Dan Snow's History Hit - The Olympic Games
Episode Date: July 23, 2021From Ancient Greece to when it was reborn in 1896, the tournament has nearly 3,000 years of history. Sports historian, Professor Martin Polley from De Monfort University, joins Dan on the podcast to t...ell the, sometimes surprising story of the competition. How did it become the international sporting event it is today? How have the games affected global politics and diplomacy? And how is Shakespeare connected to its history?
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Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.
The Olympics are beginning.
What a journey it's been.
The Olympics are beginning,
but under circumstances that none of us would wish.
The local population is experiencing a surge in COVID.
There is COVID amongst the athletes,
but they're prevented from training, they're isolating.
It is so brutal.
And compared to the fun and excitement and passion
and hedonism of Olympics past,
it's a bit of a pale reflection,
but we're still gonna enjoy it.
We're still gonna love it. Sport will win in the end i'm sure and like everything the olympics has
got a big history i mean obviously it does the olympics was a huge festival in ancient greece
over centuries the olympic games would take place and that inspired post-enlightenment thinkers
in the west to try and revive them well in this podcast you'll be hearing all about how that
process happened we've got professor martin po. He's Director of the International Centre for Sports,
History and Culture. He's a Professor of History. He's at De Montfort University, and he was with me.
Together, we talked about the history of the modern Olympic Games. Where did it come from?
The answer is a lot more interesting than you might think. Fascinating little mini Olympic Games sporting
competitions held throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th century that inspired the modern founders
of the Games. We talked about nationalism, nation states, diplomacy. Do they matter?
What's the point of the Olympics? Is it just a commercial festival in which micro-clad,
jacked-up athletes perform and also make money for big corporations? Or does it mean something?
Does it tell us something about our globalised community? I want to believe in the Olympics
and this podcast, well, it gave me a lot of context that I think is really helpful.
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Listen to all the podcasts, watch all the documentaries, what's not to like. But in the meantime, everyone,
please enjoy this episode of the podcast with Prof Martin Pauley.
Martin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
You're welcome, Dan. It's great to meet you.
What did the Olympic movement grow out of? I look at the flags and the parades. It feels very
19th century nationalist, weirdly,
to me. But what were the other currents that gave birth to the Olympics?
Well, there's a very, very long tradition, obviously. I think it was stressed that the
only real proper Olympic Games, I guess, are those that took place in Olympia in ancient Greece,
right? About the 8th century before the Common Era to the 4th century of the Common Era.
And as those happened in Olympia, they took the name Olympic Games, and they were one of many religious festivals with athletic and ceremonial aspects
involved. These were the biggest, they were dedicated to Zeus. And as I say, they went on for
over a thousand years. So, you know, the modern Olympic Games have got an awful lot of catching
up to do, but that's where the name comes from. And these games were kind of forgotten. Obviously,
plenty of archaeology, but people weren't looking. Plenty of literary texts in Herodotus and Plutarch, but people weren't looking until the Renaissance.
Shakespeare is the first that we know who used it. Henry IV, part three, he makes reference to the Olympics in a Troilus and Cressida as well, where he talks about a ring of Greeks have hemmed
the inn like an Olympian wrestling. And it's at this point that some people start staging sporting
events, or what we've now called rebranding, folk play events as Olympic Games and the most famous of these took place near Chipping Camden
in Gloucestershire where a Catholic leaning lawyer a guy called Robert Dover essentially took over a
traditional Whitson church festival and made it something bigger there was dancing there was
jumping there was wrestling sports one that we now call shin kicking, various throwing sports, there was hair coursing, equestrian
events, lots of food and drink, very much like an anti-puritanical festival. And by the 1630s,
he had a lot of powerful friends. He was a London trained lawyer. He had poet friends, including Ben
Johnson, and they wrote a book of poems in which they called these games essentially rural sports,
Whitsun Festival, as being like
the Olympic Games of old. And that's really where the name comes. And then I could go on for hours
on this, but there are loads of events in the 19th century that link in perfectly to, particular from
Britain, but France as well, interest in classical history and classical art and architecture,
and lots of events called Olympic or Olympian. There's one in Muchwenlock
in Shropshire that I'll come back to. There's one in Morpeth in Northumberland, the Morpeth
Olympic Games. We have the Liverpool Olympic Festivals in the 1860s. And bear in mind,
Pieda Cúbiton, the founder of the modern Olympics, was born in 1863. So all going on before him or
when he was still in short trousers. We even have national Olympian festivals in this country, with the first one in London in 1866 and the second in Birmingham in 1867.
So the roots are very much, as you say, in nationalism and indeed imperialism.
But it's important to stress that there were lots of events called Olympic or Olympian
long before de Coubertin came along with his ideas.
So we'll come to de Coubertin in just a second,
but what does it tell us about Britain and France,
in particular in this age,
that people sort of have time and I guess money
and there's associations and people organising it.
What does it tell us about societies,
the modern societies that are developing there?
The Olympic Games in the modern form
very much come out of the cult of amateur sport,
where people have time to play sport
and they don't need to be paid to do it.
They're doctors, they're lawyers, they're architects, they're in banking and for them sport is a hobby.
Now obviously alongside this there's plenty going further back with jockeys and pedestrians and
cricketers but really in the 1870s and 80s you start seeing the growth for example of professional
football, more prize money coming into professional athletics, 1895 the break between rugby union and
the clubs in the north who want their players to be played that leads into rugby league. So you've
got this professional sport culture growing and the Olympics are a kind of retrenchment against
that. They're saying no, sports should be pure, it should be free from money, the minute you bring
money in either as a fee or as a prize, you bring in corruption.
And so it has to be very much for the people who can take time out from their schedules in order to play.
Really important to stress that once you bring in an international element, and bear in mind the first Olympics of the modern period are held in Athens, you're not just taking time out to play, you're taking time out to travel.
You're able to fund yourself for these sometimes three, four week trips. So it grows very much out of that gentleman amateur ethos, for which Pierre de Coubertin, the main founder, was a very passionate advocate. So how do we get from
amateur regional, well, national in Britain and France, to an international Olympiad celebration
of sport? Tell me about Pierre de Coubertin. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Coubertin, born 1863, he was the son of a relatively minor French aristocrat.
Key thing there is it doesn't mean he didn't have to work a day in his life. He was financially
secure. And he developed ideas very young in his teens, really, that the future of the world would
be better without wars, a very obvious point. He observed the Franco-Prussian War at close hand.
And he became quite an idealist. And his first mission was to, how could you improve, as he put it, French manhood?
And he looked at public schools in the UK, and he looked at the university systems in America and
thought, right, they've got athletics and sport at the heart of what they do. France doesn't have
that. What can we learn from them? So he went on lots of fact-finding trips and one of them was to England and he came a number of times. He went to rugby school and believed that this was the
strength of modern Britain, was in the sports that they were playing at rugby and he went to
Winchester and Eton and elsewhere. But a really important trip he made was to Much Wenlock, a
small market town in Shropshire, where in 1851 a local doctor William Pennybrookes had established the Wenlock Olympian Games
as a sporting festival to promote the moral intellectual and physical capabilities of the
working class people of his town and I'm pretty much quoting from the original minute book there
and these games were local as you say regional to an extent but very successful and Coubertin
came to visit and they were calling
themselves Olympian and he loved it. They put on a special event for him. They put on a special
edition of the games. They put on dinners. He planted an oak tree, which is very much still
standing and doing very well, on the playing field, which he watered in with champagne.
And it's soon after this that he starts changing his tack slightly from just talking about reforming French
education to make it more sporty and talking about reviving the Olympic Games as an international
event. So that's a really important moment in the early 1890s. And in 1894, he calls a big congress
in Paris, Sorbonne, to talk about reformation of sport. And within that, he essentially slips into
the agenda agenda the revival
of the olympic games and it's popular that people have come along like the sound of this and they
staged the first one in athens just two years later in 1896 so while the british ones as you
say were very much national and regional what coubertin added to the mix absolutely crucially
was to have this internationalist vision and it's informed by his idealism that
it'll be far better, and sorry, this sounds so naive, really, but it'd be far better if countries
could settle their differences on the playing field, on the running track, in the swimming pool,
rather than on the battlefield. So that's the moment it goes from being lots of little
disconnected local things into an international movement. That's so interesting because the national element of the Olympics is so important.
You know, the anthems and the flags and the medal table.
And actually, curiously, it sometimes means that the world's best athletes
aren't actually competing against each other because you've got to have slots
for all the nation states athletes and things.
But that still runs right through that movement, doesn't it?
It does. As I say, Cupertin very much had the ideal for international competition.
And the first Games in Athens, people from 14 countries were there.
But it wasn't really set up as national teams in the way that we understand it now.
That only really comes into the fourth Olympics, which were held in London in 1908.
So Paris 1900 was absolute chaos.
There were just a whole bunch of sports events, but very much as a sideshow to an international expo that was on in Paris.
And clearly lots of people were told afterwards, oh, you've just been in the Olympic Games.
And they had no idea.
They just thought they were running or playing tennis.
St. Louis in 1904, similarly chaotic.
And if you look at the official record from 1904 for the St. Louis Olympics, where it talks about how the games were won.
Most of the teams listed are American athletics clubs,
YMCAs, schools, colleges,
and then it drops in a few country names.
But it's only really in 1908 in London
when the IOC, working with the British Olympic Association,
have really come to the decision
that if this is going to be about
promoting international understanding, then we need this concept of the national team. So
all of the very formal opening ceremony flags, anthems, that really comes from London 1908. But
yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's some really interesting exceptions, which maybe we can talk
about. But that notion of it being about national representation has run solidly from 1908.
Obviously, the ambition of de Coubertin that it would stop wars looks, as you say,
naive in retrospect, because the following generations saw the greatest wars ever fought
by humankind. What therefore has been the effect, do you think, on international politics
and diplomacy of the Olympics, if any?
Is it just a fun festival sport? Has it mattered?
I think it's mattered. I mean, there's so many ways to look at this. I think the first thing
is to stress, absolutely, as you say, he comes in in the 1890s with all these great ideas about,
let's settle our differences on the playing field. And yet in 1914, the war comes. And in 1916,
the Olympics were due to take place in Berlin and
obviously that didn't happen so you know as early as 1916 we see the idea that the Olympics can
somehow transcend conflict and transcend international misunderstandings is lost
already and really importantly come 1920 when the games are held again in Antwerp and Paris in 1924
the Germans aren't invited so the whole idea that we can
settle differences immediately, that early in the movement's history, they have to be linked to
diplomacy and the outcast nations aren't invited back to the Olympic party. And crucially, it's
during the war that the Olympic headquarters moved from Paris to Lausanne in Switzerland,
so that they're somewhere neutral, so they're not going to be disrupted by wars in the future. So I think the long history, I mean, it was a massive history
since then, but what we've seen again and again and again is the International Olympic Committee
as a, if you like, supranational body, essentially working hand in hand with the predominant
international order. So for quick examples, they don't boycott Berlin in 1936, even though plenty
of voices, trade union voices, Jewish voices, communist voices are saying, look, what Hitler
is doing is staging the Olympics as a propaganda fest. By going, you are normalising him. And the
IOC says, no, no, no, by going, we hope to liberalise Germany. Right. Didn't really work out. Okay. And we see the same
patterns going on and on. Mexico, 1968, Moscow, 1980, Beijing, 2008. And before we think that this
is just a historical issue, please let's remember the Winter Olympics in 2022 are due to take place
in Beijing. And already we have plenty of voices against this on all sorts of grounds around
China's foreign policy and human rights
record. And yet again, we see the Olympic movement being very much hand in hand with the predominant
order. But there are a couple of exceptions. And the big one for me is in 1964, the IOC kicked out
apartheid South Africa and made it very clear that South Africa wasn't coming into the Games
as long as it had a racially segregated sports system.
And that ban of South Africa remained until Barcelona in 1992.
So there's some times, if you like, where they have, to an extent, gone against what would be easy and what would be comfortable,
and made some progressive statements.
But broadly, it's worked very closely with the dominant international order.
Let's go back to the beginning again.
At what stage did the Olympics immediately kind of grab the popular imagination?
Is broadcasting a big story here?
I mean, does the Olympic movement move hand in hand with radio than TV broadcasting
in terms of it becoming a global festival of sport?
Before radio, there is press coverage.
But the great one for me, again, let's come back to London 1908.
The biggest yet in terms of the
largest number of competitors and the most countries coming but the ticket sales particularly
in the first week it was held in London it's held a new stadium at White City in Shepherd's Bush
part of the huge trade fair linked with France at the time and yet in the opening week the stadium
could hold officially 83,000 unofficially much more than that. In the first week on Sundays, they
sold 3,000 tickets. And if you look back at some of the photographs of things like when the archery
was going on, there's just a few clusters of people. People weren't looking. And I've gone
into some lovely local press on this. The sailing events for the 1908 Olympics were held at the Isle
of Wight. And I've gone through to see what was the Isle of Wight saying about hosting the Olympics.
And the news of the Olympic regatta is lower down the page than the quarterly dividends of the Isle of Wight Railway Company.
It was clearly just another sporting event. There's lots of sailing here.
Oh, this one's called Olympic. Now, that shifted a bit.
The 1908 Olympics became popular in the last week. But you're right.
It's not really until radio comes in.
I think a very important one was 1932, Los Angeles, the Hollywood Olympics,
where you had a lot of the Hollywood machine really promoted the Olympic Games.
It was unspeakably glamorous.
The advertising they did for it, the weather looked fantastic.
And so that really helped.
And then once you get Newsreel coming in, Berlin was amazing for that.
Berlin used radio, used Newsreel, made the fantastic film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl,
obviously Nazi-sponsored, but an amazing movie nonetheless.
And what happened to Berlin as well is they did the first experiment with a closed-circuit TV broadcast.
So a number of cafes and public venues around Berlin within a close proximity of the stadium had some TV footage.
But you're right, it's after the Second World War when TV really takes off. It's Mexico 1968 when we have live colour satellite pictures coming through. That's
when it becomes absolutely global. But I guess there's been a steady build up in the newsprint
days. But yeah, it's radio, newsreels and TV that really push it stratospheric.
And therefore, when does it start to attract athletes who aren't just gifted, amateur, privileged people that just take part for fun?
Do they start to be able to make money as a result of this gigantic coverage it receives?
The first part of that takes us back to politics.
During the Cold War, there's an awful lot of what we would call shamitarism, where very broadly the Soviet Union and its satellites were using athletes who were in the armed forces. They had a day job
in the services, but essentially they had all the time they needed to train and compete. So they were
professional athletes in all but name. And the US responded, very Cold War tit-for-tat politics,
with using the college scholarship systems in pretty much the same way. So officially athletes
are students, but they're being paid. They've got fantastic resources they can train. So there was an awful lot of shamanism going on in the 50s and 60s.
The 1970s and early 80s was a crisis time for the Olympics. Quickly run back, 1972,
the Munich Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes and officials murdered, hijacked by Black September
Palestinian splinter group. A horrendous shootout, awful, awful, awful.
1976, roundabout 40 African nations walked out of Montreal in protest that New Zealand was still there because New Zealand was still playing rugby with South Africa. 1980, Moscow Olympic boycott.
1984, the Soviet Union boycotts Los Angeles. So you've got that run of four Olympics from 72 to 84
when the Games are in crisis. And they realize that
they need to do some things because the traditional forms of revenue, ticketing, and relatively small
broadcasting fees were not a guarantee for the future. And so they massively upped the broadcasting
fees. There's a huge revolution between Los Angeles and Seoul in how much the IOC are charging people to buy the
feeds. They get much more interested in commercialization. They realize they don't want
advertisers' names trackside. They don't want the event to be called the Coca-Cola 100 meters or
whatever it might be. But they come to this fantastic, very, very clever partnership agreement
whereby they sell the Olympic logos to chosen partners to put on
their products. So rather than having Coca-Cola next to the track, you have the Olympic rings on
a can of Coke. And they have just single partnerships, so one soft drink, one fast food,
one credit card, one computer company, and so on. So they're bringing in more money from that.
And obviously, in that context, there's no way you can still just be an amateur event.
that. And obviously, in that context, there's no way you can still just be an amateur event.
And so in the 80s, they gradually allow athletes and they let each sport set their own rules. There is an element of devolution there. But certainly by the mid 90s, by Barcelona 92, and particularly
by Atlanta 96, virtually every sport is fully professionalised. For those who can, obviously,
some countries, there isn't the infrastructure for professional sport in every sport and so you will still get amateurs coming along but for the big countries the richer
countries those with huge sporting infrastructure by the 90s the games are professional so you know
that you are going to be seeing the best the most famous rather than the best amateurs
you're listening to dan's news history we'll talk about the history of the Olympics,
appropriately enough.
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So speaking of the 90s, that was when Britain went through its fascinating adjustment.
The Atlanta Games, Britain won one gold medal.
Now it wins loads because the government bases pumped loads of money into it.
Was that controversial at the time? Did John Major's government sort of, was that an easy decision to make?
I think it was.
Again, you need to look and think a bit wider in sport than just the Olympics. The 1980s in many ways were not a great time for
sport, neither were the early 1990s. And football is the obvious one, but with obviously things like
the Heysel disaster, the Hilsborough disaster. And the Conservative government at the time was not a
great fan of sport. Margaret Thatcher wasn't a great fan of sport. John Major was. And he saw
sport as a great
unifying agent, again, possibly a bit naively, but the government did put money into sport
at the time. And so the National Lottery coming along in 1994, part of the agenda there was to
create better funding streams for sports people so they could train full time, balance training
against any part time work commitments.
And then so much more huge improvements come from that.
I mean, it is often said, and I'd say this very much with my tongue in cheek, that Britain has become very good at winning sports in which you're sitting down on antiquated forms of transport,
like bicycles, boats and horses.
I think much more progressively about all of those things than that joke would suggest.
But you're right, the money went in, the facilities were improved massively across the board. and horses. I think much more progressively about all of those things than that jug would suggest.
But you're right, the money went in, the facilities were improved massively across the board.
The problem, though, of course, is that these are target related. So if one sport doesn't meet its targets at one games, it can find its funding cut. And I know that basketball in the UK has
suffered badly from that. But no, you're right, there's a very clear decision, which was popular
with, if you like, the voluntary tax of buying a lottery ticket supported by government rhetoric and supported by the
building of some new facilities that really did help us move up the scale there i love that so
rowing cycling horses sailing that's brilliant that's a good insight and then bobsleigh as well
in the winter sliding on things sure one of my swiss friends said this you all you do is win medals by sitting down on obsolete modes of
transport very harsh very harsh indeed that's well actually speaking of i was about to say we
need to bring back you know classic car rallies and things but famously or is this a pub fact
olympics used to be medals for all sorts of other things like sculpture and poetry and
theatricals and things yeah very quickly checking motorsports. There was one motorsport event, 1908 Olympics.
There was speedboat racing on Southampton Water.
But the IOC now have no interest in motorsports.
That would obviously change everything.
Yeah, so what they're looking at there,
and again, I do come back to William Penny Brooks in Much Wenlock.
Part of his agenda in the 1850s onwards
was the moral, intellectual and physical improvement.
And so as well as sporting events,
the Wenlock Olympian Games included prizes for knitting, for sewing, for art, for maths,
for Bible history, for essay writing, for poetry, mainly aimed at kids. And there were prizes which
were either more equipment or lessons. And de Coubertin picked up on this and he was very,
very interested in this idea of running artistic events alongside.
Now, it didn't happen until 1912 Stockholm, but from then until 1948, there were medal events across a range of artistic activities, fine art, sculpture.
Even by the 1930s, urban design and town planning was an Olympic event.
And in 1948, when London hosted the Olympics for its second time, this was supported by a big exhibition, the Victoria and Albert Museum. It wasn't
immensely popular, but it certainly wasn't just something marginal. It died out a bit after that,
but it was then revived in the late 80s and particularly kicked off in Barcelona 92 as what
we now know as the Cultural Olympiad. So rather than being a medal-based event held at the same time as the Games,
it's a series of cultural events held throughout the Olympic year.
And really importantly, not just in the Olympic city.
So they're devolved, delegated around the host country to get more buy-in.
And I was involved in a few minor projects in 2012.
And it's great, you know, stuff that's involving school kids,
doing creative writing inspired by Olympic stories, doing art projects.
There's a lot of community outreach happening through these.
So, yeah, we've moved from the Coubertin vision of the medal for the best painting or the best poem through to the cultural Olympiad that we have now.
Go on then, what's the strangest, in the 20th century and beyond, what's the strangest inclusion of an Olympic event that you've come across?
I think I'm going to have to go right back to the beginning of the 20th century, 1900 Paris,
live pigeon shooting. Don't think they'll get away with that now.
I wonder who won the gold medal in that. Talk to me about some of the years. Last year, 2020 was,
well, postponed, not cancelled. By the way, will this be the 2020 Olympics or this will be the
2021 Olympics? They're still calling it in the same way the Euros did. They're calling it 2020.
If you like, the historical reason is because, yeah because an Olympiad is a four-year period of time
and the modern ones date from 1896, so you can't have an odd number in that.
Cynically, the branding was already done. All of the merchandise was already made. You're not
going to dump all that. So I think there's both marketing and historical legacy reasons for
keeping the 2020 in place. And what about other cancelled events?
So Tokyo has hosted the Olympics before in the 60s, I think.
But what about the, well, the famous, the infamous cancelled event of, was it 1940?
Yeah, 1940.
So as I say, the Berlin Olympics of 1916 went for the war,
and Berlin finally got to host them in 1936.
In 1934-35, they start the planning for the 1940 Games, and Rome, Tokyo,
and London all expressed interest. The bidding wasn't as formal then as it became. And Rome
quickly dropped out. Obviously, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan were in conversation, and Rome said,
we'll drop out and we'll hold it in some time in the future. And the British ambassador in Tokyo
actually wrote to the Foreign Office to say, look, if London pulls out of this, it'll really improve our relations with Japan. And there's this wonderful, one of my
favourite Foreign Office documents, which is the telegram from our man in Tokyo asking the Foreign
Office to do this, to convince the British Olympic Association to withdraw their bid for 1940.
And Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, pencilled in the margin, for heaven's sake,
let us do this. I could even run in the mile myself. And I think that's such a wonderful image of the links between
Olympics and diplomacy. So Tokyo got the bid. It was announced at Berlin in 1936. But obviously,
as the 30s moved on, it was clear that there were problems for this. And in 1938, by which time
Japan is deeply mired in its war with China, they withdraw. They say, we're not going to host the Games in 1940.
Helsinki took over.
And then, obviously, they're invaded by the Soviet Union in the Winter War.
And they realise it's not going to happen.
So 1940 become the second of the modern series to be cancelled.
Martin, can I ask, it was cancelled because Japan was involved in the war.
So who cancelled it?
So Japan pulled out.
They said in 1938, we can't host the 40 Olympics. So they withdrew.
So the Games weren't cancelled then. Helsinki took it on and said, we'll do it.
But obviously by early 1940, it was clear, no, there were not going to be any Olympics anywhere.
So I've never seen any single document that says we withdraw or you cancel.
But yeah, there's no way it was going to happen.
But in 39, because Japan was
going to host the Winter Olympics in 40 as well. So the IOC were looking for a new host and they
were going to take it back to Garmisch-Pelzenkirchen in Germany, which it hosted in 1936. So if they
claim they learned lessons about not working with the Nazis, they hadn't learned them by 1939.
So the Tokyo Games in 1940 didn't happen. There's some really wonderful ephemera. They produced
posters, they produced some tickets, they produced some maps showing where the Olympics would be.
So, you know, if you look for it, there's some great artefacts from these Tokyo Games that
didn't happen. 1944, of course, didn't happen as well. Vague ideas that it could be in Helsinki
or London, but nothing ever happened. But then the Games restarted after the war in 1948.
And then Tokyo finally got
them in 1964. And they went off without a big drama. They did, they did. And there were some
wonderful, I think, very famous symbolic moment. The guy who, the one to finally carry the torch
and light the Olympic flame, was a young man who had been born on the day of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima. So they were making a resonance about this being about a rebirth of Japan
through the Olympics. And obviously, Tokyo got huge, wonderful infrastructure improvements,
and Japan got the bullet train as part of the legacy of 1964.
So that's interesting about legacy, about mattering. I mean, does the Olympics matter
in terms of giant investment? You know, East London has been transformed by the Olympic Park,
as was promised, to be fair, when we got the bid. I mean, whether it was an efficient way
of spending money is another matter, but it has transformed those neighbourhoods.
Bullet trains in Japan.
Are there some important legacy Olympics seen in those kind of projects nationally
rather than any grandiose international movement to lessen warfare?
Although we point to the First and Second World War,
the 20th century was the most remarkable period of globalisation
in the history of the world.
People moved, they fell in love, married people of different countries in vast numbers. I mean,
do you think the Olympics has mattered? I think it has. It wouldn't be here if it hadn't,
you know. And I think part of the trick is that it, sorry, that sounds cynical, part of the success
is that it has constantly evolved. That it has gone from just being a group of, with respect,
dilettante amateurs hopping off to Greece for a four-week holiday and doing a bit of sport,
to something that involved formal national identity. It's constantly involved in the range of
sports that are involved. It's constantly allowed more countries in as they've come. If we go back
to the earliest games, Athens, 14 countries. By 1936, you've got 49. By Munich, 1972, 121 countries.
And the last ones, Brazil, 2016, 207 countries. Obviously,
there are more countries in the world with decolonisation, with the breakup of the Soviet
Union and its allies. The Olympics have constantly evolved, bringing in more countries.
It's evolved to become more gender inclusive. Again, we're still not at 50-50 in terms of male,
female participation. But if you bear in mind,
there were no women at the first Olympics, about 40 in 1908, and they're trying to get 50-50 soon.
The IOC is only about 80-20 male-female, by the way, so that's the next battle to fight.
So there's this constant evolution, bringing in new sports. We're going to have skateboarding,
we're going to have climbing, we're going to have breakdance by the mid-2020s. So this constant
evolution suggests that it matters. They're constantly looking for new people. The money
that the sponsors, the partners put into it suggests it matters. The money that the broadcasters pay
for the right to carry the Olympics suggests it matters. But no, I think fundamentally,
your original point, it has created a meeting place for people who otherwise would not have met.
And it's clich cliche to talk about
friendships, but of course, friendships, relationships, exposure to other cultures,
all of this happens for a lot of young people, some not so young, there have been some Olympic
medalists in their 70s, to bring them together, to be exposed to different cultures. And I think
for me, that's one of the sad things about the Olympics that are starting in Tokyo, is because
they will be so constrained by
the COVID restrictions, as Seb Coe recently put it on a radio interview, they won't have a hinterland.
It'll just be arrive, airport, Olympic Village, train, compete, Olympic Village, home. Seb Coe
told this brilliant story about when he was at Moscow in 1980, when they similarly didn't have
a hinterland because of the political control. And one of the athletes asks the KGB minder,
where's the nearest nightclub?
To which the guy replies, Helsinki.
And I think you're going to get maybe a similar kind of
lack of a real Olympic experience in Tokyo,
which is a big shame.
But I don't think they would have survived
if they weren't relevant,
if they didn't mean something to the thousands of athletes
for whom it's the peak of their career,
for the millions, billions of TV audiences worldwide.
So, yeah, it's very easy to be cynical about them,
but they do represent, or they can represent,
at their best, a hope for the future.
And it feels like they are an accompaniment to this,
although we've currently got this rise of nationalism as well,
it's a sort of paradoxical,
but they are an accompaniment to this extraordinary internationalism
of the 20th century and embodied in fact now that
you mention it hey new story for everyone my mum and dad kind of got together at the Montreal
Olympics in 1976 and as she was Canadian he was a Brit they'd met just before but so the Olympics
is a sort of important backstory to their international romance and my subsequent appearance
so yeah nice to believe that they matter. One final point on that again it's very easy and I
share all the concerns that the Olympics can damage communities.
There's a lot of stuff going on about Paris and Los Angeles at the moment
that they're, by gentrifying neighbourhoods,
they're pushing out traditional communities,
and I agree with all that.
But I think it is important to look at some of the positives as well.
And a big positive for me is the refugee team.
I think that's been such a success.
Came in 2012 where the IOC said,
look, we know
that some athletes can't compete for their nations, because they've had to leave. But we don't want
them to miss the chance of being in the Olympics. So by the creation of refugee teams, they're
making, I think, quite an important statement, going back to those early days about settling
our differences on the sports field rather than the battlefield. Thank you very much, Martin. What
can people read from you and follow
you and get in touch with you over this next big festival of sport? Thanks. Well, I'm the Director
of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University in Leicester in
the UK. And the main book I've written about this is called The British Olympics, Britain's Olympic
Heritage 1612 to 2012, which covers all of those pre-Coubertin things, as well as the three London
Olympics. And that was published by English Heritage back in 2011. So yeah, find me there.
Actually, just what's your favourite event? What will you be watching?
Typically, I'm sorry, it's a bit of a cliche, but the athletics for sure, the drama of that.
I love the marathon and I love the swimming. So I'll be watching all of that. But again,
we've not really mentioned it because it's not Olympics, but I'm a big fan of the Paralympics
as well. So I'm looking forward to seeing the amazing achievements there as well. Well we could do a
whole other podcast about the Paralympics and I think London's extraordinary contribution to that
I say that obviously as a patriot but I do think it's objectively true that the Paralympics were
transformed by London. Such an important British backstory out of Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Well
maybe let's do another pod on that one day. Okay, brilliant. Thank you very much. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our
country, all were gone and finished.
Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time,
I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very
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We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval,
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