So many controversial stories exist within the history of the Olympics that most of them have been forgotten within the decades of mostly memorable Winter and Summer Games etched positively in people’s minds. The U.S. has a history of only slipping up once when it comes to handling the Olympics with the usual aplomb of diplomacy and athletic skill. Long before our 1980 boycott bungle against the Moscow Summer Olympics, we wisely decided to attend the 1936 Summer Games set up by Hitler. We proved that the Olympics should be a separate entity that overcomes all tyranny or evil regimes. Most other countries agreed with that idea in 1936. However, we almost boycotted those 1936 Olympics in Berlin via the influence of some American groups who didn’t think we should celebrate the process of brotherhood and sport with a German political movement who were intent on taking over the world.
And we weren’t the only ones in the world who thought that one over before making an ultimate decision.
Consider Spain to be a tad ingenious in how they worked out their ultimate decision to boycott the 1936 Games. Instead of just sitting at home and folding their arms, they decided to create their own Olympics to send the prescient message that the Nazis wouldn’t hijack the true meaning of what an Olympics should be. It wasn’t lost on nations of the world that the Nazis considered themselves to be superior and would do anything it took to lead in the medal count (which they did). In that act of defiance to remind us the Olympics shouldn’t exist to glorify one race, Spain’s newly-elected leftist government concocted an Olympics called the “People’s Olympiad” that would be held in Barcelona a couple of weeks before the ones in Berlin. Spain put out the invitations to all the countries of the world to send a strong message to Germany how they felt about The Third Reich.
This didn’t faze Germany any, because they’d already built a solid athletic Olympic team that was assured to win by the chilling method of sheer…well, triumph of the will to borrow from a certain Leni Riefenstahl film. Because Hitler was playing Mr. Good Guy and diffused the theme of joining in the Olympic spirit–it seemed to be enough to persuade not only us but most other countries to participate anyway. But Spain managed to talk America and 21 other nations into participating in their People’s Olympiad (or “Olimpiada Popular” in Spanish) that July.
There probably isn’t any doubt that the nations that decided to join in here were thinking ahead and perhaps wondering if this would become the official Olympics of the future should the Nazis consume the one started by the International Olympic Committee. The fate of war, though, ended up being the turning of tides for both the Berlin Olympics and Spain’s Olympiad for the people…
Politics and war can override the Olympic spirit…temporarily…
The political unrest in Spain was already concerning a lot of people around the world up to 1936. Some historians today might accuse the People’s Olympiad in Spain to be nothing but a leftist political movement when you see that many of the athletes sent in as intending to participate were backed by Communists and left-wing organizations who were on the side of the Popular Front that were one side of a bitter political divide with Nationalists building up into a bubble about ready to burst. An extreme divide between the left and the right at this level should probably give our own American political divides some warning at what can potentially happen when someone does something dire. In July of 1936 right before the People’s Olympiad was scheduled to go on–two assassinations occurred of two important members of each opposing political party that soon led to an uprising.
When the Nationalists took over just days before the opening ceremonies were to happen, it put Spain into a quandary about how to proceed with their alternate games. Some athletes were already in the country and others were still trying to get in to no avail. In a strange twist, some of the athletes who couldn’t get out in time ended up joining militia groups and fighting in the civil war for the Popular Front side that would soon take 50,000 lives before the end of the year.
Looking at the row of dominoes of how the Spanish Civil War ultimately influenced the Germans in how they went about conquering Europe by 1939–the idea that the 1936 Berlin Olympics was an indirect instigator of WWII is an example of the twists world history took that we still have yet to fully comprehend. Younger generations wouldn’t even entertain the thought that an Olympics could have indirectly started a world war. And yet, it was WWII itself that arguably changed the Olympics later for the better.
When the Olympics were canceled in 1940 and 1944 due to WWII–it gave people time to wash clean the memory of the Berlin Olympics and (while borrowing the pageantry from the Nazis starting during the 1948 London Summer Olympics) bring a renewed interest and appreciation of what the Olympic spirit could bring.
Of course, with war still a reality in so many mind-blowing ways today–would America ever consider starting an alternate Olympics if an Olympics was taking place in a controversial country we deplore?
America‘s Olympiad for the People…
Since I think we’ve proven that history can repeat itself several times over, I don’t think it’d ever be out of the question that America would consider putting on our own Olympics (outside of our self-created Special Olympics and Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games) should we seriously boycott an Olympics in enemy territory. At the time of this writing, it seems unlikely we’ll truly boycott the Beijing Summer Olympics in August of this year. If we ever did create an alternate Olympics, it’d probably be somewhat smaller, though probably have at least some of the usual big-budget pageantry America is known for in past Olympics through the IOC. Creating such a thing would only happen if the Olympics had virtually been hijacked by a questionable regime…such as say Iran.
The way Iran is going now, we may me looking at a brand new quasi-Nazi regime that’s as hell-bent on wiping out Israel as The Third Reich was. Nevertheless, it’s probably unlikely Iran would ever get the Olympics any time soon. On the hand, when you have the world deciding who gets the Olympics, Iran very well could get them someday if they haven’t started WWIII before then.
When it comes to the Olympic Games, America probably won’t ever make the mistake of the 1980 boycott again. But to tie this up in a bow–the ultimate irony of history repeating itself would be if our own bitter political divide ended up in a civil war right when we’re staging our own People’s Olympiad due to another country bringing the world to the precipice of war. All of this doesn’t necessarily have to happen a hundred years from now either the way unexpected things happen so fast now.
Time to start looking back at the credo of the Olympic Games and frame it up on our walls alongside all of our other important credos from history…
