested in clarifying, it wasn't just that no athlete participant could be a professional in their sport, paid for their sport. But it was also that there were these ancillary activities that could be considered as professional sport. If I was a blacksmith, I couldn't therefore throw a javelin? Well, I think it varied from country to country. But in Britain, which I said was kind of the heart of the whole thing, and they were the one who were pushing in the Olympic movement the hardest to maintain an amateur rule for the longest period of time. So there, you would have competitions that were exclusive to the leisured class, and workers would not be allowed to participate.

And then in the U.S., you had something slightly different, again, probably related to our higher degree of commercialization of sport. So what was going on in 1904 was that there were professional sports. And interestingly, maybe one of the biggest venues in which they appeared was circuses. So professional boxing, for example, and different kinds of combat or acrobatics. But also there were touring athletes as well. And again, boxing was the big one. And these guys had an unsavory reputation. They were typically from the working class. They were just not welcome in acceptable society. And so, what was happening at this time was the

organizers of sports, and in this case, in 1904, it was James Sullivan, who was head of the physical education department and organized the sports in St. Louis. They were trying to legitimize themselves and their profession and the sports that they were trying to develop at that time. So, in the U.S., part of what was going on was this attempt to separate sports off from these unsavory professional sports that had developed and to claim that your sports were physical education. They had an educational function. It wasn't all about making money. So that was really maybe the other side of it. It was class-based, but it was a little bit more of a different way

in which class was divided. Well, continuing on the theme of societal aspects of the 1904 Olympics, you know, of course, coinciding with the 1904 Olympics was the World's Fair. And so, the Olympics purported to be a cultural exhibition as much as an athletic one. You edited a collection of articles that focused on the anthropology days of the 1904 Olympics, and our series touched on it a bit. What drew you to that event specifically when studying the 1904 Games? I am an anthropologist. I have a PhD in anthropology, so I was drawn originally to the title, Anthropology Days, and I was wondering about the involvement of my discipline in that event. And it turned out that the thing was organized by W.J. McGee, who was the first president of the American Anthropological Association, which part of a bigger phenomenon in the world at the time, but also at the fair, which was the display of exotic peoples and indigenous peoples from around the world for either education or profit.

So, there were some 1,500 indigenous athletes on display inside the fairgrounds and probably an equal amount outside the fairgrounds, which those people were brought in by commercial ventures. McGee actually estimated that about one third of the entire publicity of the fair concerned the anthropological exhibits inside the fairgrounds. So that really shows that it constituted a huge part of the fair. And we can only assume a big part of the attraction to the spectators. And they came in order to come face to face with Indigenous peoples dressed in what they considered strange clothing, or maybe very little clothing at all, and to watch them performing rituals and sometimes sports, actually, like archery, for example. And so that was actually part of a bigger phenomenon because touring groups of Native peoples were going on all around Europe and the United States. And those were for-profit ventures.

Do you think this was an extension at all of the American tradition of the Wild West shows that kind of showcased Native Americans in this circus-like atmosphere? Well, it's kind of interesting that, yes, American Wild West shows were just sort of at their heyday right now. They were very big for a while. They were also popular in Europe, of course, and popularized the whole idea of the cowboys and Indians fighting each other. That was an enduring trope everywhere. I've argued, however, that in some ways the Olympic Games themselves were a similar reenactment of national histories. I mean, they had origins in Greece, and when the Greeks first began what they call the revival of the ancient Olympic Games, they imitated the ancients to the point that while they didn't compete in the nude, they did wear nude-colored

body stockings. And those were pretty clearly reenactments in the same way that the Wild West shows reenacted famous battles between cowboys and Indians. So those were actually the roots of the Olympic Games. And I think this attachment to a mythological history went on in both ways at the World's Fair. On the one hand, there were Wild West type shows showing histories, you know, that involved barbarians and savages, and they were being overcome and civilized, you know. But on the other hand, there was a lot of stuff going on there that linked the U.S. and Europe to the classical tradition going back to ancient Greece and Rome. And that was glorifying, you know, the Western history, which was not a history of barbarians and savages,

but one of civilized people. So there was really kind of like a dual claim on history that was being presented at the World's Fair. And so the Olympic Games were then the link with the classical so-called Western civilization, whereas Anthropology Bay sort of showcased the barbar so-called Western civilization, whereas anthropology-based sort of showcased the barbarians and the savages, the other to the civilized people. I'm Tristan Redmond, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered

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Ever. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Well, if the Olympics were a bit of reenacting history, let's talk about the history of the Olympics. They've had some difficult years. They were only just getting their footing in 1904. And it's debatable whether those games were successful. Since then, the games have been postponed.

They've been canceled. They've been boycotted. They've been bombed, even. Let's start with when they just couldn't be held at all. When were some times when the Olympics canceled altogether? Well, you know, some of those early games came really close. I mean, even the St. Louis games were originally scheduled for 1904 in Chicago, and then they had to be moved to St. Louis in 1904. There was a bit of a problem for 2, 3, and 4, which were held in association with World's Fairs.

And the problem then was that they were minor events. They didn't have the credibility that they now have. And so the funding was hard to raise. reviver of the modern Olympics didn't want them to be held together with World's Fairs after Paris 1900 because he called them the humiliated vassal of the World's Fair. But they were not viable events that could stand on their own. So they ended up being held in conjunction with the World's Fair in 04 and then again in London in 1908. And it wasn't until 1912 that they became a viable standalone event. That's outside of Greece. The Greeks were so into it that you could hold a standalone event there. But actually what made them viable was precisely the thing that later led to cancellations

and boycotts. It was politics, because heads of states started becoming interested in them because they wanted to see their athletes parade in behind the national flag. And so immediately, as soon as that became the appealing part of it, then political battles started emerging in Olympic Games. So in 1912, Europe is heading on its way into World War I. So it's only four years later, 1916, that World War I has blown up. And also the games had to be canceled for that reason. So that was the first canceled games, 1916. Again in 1918, and then they were restored in 1920. And what's interesting is that the losing side nations were banned from competing in 1920. And what's interesting is that the losing side nations were banned from competing in 1920. And then the others were allowed back in in 24 in Paris. But I think the French had such bad

feelings towards Germany that Germany continued to be banned in 1924. So then the same thing happened heading forward into World War II when the 1940 Games had been awarded to Japan, which would have been really historically meaningful. That would have been the first Olympics outside the West. And Japan actually rescinded the rights to those games. So they weren't specifically cancelled because of the war, but rather the military government in Japan was already concentrating single-mindedly on the build-up for war, and it just wasn't interested in the distraction of the Olympic Games, so it gave up the rights to the Games. And then when the war erupted around Europe, it was just clear it couldn't be held. So the Games were canceled in 1940. They were canceled in 1944. And then when they were finally held again in 1948,

again, Germany and Japan were banned from those games. In 1940, you mentioned that this would have been the consequential first non-Western host in Japan. When did they eventually get to host the Olympics for the first time? Japan finally got to host the Olympic Games in 1964. So that is really a big moment, not only for the history of the Olympic movement, but also for Japan. That's considered to be the moment when Japan marked its emergence as a peaceful world power, you know, that was being reintegrated peacefully into the international order. And Japan has really remained a very active bidder for Olympic Games ever since then. So, although today we're hearing a lot about the anti-Olympic

sentiment in Japan, the interesting thing about Japan is that it has probably bid for more Olympic Games than any other country. And it's held quite a few too. Of course, this is the first summer Games since 64, but it's held two winter Games in Sapporo and Nagano. It has bid for Olympic Games almost every year, despite this huge public movement against the Olympic Games. So there are sort of two things going on in Japan at the same time. A really pro-Olympic government, I guess it would be, and then this strong anti-Olympic public movement. Well, the Olympics obviously are in Japan again. The 2020 Tokyo Games are happening right now, but obviously they were postponed because it's 2021 and they're still called the 2020 Olympics. Have the Games ever been postponed

before? No, this is the first time that the Olympic Games have ever actually been postponed. Although it's a little bit amusing, a trivia point to note that actually the World's Fair in 1904 had been postponed. It was originally scheduled for 1903. And one of the main reasons they postponed it a year is that they couldn't get enough European nations on board to actually come and participate. So they had to send a diplomatic mission to Europe to really try to persuade people to commit to come. And then that was why Chicago ended up having to give up the Games to St. Louis, because with the postponement of the World's Fair, it was going to be in the same year as the Olympic Games. And James Sullivan, the organizer of the sports events in 1904, wanted the Olympic Games to be in St. Louis versus Chicago. There was a big fight. And finally, we think Teddy

Roosevelt threw his weight behind St. Louis and made the final decision, essentially by saying he was not going to give funding if they were held in Chicago. So this is the first postponement, and of course, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that forced it. Have the Olympics had to deal with any other disease or natural events that affected the Games before? Well, the 1920 Antwerp Games were actually following World War I, but that was still the tail end of the 1918 flu pandemic. It's interesting, though, that you just don't hear much about that. You know, there's not much attention to it in histories of the Olympic Games, but that's a general problem with that pandemic that people really just wanted to forget about it. So it doesn't have a strong presence in the historical record.

So we don't really have a great idea about what the attitude was or the perceived effect on those Olympic Games. The last Olympic Games, the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, were held in the midst of the Zika pandemic. And there was a lot of alarm about that. That proved to be a good lesson about whether Olympic Games can be super spreader events, because it turned out that a mosquito-borne disease is actually fairly easy to keep under control in the context of Olympics because they take place in limited spaces where you can do really strong mosquito mitigation, and it was pretty effective in Rio. But there were some lessons that were learned in Rio during the Zika pandemic, particularly in how to track the spread of the pandemic and the statistical analysis of clusters. And that kind of thing was really kicked forward in 2016, and it prepared us better for the coronavirus

pandemic when it hit. So when these events happen in 1920 or in 2016 or 2020, why postpone instead of cancel? The Olympiad is the four-year period between Olympic Games, and it was considered sacred in ancient Greece. And the International Olympic Committee has really tried to maintain that. So, they take that very seriously. So, even when they postponed it, you know, these games are officially known as the 2020 Games, even though they're taking place a year later. And so, why hold these games? I think maybe that's not so much because of some kind of Olympic pseudo religion, but there are just practical matters. The athletes who had been

training for so long would have really been devastated if there had been an eight-year gap between Olympic Games. And the organizers of the Olympic Games are largely athletes and sports people who have moved up through the system. Thomas Bach is the president of the International Olympic Committee, and he was a fencer who lost his chance to defend his team gold medal in fencing from 1976 when the Germans joined the U.S. boycott in 1980. So he and so many athletes from that generation who are now leaders in the sports system have a really bad memory of the effects of the 1980 boycott. And to this day, you will frequently hear them saying boycotts don't accomplish political goals and they only harm the athletes. And for a lot of them, that's from personal experience. So I think for that reason,

they were really mindful of the negative effect on the athletes and really wanted to try to hold the Olympic Games for the athletes, if at all possible. And of course, that's what we've got now. We've got athletes participating in an Olympic Games that involves almost no spectators or any of the street festival or other external aspects of the Games that have become the norm. Well, you've brought it back to politics when mentioning boycotts. For those who don't remember, why was there a boycott of the 1980 Olympics? So, Jimmy Carter led the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. And today, Jimmy Carter is remembered as one of our weakest presidents.

And of course, several decades later, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan itself. So, I think among people who sort of lived through the original time period and remember that history, it made that boycott in 1980 seem a bit ridiculous. And it caused the whole idea of political boycotts to lose credibility. And that's a big source of the mantra that you'll hear today about how boycotts don't accomplish political goals and they only hurt the athletes. 1980 wasn't the only boycott, of course. There was a kind of a reciprocal boycott four years later. What happened there? So four years later, the Soviet Union led a boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics, which was essentially retaliatory. You know, they were getting even for the fact that the U.S. had ruined

their long-planned Moscow Olympics in 1980. They did give other excuses, but they were somewhat lame excuses that Soviet athletes wouldn't be secure in the United States. And I think it's generally agreed that it was simply retaliation. You know, it is interesting that some key nations didn't go along with the socialist boycott in 1984, in particular China and Romania. China had been excluded from the Olympic Games over the Taiwan issue from 1956 right up until 84 was its return to the Summer Games. So it really showed the West that the socialist bloc wasn't a unified front, and that probably helped contribute to the end of the Cold War. The fact that that old divide between the socialist world and the so-called free world was falling apart probably helped bring about the end of the Cold War.

Other than these kind of Cold War East versus West battles, how else have the Olympics been politicized? Well, the Olympics have been politicized really since almost the beginning and in almost every way you can think of. There have been other boycotts. Probably the one big political movement inside the Olympic Games that might have actually had a positive effect was the protests of apartheid, the banning of South Africa from competing in Montreal Olympic Games in 1976. That boycott in particular probably really got the attention of the world that, hey, some people think apartheid is a problem. And also because South Africa is such a sports-loving country, probably put pressure on South Africa to dismantle its apartheid system, which it eventually did. So the Olympics have always been fraught with political tensions. There's always been some sort of conflict of one sort or the other, some country banned for some reason. This year,

there are athletes competing under a Russian Olympic Committee flag, but not the official Russian flag. Why are but not the official Russian flag. Why are they not representing a country? I think in terms of the discussion of sport and politics, this year is really a pivotal year in which we're seeing something new happen. So, of course, there's been this saying, which really came out of the Cold War, don't mix politics with sport, keep the politics out of sport. And then, because the Olympic Games are so obviously politicized, people are always saying,

wait a minute, it's so clear that we're mixing politics with sport. That's hypocritical. But the thing is, what the sports people, the IOC, was trying to say when they said that was, let us hold the Olympic Games and don't cause the Olympic Games to stop because of politics. And national boycotts, the 84 boycott, were a real threat to the viability of the Olympic Games and its continued existence. But now, if we fast forward to what's happening in 2020, 2021, the Russian Olympic Committee was accused of systematic centrally administered doping, going back to the Sochi Olympic Games, and that sort of attempt to get them to reform and to acknowledge their responsibility dragged on for years and years.

And the IOC just finally banned athletes from competing. First of all, in Rio in 2016, only a limited number were allowed to compete. And then this year, no athlete was allowed to compete under the Russian flag. You know, it's the ROC, the Russian Olympic Committee. And I think we are discouraged from even saying the word Russia. So this is really actually quite different from the boycott years when the IOC was at the mercy of national governments that were more powerful than it was. And now what we're seeing is that the IOC is confident enough and has enough authority in the world that it is trying to exert power over a national government, which is a major, major sport power. So this is really an important reversal that has

taken place. And I think we should understand that this battle over politics and sports, it wasn't a philosophical one. It was a battle over who gets to decide who competes and how, and to maintain sort of the integrity of the Games when national governments want to interfere, you know, with doping or other reasons. So I think this is an important moment for the Olympic movement because finally it's not the IOC having to bow down to national governments and just hope that they will come to the Olympic Games, but rather the national governments want to come to the Olympic Games and the IOC could dictate the terms under which they come so they can tell

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since the end of the Cold War among those people who have the power to send athletes to Games. So that is heads of state, national governments, and national Olympic committees. And that is the group of people who are saying that boycotts don't accomplish political purposes and they only harm the athletes. And so I think there's a broad consensus among the people who hold the power to send athletes to games that boycotts don't work and they're a bad idea. And if you look carefully, you'll realize that the organizations calling for boycotts are typically non-governmental organizations, which are advocacy groups, you know, for the various causes that are getting attention on the Olympic platform, and in particular the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and also, to a slightly lesser extent, the Hong Kong people.

I think we can all detect that you have a strong affinity for the expectations of the athletes themselves, that the intersection of politics and athletics only hurts the athletes. I'm wondering what your personal history with the Olympics are. What do they mean to you? Well, I have my own personal history with boycotts because the closest I ever came to making an Olympic team was in 1980. I was a track and field athlete. I was competing in the pentathlon at the Olympic trials, which later after 1980 became the

heptathlon. I placed seventh in those Olympic trials. The top three made the team. So I was the fourth alternate. Before we even started competing at the trials, we knew that there would be the boycott, so it had really reduced the significance of the trials before they even started. And I remember that athletes were discussing the fact that in those days we were all officially amateurs. Professional athletes were not allowed to compete in the Olympic Games until starting in 1988.

And we received no government support. And so we thought it was a bit unfair that our government, which had never given us any money, had the power to keep us from realizing our dreams. And I think there was a bit of cynicism towards the government's attitude at that point. And yeah, maybe I picked up a bit of that at that point. We felt like we were pawns, and I have continued to believe that basically athletes are pawns, have been used as pawns in political games. But I've got to say, I think that is finally changing. I think this is going to be seen as because you're waking up early to watch the events in Tokyo. How many times have you watched or been a spectator at an Olympic? I've been able to attend six Olympic Games.

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, of course, were in the U.S. And they were just down the road from Santa Barbara where I was training because I also competed in the 1984 Olympic trials. So I was able to just drive down and watch. Atlanta, of course, was in the U.S. and my sister lived there. So I spent the period of the Games with her and spectated at the events in Atlanta in 1996. I then became more interested in actual research on the Olympic Games and was both a researcher and a spectator at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the Rio 2016 Games, and the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games. And because I am a China scholar, I spent the entire year in Beijing leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games, and I

engaged in a lot of Olympics-related activities with the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee and also with the Beijing municipal government. What do you hope the future of the Olympics holds? Well, I certainly understand the cynicism and the criticism of the Olympic Games, the criticism of the gigantism, the taxpayer burden. I understand all of that. But as an anthropologist, I also look at the grand sweep of history. And I really feel that the Olympic Games have, ever since they're really going back to ancient Greece, and then also since the revival in 1896, they've been a counterbalance to war. I feel that there's a way in which the people who are organizing Olympic Games are trying to build connections and put forward a vision of peace, which is the counterbalance to the, you know,

major, major efforts, war efforts and military efforts that are going on in the world at any point in time. So I think in the grand scheme of things, I'd like to think of the Olympic Games as a peace movement. And I do wish some of my academic colleagues would look more seriously at that angle. And I think the world would be a worse place without Olympic Games, and that if we have criticisms of the Games, we need to figure out how to keep the good parts and then fix the problematic parts. Well, Dr. Brownell, thank you so much for talking to me today. Well, thank you for having me. It's been very entertaining, and I hope I was able to give you some new ideas about the Olympic Games, a much-discussed topic.

That was my conversation with Dr. Susan Brownell. She's an internationally recognized expert on the Olympics, Chinese sports, and world's fairs. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and the Huffington Post, and she is co-author of the book The Anthropology of Sport, Bodies, Borders, and Biopolitics. Next on American History Tellers, with travel restrictions loosening, many Americans are returning to the great outdoors. So we're revisiting our 2018 series

on the dramatic and sometimes turbulent history of America's national parks, starting with one of the first and most majestic, Yosemite. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe.

Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.