It Could Happen Here - The Olympics!

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

James and Shereen discuss the history of the modern Olympic Games, the Nazi Olympics of 1936, and how the games harm the communities that host them. James’ book about the Olympics: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8071-6    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking

musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us,

and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls are media. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media. Hi, Shereen.

Hi, James. That was alarming. Yeah, I went into like 2010's YouTube voice. Wow, yeah. Hi. Hi. James is excited today. I am excited. I'm always excited to make a podcast you know i love to cast a pod but uh today i am especially especially with an x like espresso

the coffee drink uh i am especially excited to talk to you shireen because we are talking about a subject which i have wasted far too much of my life reading and writing about. What are we talking about, Shireen? Sports. Sports. The Olympics. Yeah, just sports. I'm going to explain to Shireen sports, why they're fun, why I did too many of them.

Okay, we're talking about the Olympics, the Olympic Games. Specifically, I guess they're happening in Paris this year. They may be happening in Paris by the time you listen to this. But I want to talk a little bit about the history of the Olympics because I wrote a book about it. And so I get to drone on about it for half an hour. And you have to listen to me while you drive your cars to work. Cool. The modern Olympic Games is, it draws links to ancient Greece, right?

And it does that because at the time that the modern Olympic Games in the late 19th century were being created by a guy called Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocracy of Europe were obsessed with drawing links between themselves and the ancient Greeks and to sort of posit themselves as the new kind of Greco-Roman font of civilization. Hey, I took art history. I minored in it. So I know stuff too. Okay. Yeah. Good job.

Because I did not take art history. That's all I know. Good job. Okay. I'm sure you know more. You can tell me all kinds of stuff about like impressionists and shit i don't understand so if we're looking at like to understand the olympics we have to understand sport right and to understand sport we have to understand play so i was right about sports you

don't have to yeah no no you're you're right on it um right yeah but first we do play right so um if we're looking at like kind of the classic text on this it's a book called homo ludens uh but we probably don't need to read that it's not not a banger we very few academic books are bangers i like to think mine's in the sort of semi-banger category but uh yeah it's also overpriced and you shouldn't buy it just go to your library and get it for free play is it's pretty obvious what play is but it's the difference between play and sport is that sport is bounded it happens in a certain place within a certain set of rules play doesn't so the archetypal kind of example of transitioning from play to sport would be folk football in britain um so back in the day in the place where i come from for holidays the saints days and uh other days

when people didn't work they would have a game of football, which consisted of a ball inflated pig's bladder or a similar, similar device. And you have to get it from one village into the other village. And those are about all the rules, right? Sometimes they had specific rules against stabbing. There've been like an outbreak of stabbing incidents. But other than that it was pretty much you do what the fuck you wanted right you want to go on a five mile detour and come around people come in the back way no problem uh you're on a form of phalanx of all your mates and uh and just kind of go through like in a wedge style not a problem at all uh you know you want to start

hitting people with sticks yeah not an issue uh it was very loose right every village a pair of villages that would play had their own kind of understanding of the rules but it wasn't a codified set of rules that existed across all incidences of folk football and we go from there to association football right that's where soccer comes from right a soccer soccer association becomes a sock a sock becomes a soccer that becomes soccer well does that make sense fine yeah i'm gonna say yes it's a very like 19th century posh british effect that takes the word association football and comes out with soccer that's so funny yeah that's that's where it comes from uh so association football codifies the rules, right? There's a pitch.

The pitch is the same size as a goal. The goal is the same size. You can't pick it up now. And from that comes rugby football, right? So rugby football is type where you pick up the ball. There's a kind of founding myth for rugby football that this guy called William Webb Ellis with a glorious disregard for the rules, quote,

picked up the ball and ran with it it did I it's a bit weird that like they've created a founding myth for dude who effectively just like sucked at football so he picked it up and ran with it like it's it doesn't seem like he deserves a literal statue that he has uh yeah and that happened at rugby school right which was one of these English boarding schools that existed to prepare young men to be officers and administrators in the British Empire. Cool, cool, cool. And that is really what's the codification of sport

as far as we can sort of create like a reason for it is to prepare young men and just men to be administrators in the British Empire, right? It's supposed to make them physically strong. It's supposed to make them obey the rules and learn to do what they're told even in stressful situations, right? It's part of an idea called muscular Christianity. And like, as far as we can attribute this whole combination of things to one person, it would be Thomas Arnold, right? Thomas Arnold being the headmaster at rugby school. And he develops this idea of

educating young Christian men and doing so using sport as well as academia. And sports very quickly develop a set of rules around amateurism. Amateurism, like sometimes we just use amateur now to mean not very good, but at the time it specifically meant not paid to do the sport and so yeah this is the early olympics actually the olympics still relatively recently have an amateurism rule right that people can't participate if they are paid to do the sport they have exemptions for fencing coaches uh which i think tells you about everything you need to know like this isn't this isn't there for any like purity reason it is there to serve as a class barrier right and we see it used as a class barrier uh first of all in football right like that's why we have rugby league and rugby union because the rugby league people tended to be

working people and they needed to be paid to rugby league allowed for professionalism rugby union did not and those tended to be wealthier people right but it's used at the olympics extensively to police class probably the most uh prominent example would be jim thorpe you familiar with jim thorpe jim thorpe's a cool guy actually um i got to read some of his correspondence he actually wrote a history of the olympic games which is very sad when you consider that jim thorpe himself he's a member of the second Fox Nation, right? So he's indigenous to North America. He won a medal for the United States in the 1912 Summer Olympics. He won two gold medals, actually, one in pentathlon and one in decathlon. So like decathletes are kind of like the uber athletes, right? Like you're doing 10 different

sports that you have to just be good at exercising uh and jim thorpe was good at exercising uh he also played collegiate professional football professional baseball and professional basketball uh see he's he's an all-around sports dad unfortunately he lost his olympic title because he had been paid at some point for playing baseball even though he didn't do baseball in the olympics that's so fucked yeah it's it's very clearly used as a way to class and race police the games right like shitty and i think this gets to our point about what the olympics are so the early olympics tend to coincide with what are called world's fairs um you're familiar with world's fairs shireen yeah yeah yeah people sort of get together and

they have these big exhibitions and they show off their like you know if you're what i got yeah paris whatever yeah look what i stole from this this country that i have colonized and under force extracted uh these the following things uh if you're in britain like the most famous sort of world's fair site would be crystal palace right crystal palace was built and burned down but uh it was built for the world's fair if you're in san diego uh balboa park right was built for 1914 yeah yeah i feel like i knew that somewhere in my head yeah when you go to balboa park little niche san diego diversion for the millions of you who are not in san diego you can just tune out for 10 seconds uh there's those little cottages, like the international cottages, and there's like a Palestine house

and a, yeah, Palestine house. Cool that they got recognition in San Diego at least. Those are from the World's Fair. Each country would have that little exhibition in their house, right? And then all down the Prado. So yeah, that's actually how the zoo started as well. Someone in their exhibition had lions and then

fucking left them when they left. And they were like, oh i guess we better start a zoo got a couple of lions on our hands wow yeah incredible uh incredible vibes so the olympics happen at the same time as world threats for a long time and that is because the olympics are essentially a gathering of transnational bourgeoisie i'm not that's not a a phrase i came up with myself it's from my my friend David Goldblatt, who's written a really excellent history of the Olympics. It's called The Games. And if you're going to read one book about the Olympics, it should be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm

sure he's not listening, but hello, David, if you are. I would recommend his book because I think his analysis is great, right? That what these become is a place where the sort of the people who make money from finance capital all around the world can gather together and share their little ideas and play their little games. And we see that, for instance, in the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. So in St. Louis, in addition to like the World's Fair, they have the Olympics and they have something called the Anthropological Days. Have you heard about this, Shireen? I don't believe I have. No, it's one of the more fucked things to happen in st louis which i think is saying a lot um they essentially kidnapped people from around their various imperial possessions brought them to st louis which in itself is a

crime and then forced them to compete in events that they didn't fully explain to them what the fuck yeah like and then concluded from this that like uh white people were better that's like some gladiator shit that's like yeah yes what are you doing that's too modern that's too hard to happen this is 1904 yeah uh not so long ago yeah very yeah and this kind of exhibits what the what the world's fairs were and to agree to a degree like what what the olympiad became which was like a way for the colonizing powers to get together right right shereen do you know what will not kidnap you from your home country and fly you to st louis and then force you to compete in games that you don't understand. Gold. Yeah, you're probably right.

Well, indirectly it will, you know, because as a sort of source of wealth. Yeah, right. Okay, whatever. I was trying to think of something that I might hear next. Yeah, it's probably gold. You're right.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire? Join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, or wherever you get your podcasts. literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and we hope you you bought your gold uh the only uh the only uh metal that you can make an olympic medal out of incidentally really i'm allergic to gold oh really yeah you're turning green i get like you're like it's it's not good for my skin oh well i'll get like uh like not infections but like i'll get like an eczema kind of reaction oh wow i'll get like uh like not infections but like i'll get like an eczema kind of reaction oh wow what do you uh did you have an alternative jewelry i don't wear a lot of jewelry i wear rings the most but i can't wear earrings anymore they're too my ears are too sensitive i usually

like stick with silver if i have to but yeah i don't know yeah i know not meant to be rich no shame or maybe maybe platinum is what's oh yeah i can do platinum yeah okay listeners send shireen uh platinum doohickeys uh yeah to to wear yeah gold they're so the olympic medals are not solid gold they're just gold coated interesting yeah that feels a little cheap yeah yeah right like you spend your whole fucking life trading something then they did screw you on the chips off yeah yeah you drop it and uh it's just plastic in the middle i guess they have more value as i pick medals and they do as lumps of gold anyway you can sell them and people have sold them online because as it turns out like uh spending your entire youth exercising and then

getting to a point where you're too injured or old to compete is sometimes not great for your future career prospects and I've unfortunately seen lots of friends take that path and so I want to talk about like the Olympics in the 20th century and specifically I want to talk about the Olympics in the 1930s right so when theics by the time we come to the 1930s the olympics have really become like they're an american thing the los angeles olympics gives us a lot of the modern olympics and the rest of the modern olympics we get from friend of the podcast adolf hitler um and his his nazi party of course yeah i knew that you were expecting them we never never don't expect hitler so 1932 is great like um 1932 olympic village they build this olympic village

they have it patrolled by cowboys just like hollywood cosplay dudes on horses cowboying around it's the first it's it's very weird it's the first olympic village uh and it's it it becomes a real estate investment right like as soon as the olympics are done they're in classic los angeles fashion flipping the houses for more than they were paid um so it also creates this idea of like the olympics as a mass spectacle 1932 is sometimes called the hollywood olympics right and it really changes the game from rich people getting together for rich people to a spectator event and a mass spectator event. In 1931, Spain's dicta blanda collapses. Dicta blanda is like a soft dictatorship as opposed to dictadura,

it's a hard dictatorship, right? And Spain becomes a republic. 1931 is also the time when the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona. And for geographically challenged listeners, Barcelona is in Catalonia, but Catalonia is within Spain at this time. So the IOC is almost entirely comprised of very rich people. And many of them are like barons counts princes other people who like uh their job is being someone's kid right they uh and they just do things like being on the ioc to occupy them while they spend their parents money so they're in spain at the time

when spain has just deposed a monarch and it has this revolutionary republic, right? The anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin a campaign of two years of removing the church from its official position, like anti-clericalism and of land reform. These are things which rich people do not like. And so the vote happens in Barcelona about where to hold the next Olympics. And the two leading

candidates are Berlin and Barcelona. And after Barcelona, something a little weird happens. The IOC members all go home and not everyone has come to Barcelona, right? Because of the change in the situation. And instead of being like, okay, well, we had a vote in barcelona one the ioc makes an interesting and relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram and in the telegram vote they instead of going for the unstable spanish second republic opt for a more stable and liberal democracy which is of course weimar germany oh of course yeah good choice by the better rich folks they uh they really helped us out there and it's very interesting like i've spent a lot of time with these telegrams like the actual paper telegrams in the uh

international olympic committee archive in los angeles trying to ascertain did they just like did the vote happen and then they were like no fuck we can't go to barcelona like we got to redo we got to work out a way to jig this like we can't go to this republican place or that they claimed that there weren't enough votes right that they didn't have like a quorum but i've looked at previous and subsequent votes and there are there are plenty of other votes that have fewer participants and it was relatively normal at this time for not everyone to show up at a meeting right because it's 1931 like traveling is hard um and so i can't categorically say what's happened but maybe that's what i suspect has happened i can't really see any way i could find out now unless i went to

every member of the international olympic committee at the time and looked in their personal archive but either way they decided to give the olympics to this little place called weimar germany in between 1931 and 1936 uh history fans will know that the nazis came to power in germany nazis not very nice people no and no bad many people are saying yeah many people are saying the mosquitoes of the world no maybe not sorry we just recorded the mosquito episode yeah yeah in many ways like the mosquito could be eradicated maybe wouldn't be bad um yeah my favorite george orwell line one of my favorite joints orwell lines i joined the militia to kill a fascist because if all of us did so then there wouldn't be any of them left wow yeah yeah very prescient so the olympics when the nazis come to

power first they want to do away with it right they were like fuck this this is some bougie shit we're not into it we don't want to see other people we don't care about other nations we're aryans and then over time, the administrators of the Olympics, including a guy called Carl Diem, who would be classified according to the Nazis' own standards as a Jewish person, they persuade the Nazis that having the Olympics will be good for them. It will let them exhibit their shit on a world scale. And they are not wrong. The Olympics turned into a massive boon for Nazi Germany. We don't have enough time in this short episode to explain the whole boycott movement.

There was a substantial boycott movement, including in the United States. The United States very nearly boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but in the end, it ended up not doing so. You had opposition from really interesting groups, actually opposition obviously from jewish groups right because nazis you have opposition from elements of naacp but not from other elements because they have this very reasonable objection they're like well america is also racist as fuck actually and like we also like this is a time when we exclude black folks from yeah a lot of yeah like not not a yeah uh and so you have black folks boycotting and you have black folks being like now fuck it like we'll take the chance you know and then you have the opposition from an interesting group like the

liberal catholics right because the nazis have their own ideas on religion and so a lot of catholics were anti-nazi at that point, including Jeremiah Mahoney, who was president of the Amateur Athletic Union at the time, who was kind of leading the boycott movement. The United States decides not to boycott. Lots of other places in the world decide that they are going to boycott, right? Or lots of other people around the world. And that's where Barcelona, they had a conference in Paris, actually, the International Conference for the Respect of the Olympic Ideal.

And that is the conference out of which the Barcelona remember Barcelona applied in 31 right okay so they have all their shit together they actually have the site of a former world's fair and that's what they're going to use so the Catalans come to this conference in April of 36 and are like hey we can have another Olympics which isn't shit And they go ahead and have their Olympics, which isn't shit. Now, first happened the Nazi Olympics, right? The Nazi Olympics give us so much of what we consider to be the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay, you know, the torch relay. They go to Olympia and bring the flame.

Yeah, that's a Nazi thing, actually. It comes from the Nazis. They go to Olympia and bring the flame. That's a Nazi thing, actually. It comes from the Nazis. The idea of drawing a link from ancient Greece to Berlin was a Nazi idea. Why do we still do it? Yeah, that's a good question.

Shireen, isn't it? The good question is we enter the Paris Olympics. One thing they have done away with is the Olympic salute because it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazis. Did that also start in no the olympic salute predates it so you have these interesting um people march like but they the parade at the the opening ceremony of the olympics right and lots of these the pageantry of the opening ceremony also comes from the nazis by the way and you got people walking in and the french come in and they're doing a salute and people like is that the nazi salute they're doing it's at the olympic salute i'm pretty sure it's the olympic salute i'm pretty

sure uh i mean if it's too close i think it's bad yeah i think getting confused for something else i think i think you should stop yeah i just tried to not do things that look like i'm zeke hyling like that is how i how i live my life you have other uh other nations who don't do it right uh you have the americans the americans traditionally in the so they're supposed to dip their flag the americans have never dipped their flag in the big opening ceremonies so sometimes you'll see this written as like a yeah the americans said fuck hitler they didn't they just did what they'd always done um which was to not dip their flag and that that olympiad is a great success for hitler right like this is where a lot of this like oh but yeah he's very efficient he makes the trains run on time kind of shit comes

from right they use it as a pageant and they downplay their racism they include a couple of jewish athletes on their team which is one of the demands of uh avery brendage head of the american olympic committee um brendage Brundage is an interesting dude. Brundage, you can read more about Brundage in my book. Robert did a Behind the Bastards on Brundage. I don't think he begins the 1930s as an anti-Semite, but after the boycott campaign, which he calls a Jewish communist conspiracy.

Wow. Yeah, he absolutely becomes an anti-Semite. He grows closer to hit that one other because like his idea is that politics shouldn't influence the games which is inherently a political choice when the games have been given to fucking adolf hitler yeah so the 1936 olympics go ahead in germany lots of fascism lots of sieg heiling uh and a real success for hitler 1936 olympics in barcelona don't go ahead uh because the spanish civil war the barcelona olympics are like an alternative to the berlin olympics yeah they the at this time also it should be pointed out that um you got the winter olympics when you got

the olympics so the nazis already had uh garminch parton kirschen winter olympics uh and had predicted we'd had a bunch of Nazi shit, right? Which didn't stop anyone going to the Summer Olympics. Shireen, do you know what won't do a bunch of Nazi shit? What, James? It's the products and services that support this show, Shireen. I found it's easier instead of trying to come up with something just to give you the question right back.

Yeah. Damn, foiled again. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, the running interview show where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run

high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep

getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. We're back.

So yeah, these Olympics, they're supposed to happen in Barcelona. They don't happen because the Spanish Civil War starts at the same time, right? Lots of these anti-fascist athletes go on to participate as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, about 400 same time, right? Lots of these anti-fascist athletes go on to participate as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, about 400 of them.

The popular Olympics are cool. The main reason they're cool is because I've written a book about them. But other reasons include that they had like elite amateur and then provincial races. So like you could just show up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to fucking check my hat in the ring 100 meters. Let's see how I do. And there'll be a place for you to compete, right? It wasn't about who was a freak athlete.

They were really interested in working class health. So for that reason, they also had these mass relay events where you'd have the 50 by 25 meters or the 10 by 50 meters, and you couldn't have all runners. So the idea was that the country that would win or the nation that would win, they competed as nations rather than states. So the exiled Jews of Europe competed together for the obvious reason that if you're a German Jew in 1936, you don't want to compete for fucking Germany. So even at the popular Olympics, they competed. It's a Jewish work of sports associations. And you have exiled anti-fascists from Germany and Italy competing under their own banners. And you have Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque country, competing as their own little nations. And the same with the colonized people of North Africa.

And you have the women students of the world with their own little team, which is nice. They also made a big deal of including women, allowing women to do sports that men do. At the time in 1936, women couldn't run more than 200 meters. Well, they actually could, as it turns out. They just weren't allowed to. Surprise. Yeah. Shocking, shocking discovery. They didn't just involve that capacity since 36. But these Olympics don't go ahead because Spanish Civil War starts. Lots of the anti-fascist athletes who came stay to fight right including like people i've written about in my book we did a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this so you can listen to more if you want to

in margaret's feed i'm sure if you search popular olympics it'll be there by the way you'll sometimes see it translated as people's olympics i prefer popular because it's inherently tied to the idea of a popular front, which is a policy of a united front between everyone, from the liberals to the communists to the anarchists, against fascism. Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular front because it is dominated by communists, and the communists, in fact, love to kill anarchists a lot more than they love to kill fascists.

And they use the popular front as cover for doing that, as we see in Spain. But the anarchists did participate in workers or popular sport in Barcelona, at least to an extent. So these games, as I said, they don't happen. You can read about that in my book, or you can listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But I want to talk about what the Olympics represent today, the modern Olympics. They have become, as they always were, they continue to be a spectacle that they've been since 32, and they continue to be a vehicle for capitalism as they have been forever. If we look at their recent Olympic games, we look at London, we look at Rio. I think Rio is a really great example. The Olympics, they were able to clear areas of the

city using the pretentious Olympics, displace favela communities, displace poor and excluded and marginalized people, and take advantage of incredibly underpaid labor. It's a bit rarer now, but for most of the last eight years, you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana mostly. The US has been especially racist and bigoted towards Haitians. I wrote a piece for NBC about Biden's hypocrisy on Haitian immigration. But there were people who had worked on the Olympic Stadium in Brazil. So they'd come from like after the earthquake or the economic and political issues they've had ever since the earthquake, they'd gone to Brazil and then they'd worked in Brazil, building the stadia, getting paid fuck all and doing dangerous work.

And then eventually either been able to find work that visas had run out or they'd otherwise chosen to come North to the United States. And they often end up not being able to, that they end up stuck in Tijuana or living in Tijuana and finding work there. So often, Olympics take advantage of migrant labor. They are used as a means of reshaping the city into sculpting it under capitalism, pushing folks out of their neighborhood. They don't do the Olympics in bougie neighborhoods. They use it as an excuse to gentrify a neighborhood, to remove entrenched working class communities.

Yeah, like it's really sad. When I read so much of the stuff about like specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games, we see these people who are unquestionably good people, right? They genuinely believe that through what they see as the ideal of the Olympics, games like we see these people who are unquestionably good people right like they genuinely believe that through what they see as the ideal of the olympics they can liberate women they the barcelona organizers so like they didn't have much money right they were putting people up and you i found these forms in the archives they'd go around people's houses and be like hey uh do you

have a spare bedroom and in the form you can tick i have one two three spare bedrooms i can serve breakfast i can't serve breakfast like and that's how they would bill at the athletes right the athletes didn't have an olympic village they had a hotel and then any surplus you would just stay with with a local person it was a very different vision of what the olympics could have been right and they really believed in the youth of the world coming together they really thought that at the popular olympics they could show the strength of anti-fascism that anti-fascism wasn't just a talking point that it was uh that it was young and it was healthy and like most importantly that they could fucking kill you right like that that sport orwell again double orwell quote episode orwell could sport war without the shooting and i think he's spot on actually it is good he's got some bangers shireen you do say that

sounds like a writer yeah yeah he's a word guy george orwell people do love to misquote george orwell but uh i like to quote him correctly uh you know you can you can always when someone misquotes george orwell you can always just quote tweet them with the i had joined the militia to kill a fascist right or the other absolute banger from orwell i have no particular love for the idealized worker as he exists in the mind of the bourgeois communist but when i see a real flesh and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy the policeman i don't have to ask myself which side i'm on oh it's a banger that's that's poetry yeah it is it's great like uh it's something that uh that when I get around to it,

I'll have tattooed on my body. Maybe when I have to cross fewer borders. It's probably not something you want to be showing off to the intelligence agencies of various countries. Yeah, it's really sad to see this thing. And I think it does have potential. I think it's a potential. What I want to end on is,

I think we can recover that potential. We can take the Olympics away from the people who did 1904 and the people who did 1936 and and like it doesn't we'd have to use that obviously the ioc is not fucking coming with us right um you know i've been to the ioc very nice building uh but like this you know the the interests of finance capital and the interest of the IOC are inherently tied. Coca-Cola, every massive corporation in the world

is a massive sponsor of the Olympics. It's also been a platform for some really good things. We think about Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics giving a raised fist salute on the podium.

I'm sure you've seen it. There's a statue of them. There's a statue of them, several statues of them, I think actually. But yeah, very famous Olympic moment. The whole 1968 Olympics actually kind of gave a platform for protest. Parisians have been protesting against this Olympics and Angelenos are already protesting against what is going to happen in 28. You can look up Nolympics LA for those folks. I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I don't think that the idea is inherently bad. The idea of coming together to play and like sports are where we decide who's on our team

and who's not on our team. And what the popular Olympics did was said, working people are all on the same team. And they played that out. The day the games are supposed to start, some of those athletes were in the streets killing fascists. And they won. That day the military coup failed in barcelona and a lot of them left really feeling like they'd got something out of the games that they couldn't have got or they came to play and and they saw like what they were playing for acted out and and i think there's still something really powerful in that but like we can only get there by acknowledging how fucked up the Olympics have

always been. I see this like liberal narratives that the Olympics were once great and about sportsmanship. And now they're about capitalism. No fuck that. Like they have always been inherently about capitalism. They've been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics,

right? The, the metal table, we don't do the metal table for shits and giggles. The metal cable is there to prove like the superiority of one race like that is why hitler is obsessed with the medal table right um he's extremely worried that like either the like black folks in the united states or like god forbid the japanese do well in the olympics it's like and then the olympics trying to sort of posit itself as inherently

pro-human rights i think is very problematic when we look at like how olympic stadia get constructed by whom they get constructed and where they get constructed yeah yeah who they affect and yeah and who who they're for and who who they take from and so i know i'm not saying don't watch the o. Like, uh, when I was a kid, the Olympics were like fucking formative and me wanting to do sport. And when I was an athlete, the Olympics was also a big idea.

I wanted to do, I have friends who are going to be at the Olympics. And like, I guess I wish them the best, but still a bad thing. And like, I certainly don't blame folks who come from like resource poor settings for taking that chance.

Yeah, of course not. But it is like, yeah, the way it currently is and the way it's always been is just, doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. But maybe there's a different timeline where, I don't know, Barcelona's idealism of an Olympics is, like, true. Yeah, I know. I think we can bring it back I think like anti-fascism is having a moment that it probably hasn't had

since the 1930s the last four years like when we can get together we can have our own institutions too like I don't think we should abandon sport to the chuds just because the chuds have liked sport there's a way but I also don't want anyone to use it as a way to like not sports wash but like kind of focus on something that is not as relevant as the bigger

picture does that make sense like yeah totally like yeah uh yeah it shouldn't be used to distract yeah exactly that's what that's the short word to say yeah and like it has been like global sports are increasingly going to uh like petro states in the middle east yeah right like and that is a problem i think if you're an athlete i would encourage you to really consider what your role is i know some of my friends listen who are still like professional athletes and uh just think about what you can do and like i will tell you that when you stop getting paid to exercise all of it seems very unimportant uh and like you suddenly realize that in my case but uh there's important shit that you can do if you have a chance to do it and you should do it

uh if you get the chance but yeah i think hopefully you know if people want to know more uh about the popular olympics i will fucking talk your ear off send me an email uh yeah my book i think it might be on libcom now as well i think you can i think it's been pirated which is good to see you can get it from your library i'd love you to get it from your library because then it's there for someone else i love libraries yeah i do love a library yeah i should do a library episode yeah i was trying to get the library san diego library association on because we've been defunding the libraries here in san diego to have more cops yeah it's fucking great fucking great, isn't it? No, I love...

Libraries are just this, I don't know, pure little place. We've got to do some library episodes. Yeah, we'll do them. We'll get them back. We'll get the libraries. If you work in a library and the police are taking away the money you use to read books to little children, you can DM

me on x.com. Yeah, and we will fight the good fight for you yeah alright that's been the Olympics I know go forth do a little decathlon here's a fun Olympic fact for you a fun fact to end the episode

General Patton right American war guy entered the pentathlon at the Olympics and used such a large pistol that they were unable to determine the size of his grouping of shots on the target because he just eviscerated the whole target his hand cannon yeah so embody that uh the pentathlon a sport that was designed to train officers right you have to run swim of course it is ride a horse sword fight and shoot yeah so make a better pentathlon uh make make an anti-fascist decathlon yeah send us your uh you

can tag us with your your decathlon ideas on on x.com we both use at i write okay bizarrely we have the same the same twitter handle um but yeah send us your sporting ideas enjoy your little uh little olympic viewing now that i've ruined it all for you, I guess. Yeah. No, I mean, it's good to know context. But yeah, until next time. Yeah. Until the next time me and James

talk about something either terrible or fun. Or somewhere in between. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be back soon with something else. You'll never know what. These must just come out of left field for people. Like, what the fuck are they talking about today? Yeah. Well, I guess you'll never know what these are always fucking just these must just come out of left field for people like what the fuck are they talking about today yeah well i guess we'll never

know until you listen that's it listen every day bye-bye bye it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast,

Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. third journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.