Olympic Values and Ethics in Contemporary Society

Susan Brownell Jim Parry

A publication of the

OLYMPIC CHAIR HENRI de BAILLET LATOUR JACQUES ROGGE

chair holder: Annick Willem

Olympic Values and Ethics in Contemporary Society

Susan Brownell Jim Parry

Chair Holder Ghent University: Annick Willem

Copyright 2012 by Susan Brownell, Jim Parry, and the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour Jacques Rogge No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the authors or the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour - Jacques Rogge Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour - Jacques Rogge Ghent University Watersportlaan 2 9000 Ghent Belgium 162 pages

ISBN XXX-XX-XXX-XXXX-X

Content
Preface Annick Willem ........................................................................................................................ 7 Preface Thierry Zintz............................................................................................................................ 9 Preface Paul Van Cauwenberge ........................................................................................................ 11 PART 1: Lectures of Jim Parry ................................................................................................................ 13 The Ethical and Political Values Of the Olympic Movement ............................................................. 15 Physical Education as Olympic Education ......................................................................................... 29 Heroes and Villains: Doped Athletes and their Impact on Society and Education ........................... 49 The Youth Olympic Games Ethical and Value Issues ...................................................................... 61 Part 2: Lectures of Susan Brownell........................................................................................................ 81 The Olympic Games in the World System: Reflections on the Future of Globalization ................... 83 Commercialism, Values, and Education in the Olympic Movement Today ...................................... 95 Women and Children in State-Supported vs. Market-Oriented Sport: China vs. the U.S. .............. 109 The Olympic Games and Human Rights: Moving forward from Beijing 2008................................. 121 Multiculturalism in International Sport: Shift of Power from West to East? .................................. 133 Sport, Politics, and World Peace: Lessons from the Beijing Olympics ............................................ 149

Preface Annick Willem

This book is aimed at a wide readership encompassing all who are interested in sport and its values. It is written from the perspective of the Olympic Movement but is certainly not limited to elite sport or the Olympics. Everyone interested in sport can learn from the Olympic Movement and the challenges of sport in its international context. On the eve of the London Games, lessons from the previous games need to be recalled. This is not first - and it certainly will not be the last - book on Olympic values. What makes this book unique are the authors, Susan Brownell and Jim Parry, who have knowledge, expertise and insight that are unique and that have allowed them to make an in-depth investigation of the Olympic values. Their insiders perspectives and critical reflections allow the readers of this book to think more thoroughly about sport, its values, the Olympic Movement, and the Olympic Games. This brings us to the main purpose of this book; namely, providing the reader with insights and reflections on the Olympic Movement, the Games and what they stand for. Jim Parry talks about the ethical dimension of the Olympic Games and all that comes with it, such as enormous media attention, politics, doping, multiculturalism, paradoxes between the Olympic Charter, Olympism and reality. He explains the philosophical anthropology of Olympism to guide the readers in interpreting the Olympic values in their international context and from an ethical perspective. Susan Brownell looks at the Games from the inside out, as a western researcher and as an American citizen, but with a tremendous knowledge of and sensitivity for Chinese culture. She will take the readers of this book on a journey through the history of the Olympic Games, and in particular the Games in China in 2008, teaching us about: the globalization of sport, the evolution to multiculturalism in the Games, the tensions between the economic and commercial values and the educational and Olympic values, the challenge of world peace in a context of world powers and world politics, and the story behind the human rights dispute. While Jim Parry discusses Olympism in general, Susan Brownell focuses particularly on the Games in Beijing. They present us their knowledge based on in-depth research and investigations, complete with their interpretations as food for thoughts. The book is organized as follows. It starts with the prefaces of Prof dr. Paul Van Cauwenberge, Rector of Ghent University, who is a great champion of the Olympic Movement and Olympic Games; and prefaces of the two chair-holders of the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour-Jacques Rogge. The main part of the book is divided into two sections, one with the texts of the lectures of Jim Parry and one with the texts of the lectures of Susan Brownell. These authors have shared their thoughts during the Olympic Week, a yearly event organized by the Olympic Chairs at Ghent University and Universit Catholique de Louvain. Jim Parry was our guest at Ghent University in 2009 and Susan Brownell in 2011. The Olympic Chairs Henri de Baillet LatourJacques Rogge are funded by the Fund Inbev-Balliet Latour, which was founded at the end of the seventies by Alfred de Baillet Latour. The Fund Inbev-Balliet Latour supports four major sectors on which the InBev-Baillet Latour focuses its initiatives: clinical research, university chairs and scholarships, heritage, and the Olympic spirit. One of the aims of the fund is, thus, supporting the Olympic Movement. It is the ambition of the Fund and the partners holding the Olympic Chairs Henri

de Baillet Latour-Jacques Rogge to greatly advance the knowledge and understanding of the Olympic Movement among a broad audience. The Olympic Chairs were founded in October, 2008. The Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet LatourJacques Rogge is the fifth Olympic Chair in the World and has as its purpose the academic study of the diverse aspects of the management of sport organizations with an emphasis on the Olympic values, to stimulate the sporting ethos and deontology of athletes and to enhance cooperation between the two parts of the country. At the moment, at both UGent and UCL, a scholarship researcher is financed with the resources of the Chair to do research in the domain of sport management and the Olympic values. Also, research seminars and guest lectures are frequently organized at both universities. The choice of the Universities of Ghent and Louvain, like the name of this unique cooperation, wasnt without reason. Count Henri de Baillet Latour once himself studied at Louvain and Count Jacques Rogge was a student of Ghent University, from which he received an honorary PhD in 2001. Both were the only two Belgian chairmen of the International Olympic Committee. Count de Baillet Latour was Chair from 1926 until 1942, while Count Rogge has been the present Chairman since 2001. At Ghent University, the Olympic Chair was led, until his unexpected and tragic decease on August 14th 2010, by Professor Marc Maes. Professor Annick Willem, Professor of Sport Management in the Department of Movement and Sport Sciences, took over the torch. At Louvain University, Professor Thierry Zintz holds the Olympic Chair. He also is the Dean of the Faculty of Physical Education and Rehabilitation at this institute. Thanks to the Chair, both universities are able to enhance their collaboration. We, therefore, express our gratitude to the Fund Inbev-Balliet Latour. Ghent, July 2012 Prof dr Annick Willem

Preface Thierry Zintz

In 2009, the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour and Jacques Rogge welcomed the honourable Prof. dr. Jim Parry of the University of Leeds, England. It was a great honour as Professor Parry is, to my colleague Marc Maes and to me, one of the most prominent experts on Olympism, Sports & Ethics. Unfortunately Professor Marc Maes passed away in August 2010. He was a reference in ethics and sport and helped me in balancing management and ethics in sport organizations in a proper way. However the main reason for inviting Professor Parry was that he is one of the few who broadly embodies the Olympic Movement. For him, the Olympics are only the tip of the iceberg that consists of a broad movement aiming to emphasize sports as a universal language. He wishes to pay special attention to the cultural development in symbiosis with the overall development of the personality of youth globally. This book presents the lectures Professor Parry gave during his stay at the Universities of Ghent and Louvain-la-Neuve as a visiting professor of the Chair (May 2009). His humanistic views on sport and ethics deeply impressed our students, during their classes, as well as our guests during the public conferences. He claimed that Olympic ideals may be seen not merely as inert ideals, but living ideas which have the power to remake our notions of sport in education, seeing sport not as mere physical activity but as the cultural and developmental activity of an aspiring, achieving, wellbalanced, educated and ethical individual (Parry, 1998 ). Next to the essays of Professor Parry, we are delighted to present the work of Professor Susan Brownell, who visited the Chair in 2011. Professor Susan Brownell, (USA), obtained her degree in anthropology and a doctoral title at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1990. She was appointed professor at the St. Louis University in Missouri in 1994. She is very committed to her research work concerning sports and the human body, with a particular interest in Chinese culture. In the eighties she travelled to China to learn the language and work on her PhD, and she lived in Beijng in the year leading up to the 2008 Olympics. She has acquired a status as international expert on Sports in China, which was an excellent occasion for us to invite her and gave her a stage to talk about the Olympic Games in Beijing. Both researchers give us unique insights into the domain of sport ethics, and stimulate us to question our beliefs and understanding of important societal matters. Prof. Dr. Thierry Zintz, Co-holder of the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour & Jacques Rogge in Management of Sport Organisations, Universit catholique de Louvain

Preface Paul Van Cauwenberge

On behalf of Ghent University, I am delighted to introduce this book, which is a publication of the Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour-Jacques Rogge. For years now I have been fascinated by the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement, by the results that have been and are being obtained during the different Games as well as the state of mind that stands for Olympism. Olympism was introduced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the Olympic Movement and responsible for the revival of the Modern Olympic Games. According to him, sport from an early age was very important for the formation of youngsters and adolescents, for assuring a better future for all of us. His interest in this matter was nurtured by the many trips he undertook. He became acquainted with sport-orientated school systems and the explosive evolution of the sport clubs environment. Keywords for him were values, discipline and a volunteer's mentality. By a volunteer's mentality de Coubertin was referring to the voluntary choice of making the effort for physical exertion. "The primary objective of sport pedagogy is the stimulation and encouragement of moral education through sport and physical education", de Coubertin said, and he expressed this quite emphatically: "Du bronzage de l'me par le bronzage du corps". De Coubertin was especially interested in the Olympic philosophy, Olympism, a complex of anthropological concepts in which sports could be considered as both the means and the end. The Olympic Games arent only about greatness in sport, but they deal with virtue and values as well. Pierre De Coubertin acknowledged the importance of the ethical value of the Games and how the Olympic vision can inspire not only athletes, but society as a whole. The Olympic and Paralympic values, being friendship, respect, courage, excellence, determination, inspiration and equality, are important on the sports field but they are applicable to much broader domains and remain admirable principles that can be of great support to each one of us. Sport can be of great benefit to societal challenges, such as development, education, peace and equal rights. It can fulfil a role as a lever, a reconciliator, and an initiator of progress in these fields. I strongly believe that we can indeed build a better world through sport. However, we should not forget that these values are sometimes at risk in the world of sport itself and need to be carefully tended and managed. Because sport has been evolving rapidly during the last years, the gap between the manager of a sport organization, often a volunteer, and the practitioner of sport, who is becoming increasingly professionalized, is becoming bigger. This situation requires special managerial attention. In this complex situation, there is also an increasing call for the promotion and protection of ethical behaviour on the field and in the boardroom. For these developments and considerations in the domain of sport management, eminent researchers worldwide bear a shared responsibility.

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Prof. dr. Jim Parry and Prof. dr. Susan Brownell are two of these excellent researchers. They were welcomed at our university to lecture about the ethics that are involved in the changing world of sport and sport management. Their presentations have led to interesting texts on the ethics of the Olympic Games and their value in contemporary society, which are presented to you now in this manuscript. Prof. dr. Paul Van Cauwenberge Rector Ghent University

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PART 1: Lectures of Jim Parry

The Ethical and Political Values Of the Olympic Movement

Olympism
For most people, I suppose, the word Olympic will conjure up images of the Olympic Games, either ancient or modern. The focus of their interest will be a two-week festival of sport held once in every four years between elite athletes representing their countries or city-states in inter-communal competition. Most people, too, will have heard of an Olympiad, even though it is sometimes thought to refer to a particular Games. In fact it refers to a four-year period, during which a Games may or may not be held. So: the Athens Games are properly referred to not as the XXVIII Games (since there have been only twenty-four, three having been cancelled due to World Wars) but as the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad. The Games are held to celebrate the end of the period of the Olympiad. Fewer, however, will have heard of Olympism, the philosophy developed by the founder of the modern Olympic Movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat who had been much influenced by the British Public School tradition of sport in education. This philosophy has as its focus of interest not just the elite athlete, but everyone; not just a short truce period, but the whole of life; not just competition and winning, but also the values of participation and co-operation; not just sport as an activity, but also as a formative and developmental influence contributing to desirable characteristics of individual personality and social life.1

Olympism - a universal social philosophy

For Olympism is a social philosophy which emphasises the role of sport in world development, international understanding, peaceful co-existence, and social and moral education. De Coubertin understood, towards the end of the nineteenth century, that sport was about to become a major growth point in popular culture - and that, as physical activity, it was apparently universalizable, providing a means of contact and communication across cultures. A universal philosophy by definition sees itself as relevant to everyone, regardless of nation, race, gender, social class, religion or ideology, and so the Olympic movement has worked for a coherent universal representation of itself - a concept of Olympism which identifies a range of values to which each nation can sincerely commit itself whilst at the same time finding for the general idea a form of expression which is unique to itself, generated by its own culture, location, history, tradition and projected future. De Coubertin, being a product of late nineteenth-century liberalism, emphasised the values of equality, fairness, justice, respect for persons, rationality and understanding, autonomy, and

de Coubertin, P. (1894/1934). Forty Years of Olympism. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 126-130.

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excellence. These are values which span nearly 3000 years of Olympic history, although some of them may be differently interpreted at different times. They are, basically, the main values of liberal humanism - or perhaps we should say simply humanism, since socialist societies have found little difficulty in including Olympic ideals into their overall ideological stance towards sport. The contemporary task for the Olympic Movement is to further this project: To try to see more clearly what its Games (and sport in wider society) might come to mean. This task will be both at the level of ideas and of action. If the practice of sport is to be pursued and developed according to Olympic values, the theory must strive for a conception of Olympism which will support that practice. The ideal should seek both to sustain sports practice and to lead sport towards a vision of Olympism which will help to deal with the challenges which are bound to emerge.

The Olympic Charter

The Olympic Charter states simply the relationship between Olympic philosophy, ethics and education: Fundamental Principle 2 says: 2 Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. Fundamental Principle 6 says: 2 The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. If we add to this de Coubertins famous dicta all sports for all people 3 and All games, all nations 4 we seem to have a recipe for the core values of Olympism: effort and excellence; friendship and solidarity; peace and international understanding; and multiculturalism.

2 3

p.7 in IOC (2008). The Olympic Charter. Lausanne: IOC. p.187 in During, B., and Brisson, J.F. (1994). Sport, Olympism and Cultural Diversity. In B. Jeu et al. (Eds.), For a Humanism of Sport. Paris: CNOSF-Editions, pp. 187-197. 4 p.127 in de Coubertin, P. (1894/1934). Forty Years of Olympism. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 126-130.

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A Philosophical Anthropology of Olympism

Based on its heritage and traditions, each society (and each ideology) has a political and philosophical anthropology - an idealised conception of the kind of person that that society (or ideology) values, and tries to produce and reproduce through its formal and informal institutions. In Chapter 2, I shall discuss many attempts to interpret the idea of Olympism, and I shall try to present a 'philosophical anthropology' of Olympism as part of an explication of its ideology, and as a contribution to a theory of physical education. 5 6 For now, it will suffice to suggest (without discussion) that the Olympic Idea translates into a few simple phrases which capture the essence of what an ideal human being ought to be and to aspire to. It promotes the ideals of: individual all round harmonious human development; towards excellence and achievement; through effort in competitive sporting activity; under conditions of mutual respect, fairness, justice and equality; with a view to creating lasting personal human relationships of friendship; international relationships of peace, toleration and understanding; and cultural alliances with the arts.

Sport and Universalism

However, Olympism achieves its ends through the medium of sport, and so it cannot escape the requirement to provide an account of sport which reveals both its nature and its ethical potential. Let me briefly suggest a set of criteria which might begin to indicate the fundamentally ethical nature of sport. physical (so effort is required), contest (contract to contest - competition and excellence), rule-governed (obligation to abide by the rules, fair play, equality and justice), institutionalised (lawful authority), shared values and commitments (due respect is owed to opponents as co-facilitators).

It is difficult even to state the characteristics of sport without relying on terms that carry ethical import, and such meanings must apply across the world of sports participation. Without agreement on rule-adherence, the authority of the referee, and the central shared values of the activity, there could be no sport. The first task of an International Federation is to clarify rules and harmonize understandings so as to facilitate the universal practice of its sport.

5 6

Parry, J.(1998a). Physical Education as Olympic Education. European Physical Education Review, 4(2), 153-167. Parry, J.(1998b). The Justification of Physical Education. In K Green & K Hardman (eds.), Physical Education - a reader, Meyer & Meyer, pp. 36-68.

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Olympism: Immutable Values?

The principles of Olympism, to be universal, must be unchanging, and yet they must apparently be everywhere different. They must not change over time, but at all times we see rule changes reflecting social changes. How are these paradoxes to be resolved? What I have argued elsewhere 7 is that there are indeed fundamental differences between the ancient and modern Games, and between de Coubertins revivalist ideas and those which are current today. The ancient Games had developed over a thousand years, as an expression of the values of a developing archaic community. The modern Games, however, were created by a set of nineteenth century ideas which sought to impose a modern ideology onto ancient values so as to affect contemporary social practice for the better. Such differences are inevitable, over time and space. Social ideas, or ideas inscribed in social practices, depend upon a specific social order or a particular set of social relationships for their full meaning to be exemplified. This seems to suggest that such meanings are culturally relative and that therefore there could be no such thing as a universal idea of Olympism. But are we doomed to relativism? Are we doomed to a situation in which we must continue to misunderstand one another, since we inhabit different cultures (and therefore generate different meanings for Olympism)? Rawls distinction between concepts and conceptions is useful here.8 The concept of Olympism, being an abstraction, will be at a high level of generality, although this does not mean that it will be unclear. What it means is that the general ideas which comprise its meaning will admit of possibly contesting interpretations. Thus, naturally, the concept of Olympism will find different expressions in time and place, history and geography - just as the concepts of democracy, art and religion do. There will be differing conceptions of Olympism, which will interpret the general concept in such a way as to bring it to real life in a particular context. Taken together, the promotion of these values will be seen to be the educative task, and sport will be seen as a means. Each one of these values, being articulated at a high level of generality, will admit of a wide range of interpretation. But they nevertheless provide a framework which can be agreed upon by social groups with very differing commitments. This raises the questions of the relationships between such differing cultural formations, and of our own attitudes towards cultural difference. One way of addressing these questions is via a consideration of the very important notion of multiculturalism.

Parry, J. (1988). Olympism at the Beginning and End of the Twentieth Century. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, 28, pp. 81-94. 8 Rawls, J. (1993). The Law of Peoples. In Shute & Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights, New York: Basic Books, pp. 41-82.

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Liberalism and Multiculturalism

In an earlier paper 9, I looked at the contemporary importance for liberalism of the idea of multiculturalism. The liberal state sees itself as deliberately not choosing any particular conception of the Good Life for its citizens to follow. Rather, it sees itself as neutral between the alternative conceptions of the Good to be found in most modern liberal democracies. In this it sharply distinguishes itself from illiberal states, which embody and enforce one view of the Good Life. Rather than promoting one culture over another, it sees itself as multicultural. Citizens can choose their own version of the Good and pursue their own aims and values, independently of the state. In such a state, attention to multicultural ideals such as recognition, respect and equal status for all cultures will become increasingly important. Multiculturalism is a fact nowadays for most Western societies, and it requires a political society to recognise the equal standing of all stable and viable communities existing in a society. It outlaws discrimination against groups and individuals on the grounds of ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, class, gender or sexual preference. However, some of these communities may be authoritarian, illiberal and oppressive so does multiculturalism apply equally to all communities, or only to liberal ones? Rawls 10 attempts to draw guidelines for a Law of Peoples acceptable to members of both liberal and illiberal cultures, by introducing the notion of reasonable societies. These societies, though illiberal, follow certain core principles: Peace (pursuing their ends through diplomacy and trade). Common Good (a conception of justice). Consultation (a reasonable hierarchy thereof). Responsibility (citizens recognise their obligations and play a part in social life). Freedom (some freedom of conscience/thought). Reasonable societies, even illiberal ones, could agree to a Law of Peoples based on such a thin liberalism as this and this could be seen very positively: as offering learning experiences both ways, as each culture learns from the other. But multiculturalism has its limits, and those limits are drawn by the universalistic claims of thin liberalism, supported by some form of Human Rights theory. As Hollis 11 says, liberal societies must fight for at least a minimalist, procedural thesis about freedom, justice, equality and individual rights. In the short term, in the interests of peace and development (or of political or economic gain), such basic moral commitments may be temporarily diluted or shelved but they are the inalienable bedrock of the possibility of a global multiculturalism. There are limits to toleration. Liberal democracy is (still) an exclusionary system - some cultures are beyond the pale.

Parry, J. (1999). Globalisation, Multiculturalism and Olympism. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, 39, pp. 86-97. 10 Rawls, J. (1993). The Law of Peoples. In Shute & Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights, New York: Basic Books, pp. 41-82. 11 Hollis, M. (1999). Is Universalism Ethnocentric? In C. Joppke & S. Lukes (eds.), Multicultural Questions, Oxford: OUP, pp. 27-43.

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Why Be Multiculturalist?
Why should we be multiculturalists? Because we want to honour and respect the widest variety of human culture. Why? Because it enriches us all. We value diversity because every culture expresses a form of human life and helps us to appreciate the full range of difference and choice. It is the same reason that we value knowledge of the history of human social evolution: to help us to understand more fully our identity as humans. But this means that we have to tolerate difference, and we have to accept that sometimes other peoples views will hold sway over our own. The liberal citizen permits democracy - people can see the reason for (and therefore accept) decisions even if they do not agree with them. Such a rational pluralism is characteristic of Liberalism, but unreasonable doctrines will not accept such a pluralism. Liberals see the problem as resting with those who object to the valuing of anything other than their own culture. In these circumstances we can still believe in live and let live but we must defend the liberal values that permit such tolerance. Central to our concern is the defence of individual rights against illiberal groups. We have two motivations: (a) to save a valuable heritage, central to the identity of a group of people; (b) to defend the liberal rights of the individual. For example, imagine Aztec society, now long disappeared. Its achievements (in common with the astonishing achievements of other indigenous meso-American cultures) cause us to think again about the capacity of humans to organize themselves into social groups that can build, think, create, maintain, etc. But it also promoted the ritual sacrifice of some of its members to propitiate its gods. So we disapprove of forced sacrifice, ritual murder, cannibalism, etc. - but this does not prevent us from valuing those cultures for their achievements, and for their reminders to us of the great variety and flexibility of possible human social arrangements. So what do we do? Internally, we seek to liberalise those cultures, at least to some small extent, e.g. to enforce basic liberal rights within the liberal states. So, in minority cultures, we permit no slaves, no mutilation, no forced marriage, no child prostitution, etc. - or we permit individuals to escape from those circumstances if they want to; to deny others the right to harness individuals to their ends. Externally, we pursue foreign policies that seek to contain hostile illiberal societies in ways that minimise their threat to liberal ones. So long as they are far away, pose no external threat, collaborate with (or at least do not obstruct) commerce, we may express disapproval or criticism of their arrangements, but we often leave them to do as they wish, even in cases where the majority of the population is obviously oppressed.

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Is Universalism Ethnocentric?
Critics of the liberal project put forward the objection that the idea of liberal democracy is a historical product, a kind of western ethnocentrism, a kind of post-colonial imperialism, foisting local western values on the rest of the world. The kind of universalism to which both liberalism and Olympism pretend is just an ethnocentric smokescreen. There is no basis for such a universalism of values, because all values arise within cultures, and therefore do not apply across cultural boundaries they are culturally relative. We may call this thesis the Anthropologists Heresy: liberalism for the liberals! cannibalism for the cannibals! 12. All cultures are equally valid, because they can only be judged on their own internal terms norms and principles that apply only to themselves.

Objections
1. This thesis cannot account for moral criticism across cultures for how can we criticize unjust practices if that is all they are the practices of others? 2. Is relativism itself a kind of concealed ethnocentrism? Is it true that to respect other cultures is to abstain from criticizing them? Or is this a kind of disrespect failing to apply to others (denying to others) the standards of justification and argument we apply to ourselves? 3. Relativism is self-refuting. It is a theory that claims that there are no cross-cultural truths. Well, then: does relativism apply to itself? If so, relativism is not true (because it says that there are no cross-cultural truths; so relativism is just a cultural practice of anthropologists, with no claim to truth, and therefore nothing to say to outsiders like me). So: even if relativism could be true, it would make itself false. But relativism cant be 'true', since it claims that there is no such thing as 'truth'. 4. Concept of culture is a tricky one here, too. Relativism, says Lukes12 , trades on poor mans sociology, according to which cultures are homogeneous, coherent wholes. But cultures are not windowless boxes. Conflicts arise within cultures as well as between them, but relativism gives us no way of making progress. 5. Finally, adherence to the Anthropologists Heresy means a rejection of all those organisations that pretend to universalist values, including the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and Amnesty International. It means that there is no such thing as Human Rights, an idea which, of course, is rooted in notions of our universally common humanity. I dont think that there will be too many of us willing to accept such a radically disastrous conclusion. So Lukes and Hollis12 dismiss relativism as a sensible response to diversity. Of course, there is considerable diversity, and the job of the anthropologist is to seek it out and describe it for us. But the anthropologist exceeds his occupational remit when he seeks to convert his experiences into an ethical theory. The importance of such research cannot be overestimated. It continually reminds us that we should recognize the value of modesty or restraint in moral judgement and criticism, and avoid the dangers of abstract moralising. But anthropological experience is not a sufficient basis for ethical theory. The facts of diversity require theoretical explanation but the facts alone do not explain it.
12

Lukes, S. (2002). Liberals and Cannibals. London: Verso; and Hollis, M. (1999). Is Universalism Ethnocentric? In C. Joppke & S. Lukes (eds.), Multicultural Questions, Oxford: OUP, p. 36.

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Liberal Democracy - an Historical Product?

So I must ask myself: do I accept liberalism just because its the view of my tribe? I dont think so, because any political view requires a justification, and we offer arguments for and against particular systems. Liberal democracy is a historical product. Well, it is true that the benefits of liberal societies flow from a series of European inventions: The constitution of the individual as a legal subject. Scepticism as to the truth. Self-criticism. Separation of church and politics (and the emergence of the secular state). Separation of church and knowledge (and the development of the scientific world-view). However, the fact that liberalism happened first in the West does not bestow a greater virtue upon us. Maybe it just happened here as it were, contingently. In Europe, historically, people just became exhausted from religious wars, and pluralism emerged as a pragmatic way of carrying on with life without the debilitating and destructive background of constant war. And look how long and painful was this development in the West through religious and social persecution (there were witchcraft trials all over Europe, Catholics in England were still denied political rights in the mid-19th century, women until after the First World War, African-Americans until after the Second World War, etc.). It took hundreds of years of development, and we are still not satisfied with our political systems. Apartheid in South Africa, state communism in Europe, religious and ethnic enmity in Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, the former USSR, etc. It is a long and painful struggle to achieve stability with freedom and development, and maybe the preconditions do not yet exist everywhere. Liberal democracy is a historical product. This makes it sound as though there is no justificatory argument for liberalism, although a very important element of liberal thinking, part of the liberal project, is the claim that liberalism expresses a kind of truth about human beings and the human condition; that it is the best mode of social organization for the benefit of all citizens of the world. The arguments we advance for liberalism claim that it is the system within which individuals can find maximal freedom for self-development and maximal choice of life-style, and through which communities can progress along their own chosen path of development in peace and fruitful concord with other communities. It is a salient fact that no liberal democracy has ever declared war on another. But we have to remain self-aware and self-critical. Just because some community claims the status of a liberal democracy does not automatically mean that they are the good guys. Our judgements of their goals and their actions contribute to our assessments of the quality of a particular democracy. Is it behaving in anti-liberal ways? Is it being perverted or exploited? What are its disadvantages, and how can they be ameliorated? Where does it need improvement? Is a majority being oppressive and if so do we need special minority group rights? So we hope to see critical liberal democracies, striving towards ideals expressed in terms of human rights and peaceful co-existence. Since they are human creations, they will be imperfect and they will make mistakes. It is often said that democracy is not a very good system of government it is inefficient, cumbersome, ridden with untidy and unsatisfactory compromises, and with many other faults and disadvantages - but every other system of government thought up by mankind is worse!

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Olympism Again
Above, I outlined the distinction between concepts and conceptions, and argued that the concept of Olympism will be at a high level of generality. In fact, it sets out a range of thin liberal values, allied to the thin values underlying the concept of sport. However, the values which comprise its meaning will admit of contesting interpretations, exhibiting a range of thick values as the concept of Olympism finds different expressions in time and place, history and geography. In terms of promoting its aims of international understanding and multiculturalism, it is most important that the Olympic movement continues to work for a coherent universal representation of itself - a concept of Olympism to which each nation can sincerely commit itself whilst at the same time finding for the general idea a form of expression (a conception) which is unique to itself, generated by its own culture, location, history, tradition and projected future. I believe that providing multicultural education in and for modern democracies is a new and urgent task, and one that must be made to work if we are to secure a workable political heritage for future generations. In the present global political context, this means promoting international understanding and mutual respect; and a commitment to the peaceful resolution of conflict. In the case of Olympism, I think that the thin values underpinning the rule structures of sport, acceptance of which by all participants is a pre-condition of the continuing existence of sporting competition, support at the educational and cultural levels such political efforts. Children who are brought into sporting practices, and who are aware of international competitions such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup, are thereby becoming aware of the possibilities of international co-operation, mutual respect, and mutual valuing. The Olympic Games went to Moscow in 1980, and it was impossible to prevent the penetration of ideas into a previously closed society. Maybe the connection is fanciful, but maybe there is a direct relation to the dramatic, spectacular and incredible events of 1989, when The Wall came down. Only 15 years later, many of the former Eastern bloc countries formally joined the European Union. A generation before, this was unthinkable. We should watch with care the results of Beijing 2008, when a mighty and venerable culture, on the cusp of massive economic expansion into world markets, accepted the influence of visitors and the kind of global communications associated with an Olympic Games. The 2008 Olympic Games can surely be read as a public and global affirmation of a China that is ready to look outwards and take its place in the world. Nowadays the very idea of a closed society is under threat everywhere the people are no longer reliant on restricted and controlled forms of information. The internet, satellite television and global forms of communication are all contributing to a democratization of information, and the extensive migration of people across continents is producing a new cosmopolitanism. It will require increasingly high levels of dogmatism, authoritarianism, isolationism and extremism to sustain closed, exclusivist societies. Their life is limited. This, at any rate, has to be our hope, and the hope of any kind of peaceful internationalism based on the ideas of individual freedom and human rights. Does all this matter? Is it just abstract academic theorizing? I think it matters a great deal, and our commitment to the development of global forms of expression such as sport, and to international understanding through Olympism is one way that we as individuals can express our commitments, ideals and hopes for the future of the world.

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Organizational Ethics
But our influence as individuals, though important, is necessarily small, and so we often rely on organizations to represent and express our views in more powerful ways. The International Olympic Committee is the organization charged with promoting the ethical ideals of Olympism, and it has attracted some criticism in recent years, Segrave 13 says: Perhaps the most egregious example of the widening chasm between the organizational ideals and organizational conduct within the Olympic movement is the ever deepening corruption and bribery scandal that has engulfed the Olympics since late 1998 when Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler first exposed the chicanery surrounding Salt Lake Citys bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Several IOC members came under personal scrutiny and criticism, and later resigned or were expelled, but the IOC itself was also castigated for failing to notice or prevent unethical practices. The question arose: was the IOC itself an ethical organization? We routinely ascribe moral responsibility to individuals, but does it make sense to talk of the responsibility of a company, corporation, government, institution or organization, such as the International Olympic Committee? Some think that organizations are just like persons, having rights and responsibilities, and others think that this applies only to human individuals. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth: sometimes corporate decisions and practices exceed the responsibilities of the individuals who collectively made them (the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts); but sometimes the individuals within the organization end up accepting more responsibility than is fair. If things go wrong (in ethical terms), people inside the organization should not be used as scapegoats for the shortcomings of the organization, but neither should they be allowed to hide inside the organization if they are blameworthy. Of course, organizations are constituted by individuals, who jointly design its structures, strategies, attitudes, values and aims in short, its culture. So we need to examine two ways of approaching the description of the ethical organisation: via an analysis of the corporate culture, and of the moral autonomy of the individual within the corporation.

Corporate culture
Corporate culture has been characterised as the way we do things round here , as an expression of the lived values of the organisation. Of course, since the culture may have arisen organically, out with the intentions and will of the individuals within the organisation, it may or may not exhibit those values that the corporate leadership would wish it to. An ethical approach asks why we do the things we do, and why we do things this way rather than that. Both of these things (our ends and our means) express our values.

13

p.273 in Segrave, J.O. (2000). The (Neo)Modern Olympic Games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 35, 3, pp. 268-281.

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So, what might be necessary for arriving at an account of a morally excellent organization one with an ethical culture? Hoffmann 14 suggests a three-step process: 1. Identifying issues as ethical issues, or as having an ethical dimension, 2. Engaging actively in moral thinking, 3. Translating decisions into moral actions. The first step is crucial. Issues are often dealt with as technical, scientific or organizational, when they will never be resolved without an explicit confrontation with the ethical aspects of the issue. Think, for example, of anti-doping measures, where research and development has been overwhelmingly directed at expensive and yet spectacularly unsuccessful technical/scientific solutions, whereas the problem is mainly ethical, not scientific. Or think of the allocation of the Olympic Games through the bidding process, where the ethical commitments of Olympism are seldom mentioned amongst all the technical detail considered (whereas FIFA has committed itself to the principle of rotating events, and next time to Africa). What is necessary here is the self-conscious adoption of an ethical mind-set as part of the approach to the problem. Without that, we remain ethically blind and vulnerable to ethical mistakes. The second step requires, in addition, the self-conscious adoption of a set of ethical principles and procedures born of thoughtful deliberation internal to the organizations structure and culture. This might mean attention to legislation and Codes of Conduct, statements of aims and values, training programmes (such as the Football Associations Child Protection training for intending coaches), internal ethical audits, equal opportunities and human rights policies, grievance and appeals procedures, and so on. This step celebrates the idea of the Thinking Organization, that takes seriously its duty to reflect upon itself, its workings and its impact on individuals and society. The third step reminds us that fine thoughts are not enough. Good intentions must be translated into action, and this requires determination and resolve. In the case of sports organizations, we ought to expect that they will take a close interest in matters such as, for example: Corporate Governance Ethics. Anti-Doping and Drugs Education. Participant Rehabilitation. Privacy and Data Protection issues. Justice and Human Rights. Fair Play and Equality of Opportunity. Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (especially age and disability issues). Equality and anti-Discrimination (class, race, ethnicity, religion and gender issues). Child Protection and Childrens Rights. Violence and Harm. Pain, Injury and Medical issues.

14

pp.45-47 in Hoffmann, W. M. (1994). What is necessary for corporate moral excellence? In J. Drummond, & B. Bain, Managing Business Ethics. London: Heinemann-Butterworth, pp. 39-54.

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The moral autonomy of the individual within the organization

One view of the excellent organization is that each person understands and accepts his or her role and status within the organization, works as a cog in the wheel, and contributes at his or her own level to the unified goal of the organization. But it is not necessarily true that an excellent organization leaves no space for individual thought and autonomy. Individuals cannot feel a sense of freedom and empowerment if they are not kept informed and consulted about developments, or if they feel themselves a tiny part of a massive organizational structure, or if they simply follow orders and instructions all the time. So successful organizations seek to provide ways in which individuals can see themselves as meaningful contributors by offering them opportunities to solve problems and initiate moral action in their own sphere, and by making corporate moral goals their own. Failure to do so is failure to recognize them as moral agents able to develop their own moral autonomy.15 Hoffmans conclusion is that moral culture provides the form and individual moral autonomy provides the content for the morally excellent corporation.16 This is precisely applicable to sports organizations, which must consider both dimensions.

The IOC Ethics Commission

The International Olympic Committee is an international organization that seeks to be an ethical organization. After all, it is not simply a profit-seeking company, but pursues ethical as well as other aims. As a direct result of criticism, the IOC set up an Ethics Commission in 1999, whose Terms of Reference were: 1. to develop, and update, a framework of ethical principles, including a Code of Ethics, based upon the values and principles enshrined in the Olympic Charter; 2. to develop and promote best practice in the application of the ethical principles and suggest concrete measures to this end; 3. to provide assistance, including advice, upon request by the IOC, to the cities wishing to organize the Olympic Games, in order that the ethical principles are applied in practice; 4. to help ensure compliance with the ethical principles in the policies and practices of the IOC, the cities wishing to organize the Olympic Games, the NOCs, the OCOGs and the participants within the framework of the Olympic Games; 5. to assess the extent to which the ethical principles are being reflected in practice; 6. to investigate complaints raised in relation to the non-respect of the ethical principles, including breaches of the Code of Ethics, and if necessary propose sanctions to the Executive Board; 7. to review guidelines within the IOC as to how they relate to the ethical principles, in particular the guidelines applicable to cities wishing to organize the Olympic Games, and to make comments and/or recommendations related thereto.

15

p.50 in Hoffmann, W. M. (1994). What is necessary for corporate moral excellence? In J. Drummond, & B. Bain, Managing Business Ethics. London: Heinemann-Butterworth, pp. 39-54. 16 p.52 in Hoffmann, W. M. (1994). What is necessary for corporate moral excellence? In J. Drummond, & B. Bain, Managing Business Ethics. London: Heinemann-Butterworth, pp. 39-54.

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The IOC Ethics Commission website (see the Crisis and Reform Chronology pages) makes it clear that the IOC sought to take steps to engage in an organizational re-think of the implications of the values in the Charter, and to ensure that those values were respected throughout the organization. This is a significant step forward, as it provides a benchmark for future assessments of IOC policy and practice, and of the actions of individual members. There is a close relationship between ethics, policy and action, inasmuch as policies and actions encapsulate and express ethical values. It is possible to read off working values from policies and actions and compare them with professed values. What the Olympic Movement means by its values should be written into its practices; and its sincerity may be interrogated through the reality of its practices. And we are all watching, judging and commenting which is just as it should be. Part of life in liberal communities is maintaining a critical awareness of the organizations we choose to support (and others, too). For our support is crucial. If the editor of a national newspaper makes an editorial mistake that upsets many of his readers, he will have to leave. If the Prime Minister disappoints his supporters in government, he will be replaced. If IOC members behave dishonestly, or against Olympic principles, they threaten the moral standing of the whole organization, and that is intolerable. Our duty in liberal society is to be aware, to take a critical interest, to learn to understand the issues, to express a point of view, to contribute to the formation of opinion and, where necessary, to press for action. This is the best way to protect the values we wish to promote, and to preserve the organizations that we hope will work for us. And that is why we are here. This is the work of the Olympic Academies, and of the Olympic Chair.

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Physical Education as Olympic Education

Introduction
As we have seen, the philosophy of Olympism carries with it ethical and political content but, above all, Olympism is an educational philosophy, emphasising the role of ethical sport in educational and social development. In an early paper 17, I argued that: the justification of PE activities lies in their capacity to facilitate the development of certain human excellences of a valued kind. Of course, the problem now lies in specifying those human excellences of a valued kind, and (for anyone) this task leads us into the area of philosophical anthropology. I suggested that the way forward for Physical Education lies in the philosophical anthropology (and the ethical ideals) of Olympism, which provide a specification of a variety of human values and excellences which: have been attractive to human groups over an impressive span of time and space; have contributed massively to our historically developed conceptions of ourselves; have helped to develop a range of artistic and cultural conceptions that have defined Western culture; have produced a range of physical activities that have been found universally satisfying and challenging. Although physical activities are widely considered to be pleasurable, their likelihood of gaining wide acceptance lies rather in their intrinsic value, which transcends the simply hedonic or relative good. Their ability to furnish us with pleasurable experiences depends upon our prior recognition in them of opportunities for the development and expression of valued human excellences. They are widely considered to be such opportunities for the expression of valued human excellences because, even when as local instantiations, their object is to challenge our common human propensities and abilities. I claimed that Olympic ideals may be seen not merely as inert ideals, but living ideas which have the power to remake our notions of sport in education, seeing sport not as mere physical activity but as the cultural and developmental activity of an aspiring, achieving, well-balanced, educated and ethical individual. This chapter seeks to make good that claim by trying to develop a case for Physical Education as Olympic Education. I begin by setting out various accounts and conceptions of the Olympic Idea; then I suggest a unifying and organising account of the philosophical anthropology of Olympism; and this is followed by the practical application of that account in two examples of current ethical issues. Finally, I seek to present an account of Physical Education as Olympic Education.

17

p.64 in Parry, J. (1998b). The Justification of Physical Education. In K. Green, & K. Hardman (eds), Physical Education - a Reader, Meyer & Meyer, pp. 36-68.

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The Olympic Idea

For most people, I suppose, the word Olympic will conjure up images of the Olympic Games, either ancient or modern. The focus of their interest will be a two-week festival of sport held once in every The Olympic Idea As we saw in the last chapter, de Coubertin, being a product of late nineteenth-century liberalism, emphasised the values of equality, fairness, justice, respect for persons, rationality and understanding, autonomy, and excellence. These are values some of which span nearly 3000 years of Olympic history, although they may be differently interpreted at different times. De Coubertin appreciated this point: But now Olympia ... has been rebuilt or rather renovated under forms which are different because modern, yet steeped in a kindred atmosphere.18 In its liberal context, Olympism celebrates the values of humanism, and the contribution of sport to the development and promotion of humanistic values. So the contemporary task for the Olympic Movement is to further this project: to try to see more clearly what its Games (and sport in wider society) might come to mean. This task will be both at the level of ideas and of action. If the practice of sport is to be pursued and developed according to Olympic values, the theory must strive for a conception of Olympism which will support that practice. And the theoretical ideal should seek to lead sport towards a vision of Olympism, which will help to deal with the challenges that are bound to emerge 19, since new sport forms and new attitudes towards sport as a social phenomenon may threaten the moral status of sport, and thus also threaten its educative potential.

Conceptions of Olympism revisited

I also suggested in the last chapter that the distinction between concepts and conceptions might be helpful in understanding how varying conceptions of Olympism have been advanced. (Compare, for example, the wide-ranging conceptions of democracy that have been advanced over the ages, and across continents and political ideologies.) So we should not be surprised that there should arise interesting discussions about the relation between ancient ideals and values, and those of modern revivalists 20; or between both of those and 21st century conceptions of Olympism. Since Olympism is a movement, we should not be surprised if and when it moves! Often we hear that there can be no such thing as Olympism, because the ideas composing it appear to change over time and place. But the mistake here lies in assuming that concepts only have meaning if they stand still and never change their content. (Imagine the differences between the democracies of ancient

18

p.16 in de Coubertin, P. (1906). Opening Address to the Conference of Arts, Letters and Sports. In Carl-DiemInstitut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de Coubertin Discourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 16-18. 19 This opening section draws on earlier versions, especially Parry, 1989; and 1994, pp. 181-182. 20 See, for example: Laemmer, M. (1987). The Ancient Olympic Games - a Clash of Ideologies. Proceedings of the 1st Italian Olympic Academy, Rome: CONI, pp 39-46. Segrave J.O., and Chu, O. (eds) (1988). Olympic Games in Transition, Leeds: Human Kinetics. Young, D. C. (1984). The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics. New York: Ares. Parry, J. (1988a). Olympism at the Beginning and End of the Twentieth Century. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 81-94).

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Greece, medieval Iceland, and present-day European nations. Of course there are differences - and of course this does not mean that they are not all democracies.) Similarly, present-day Olympism is not one church, with a set dogma to be parroted universally. There are different competing and collaborating conceptions of Olympism, with a rich diversity of interpretations and values on offer. So let me try to set out some of the many modern attempts that there have been to capture the meaning of Olympism, to try to give a flavour of the idea in all its complexity. I simply report others positions, in the main, but I also take the opportunity to comment on some of the themes, where it seems necessary or useful.

Contemporary Official Sources

We have already referred to the Olympic Charter 21, which states simply the nature and values of Olympism: fair play and equality; anti-discrimination and justice; education and culture; effort and excellence; friendship and solidarity; peace and international understanding; and multiculturalism. However, the former President of the IOC, J.A. Samaranche, appealed to six basic elements of Olympic ethics 22, which have some overlap with the above, but which also introduce new elements and omit some important ones: tolerance, generosity, solidarity, friendship, non-discrimination, respect for others. Later in the same editorial he says that the principles which inspire the Olympic Movement are based on justice, democracy, equality and tolerance - again, a significantly different set of values. And, some time around the turn of the century, a summary form was adopted by the IOC as 'the Olympic values' in the slogan Excellence, Friendship and Respect - which seems to me a weak and uninformative formulation. It catches something of value, but it seems to me to miss out most of what is important and unique about Olympism, including justice, equality, fair play, peace, education, and much more. Friendship, Excellence, Respect is a slogan that might be adopted by almost any organisation - by FIFA, or by a multinational company such as McDonald's, or Coca Cola. It is a dumbing-down of the mission of the IOC into a few platitudes. Why were just those three ideas chosen, rather than, say, Justice, Peace and Education - or Equality, Democracy and Multiculturalism? Clearly, the idea of Olympism has been interpreted in many different ways, and we shall now outline some further explorations and suggestions.

21 22

International Olympic Committee (2008). The Olympic Charter. Lausanne: IOC. p.3 in Samaranche, J.A. (1995). Olympic Ethics. Olympic Review, Feb-Mar, XXV-1, p. 3.

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Hans Lenk
Lenk 23 refers to over 30 Olympic aims and values dealt with in his book of the same title as the essay, including: values or religious-cultural import festive, artistic and spiritual planning of the Games creation of a sporting elite ideas relating to performance (competition, records, etc) equality of opportunity (the equal starting position) reference to the Greek idea of agonistic activity fair play the ancient idea of a truce, and the Olympic Movements peaceful mission making the Movement international and independent the desire to give the Games the character of the host country the value of amateurism sweeping aside all cultural, racial, national, religious and social barriers uniting all forms of sport on an equal footing at Olympia relating the ancient meaning of the Games to their modern form regulating sporting life by looking towards the Olympic Games periodically the beneficial effects of the example of Olympic competitors the incentive provided by the possibility of participating in the Games. However, since this list was in part derived from a questionnaire, it is not clear what status any of these suggestions might have - they may be nothing more than the subjective impressions and opinions of individual athletes, administrators, etc..

Ommo Grupe
Grupe 24 addresses de Coubertins pedagogical concept of Olympism which, he says, was based on five points: Unity of mind and body It is true that de Coubertin emphasised unity and harmony of mind and body - but he held a more differentiated view : ... there are not two parts to a man - body and soul: there are three - body, mind and character; character is not formed by the mind, but primarily by the body. The men of antiquity knew this, and we are painfully relearning it. 25

23

p.206 in Lenk, H. (1964). Values, Aims, Reality of the Modern Olympic Games. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 204-211. 24 Grupes title is in quotation marks because it was taken (without attribution) from a letter of de Coubertins (1918c, Letter IV, p55): Olympism is not a system; it is a state of mind. Grupe, O. (1997). Olympism is Not a System, it is a State of Mind. Olympic Review, Feb/Mar, XXV, pp. 63-65. 25 de Coubertin, P. (1894b). Athletics in the Modern World and the Olympic Games . In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 710.

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And later: 26 I prefer to harness a foursome and to distinguish not only body and soul, ... but muscles, intelligence, character and conscience. This is important, showing not only a concern for the whole person, but also for the relation between sport and moral education, and the role of properly designed physical activity in character development. De Coubertin often made the point that Olympism seeks to promote moral sport and moral education through sport. Referring to the UK school reforms of 1840, he says: 27 In these reforms physical games and sports hold, we may say, the most prominent place: the muscles are made to do the work of a moral educator. It is the application to modern requirements of one of the most characteristic principles of Greek civilisation: to make the muscles the chief factor in the work of moral education. However, we should notice that de Coubertin's ideas of the whole person do not have a deep philosophical basis, being based in a simple dualism, and need to be rethought and reformulated, in order to be a proper basis for further ideas (as attempted, for example, in Martinkova, 2007)28 2. Self-improvement (developing ones abilities) This is a motif often found in de Coubertin's works - effort leading to excellence. However, Hans Lenk had already pointed out that the Olympic motto citius, altius, fortius (swifter, higher, stronger) may lead us astray, given the dangers for humaneness of the constant striving for records, and the attendant dangers of cheating, political exploitation and commercialism 29. Such self-improvement should be seen as one-dimensional, and therefore inconsistent with Olympic holism. Grupe also warns of todays dangers, and asserts that we need a new definition and a new legitimacy. On his account, Olympism today is about a wider conception of self-improvement - through education, selffulfilment and effort - in the wider context of fairness, peace, toleration, anti-discrimination, and sport for all. 3. Amateurism - with its connotations of nobility and chivalry It is true that de Coubertin held to a certain concept of amateurism, relating to out motives for engaging in sport.30 However, de Coubertin was critical of the kind of social inequality sometimes reinforced by assumptions and practices related to class privilege in discussions of the value of amateurism.

26

de Coubertin, P. (1918b). Olympic Letters III, 26 Oct 1918. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, p. 54. 27 p.11 in de Coubertin, P. (1896). The Olympic Games of 1896. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 10-14. 28 Martinkova, I. (2004). Harmony of the Human Being. In Macura, Duan & Hosta, Milan (Eds.). Philosophy of Sport and Other Essays. Ljubljana: Faculty of Sport, University of Ljubljana & Eleventh Academy, 2004, p. 235238. 29 Grupe tells us that Lenk had added humanius - but actually, at this reference, Lenk also includes pulchrius (more beautiful) to correspond to the five Olympic rings (1982b, p.228). 30 th Martinkova, I. (2007). The Ethics of Human Performance. In 7 International Session for Educators and Officials of Higher Institutes of Physical Education 20-27 July 2006. Proceedings. Ancient Olympia: International Olympic Academy and International Olympic Committee, 2007, pp. 48-57.

33

For example, he fulminates against the English of England, and on their heels the English of the Dominions, alleging against them: A good sports club in their eyes continues to be a club in which the members are gentlemen on the same level. That was the first condition. They have not succeeded in freeing themselves from it. That is why, in rowing for example, they formerly declared every manual worker a professional. The university rowers wished to preserve in this way the aristocratic hall-mark of their favourite sport. It took a long time to put an end in theory to such medieval legislation. When it will disappear in practice no-one knows. 31 De Coubertin certainly looked favourably upon medieval notions of chivalry, though, suggesting that such an ideology of honour pre-figured modern notions of fair play. So popular were tournaments and some folk games that the Church had to tolerate them for some time: It is certain that the sporting spirit could easily have developed in Europe in the Middle Ages. But feudalism repressed it, and as soon as the Church became detached from Chivalry it returned to its distrust of physical culture, in which it appeared to descry a dangerous forerunner of free thought. 32 The final two elements discerned by Grupe are discussed in detail elsewhere - Fairness, and fair play in Chapter 3; and Peace, shortly below.

Pierre de Coubertin
Now let us remind ourselves of the considered ideas of the founder of the modern Olympic Movement, Pierre de Coubertin. His mature article The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Olympism 33 clarifies the idea of Olympism. It is: A religion of sport (the religio athletae). I was right to create from the outset, around the renewed Olympism, a religious sentiment (transformed and widened by Internationalism, Democracy and Science)... This is the origin of all the rites which go to make the ceremonies of the modern Games. 34 Roesch, however, argues that this is to misunderstand the nature of the religious life: Religious life and cultic expressions take part in other forms and contents, such as gesture, attitude, ritual dance, prayer, speech and rites. The individual athlete, no matter what his religion, denomination or ideology, lives and acts, according to his religious conviction as a Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Jew and so on ... Olympism cant take the place of that. 35

31

p.94 in de Coubertin, P. (1924). Amateurism at the Prague Congress. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 93-95. 32 p.46 in de Coubertin, P. (1918a). What We Can Now Ask of Sport. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 43-51. 33 de Coubertin, P. (1935). The Philosophic Foundations of Modern Olympism. . In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 130134. 34 p.131 in de Coubertin, P. (1935). The Philosophic Foundations of Modern Olympism. . In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 130-134. 35 p.199 in Roesch, H.-E. (1979). Olympism and Religion. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 192-205.

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Roesch 36 calls the ritual elements of Olympism consciously created by de Coubertin pseudo-cultic expressions, and he proposes four central values of Olympism, which seem to be entirely secular: freedom, fairness, friendship, peace. This insistence on the secular nature of Olympic values seems to me entirely correct; but Roesch creates his contrast only by failing to take account of what de Coubertin means by religion, and of what he repeatedly says about the religio athletae.37 Again, the core of de Coubertins concern here is the moral value of sport. An aristocracy, an elite (but egalitarian and meritocratic) This is a source of some difficulty for de Coubertin. On the one hand, he wanted to insist that sport was a meritocratic equaliser, in which the winners were the product of a transparently equal contest, which bestowed upon them the status of 'natural' aristocracy of talent, ability and merit. On the other hand, the structures of the IOC were based on another kind of aristocracy, which persists to this day. The IOC is an appointed group, not a democratically elected group; and a large fraction of its members are social aristocrats (whether or not they are sporting aristocrats, too). Truce (the temporary cessation of quarrels, disputes and misunderstandings) and Peace, promoted by mutual respect based on mutual understanding. Truce was the basis of the ancient Olympic Games. The Greek Empire, which meant most of the known world at the time, was united in language, religion and ethics and yet there was constant warfare amongst the different races and cities. It became necessary, then, to institute the 'ekecheiria', or truce, which guaranteed to all Greeks a meeting at a neutral religious site and competition under conditions of fairness, with justly administered rules. Modern Olympism claims to further peace and international understanding, and it draws on the authority of such an alleged classical model. During the ancient Games, it is said, there was a general laying-down of arms all over Greece. However, some writers have objected that this constitutes not peace, but only truce 38. Furthermore, we should notice that the concept of truce is logically dependant on that of war, or conflict, since a truce is something that happens between hostilities, not instead of them. In ancient times, truce did not put an end to war - it simply ensured that the Games took place even if there was war. However, we could argue that Olympia, with its mystic ceremonies, suspension of hostilities and gatherings of thousands on neutral territory, actually helped to neutralised political discord and led to the development of a common consciousness linking all Greek tribes 39. In the same way, it might be thought, the modern Olympic Games might stand as an example of global interaction and intercommunication that might lead to a common consciousness based on ideas of peace and

36

p.201 in Roesch, H.-E. (1979). Olympism and Religion. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 192-205. 37 This is such an important theme, with consequences for the development of a morally educative sport, that it deserves separate consideration; and I intend to address it elsewhere. 38 p.16 in Lmmer, M. (1982). The Peace Philosophy of the Olympic Movement: a historical perspective (Stadion, 1982, vol 2, pp.13-19) 39 th p.210 in Palaeologis, C. (1965). The Institution of the Truce in the Ancient Olympic Games. Report of the 5 Session of the International Olympic Academy, pp. 203-210.

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internationalism. De Coubertin wanted to harness and extend these ideas to a modern concern with world peace, which Samaranche would later ally to the central mission of the United Nations, and the IOC would develop into the International Olympic Truce Foundation. Rhythm (the Olympiad) The origins of the Games are shrouded in myth and historical construal. But let us simply record Gardiners conclusions: The Olympic festival was a festival of lustration (purification) marking the beginning and afterwards the middle point of a Great Year of eight years. It was a festival of Zeus, the predominant god of the district ... His festival was a cessation from arms; ... Games were held at which only free-born warriors of the tribes might compete. The season of the festival was early autumn, a season of rest from agricultural work ... 40 So, the Olympic calendar followed a rhythmic pattern dictated by astronomical observations and the cycle of seasons, celebrating the most significant points in the rhythm. This accounts for the fouryearly cycle of the Olympic Games, which seems to add to its significance amongst those very many annually-recurring competitions and events. The Young Adult Male Individual De Coubertin held what now seem to have been very reactionary attitudes towards women's participation in sport, and especially in the Olympic Games. It follows from what I have said that the true Olympic hero is in my view the adult male individual,41 who alone should be able to enter the Altis, or sacred enclosure. This means that team games will be at best secondary, taking place outside the modern Altis (... fittingly honoured, but in the second rank.). It also means that women could also take part here if it is judged necessary, although de Coubertin himself thought that they had no place even in the second rank. He says: I personally do not approve of the participation of women in public competitions, which is not to say that they must abstain from practising a great number of sports, provided they do not make a public spectacle of themselves. In the Olympic Games, as in the contests of former times, their primary role should be to crown the victors. 41 He is at least consistent on this: As to the admission of women to the Games, I remain strongly against it. It was against my will that they were admitted to a growing number of competitions. 42 And even towards the end of his life: I still think that contact with feminine athletics is bad for him (the modern athlete) and that these athletics should be excluded from the Olympic programme. 43

40 41

p.76 in Gardiner, N. E. (1925). Athletics of the Ancient World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p.133 in de Coubertin, P. (1935). The Philosophic Foundations of Modern Olympism. . In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 130-134. 42 th p. 106 in de Coubertin, P. (1928). Message .. to the athletes .. of the IX Olympiad. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 105-106.

36

There are very important corollaries of this kind of statement. For example, those who simply disparage the Muslim doctrine of separate but equal development should notice the echoes of that view in de Coubertins work, in the practice of the Ancient Olympics, and in the educational ideology of single-sex schooling throughout Europe. And those who, on other issues, call upon the authority of the thought of de Coubertin or of ancient practices to support their views, should notice that such authority does not necessarily derive from justifiable principle, and does not necessarily support their other views. Beauty - artistic and literary creation De Coubertin sought to create a relationship between sport and culture, and promoted early versions of what we would now call the Cultural Olympiad, as well as competitions in the arts, including poetry, painting and architecture. This interest also resulted in such developments as the opening, closing and medal ceremonies, the torch relay, and intellectual manifestations organised around the Games, so as to promote civilisation, truth, and human dignity, as well as ... international relations. 44 Participation and competition. de Coubertin, said in London at the close of the 1908 Games: Last Sunday, in the course of the ceremony organised at St Pauls in honour of the athletes, the bishop of Pennsylvania recalled this in felicitous words: the important thing in these Olympiads (sic) 45 is less to win than to take part in them. ... Gentlemen, let us bear this potent word in mind. It extends across every domain to form the basis of a serene and healthy philosophy. The important thing in life is not victory but struggle; the essential is not to have won but to have fought well. 46 In saying this, de Coubertin gave credit to the bishop for a sentiment that was often on his own lips. Fourteen years earlier he is quoted as exhorting an audience at the Parnassus Club in Athens to support the revival of the Games, and: ... not to let their enthusiasm be cooled by the thought that they might be beaten by strangers. Dishonour, he said, would not lie in defeat, but in failure to take part. 47

43

p.129 in de Coubertin, P. (1934). Forty Years of Olympism (1894/1934). In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 126130. 44 pp.133-134 in de Coubertin, P. (1935). The Philosophic Foundations of Modern Olympism. . In Carl-DiemInstitut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 130-134. 45 We are working at second and third hand here, but if this is an accurate record of de Coubertins report of the bishops words, then one of them has failed to heed de Coubertins warning against confusing an Olympiad with its Games (see the second paragraph of the second section of this paper). 46 pp.19-20 in de Coubertin, P. (1908). The Trustees of the Olympic Idea. In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 18-20. 47 p.10 in de Coubertin, P. (1894b). Athletics in the Modern World and the Olympic Games . In Carl-DiemInstitut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 7-10.

37

Avery Brundage
Just to show how things change over a very short period of time, consider the views expressed by the former President of the IOC, Avery Brundage, in terms that remained fairly standard (although under threat) into the 1980s:48 The first and most important of these rules, for good reasons, was that the Games must be amateur. They are not a commercial enterprise and no one, promoters, managers, coaches, participants, individuals or nations, is permitted to use them for profit.49 The Olympic Games were revived by the Baron de Coubertin, Brundage says, to:50 bring to the attention of the world the fact that a national program of physical training and competitive sport will not only develop stronger and healthier boys and girls but also, and perhaps more important, will make better citizens through the character building that follows participation in properly administered amateur sport; demonstrate the principles of fair play and good sportsmanship, which could be adopted with great advantage in many other spheres of activity; stimulate interest in the fine arts through exhibitions and demonstrations, and thus contribute to a broader and more well rounded life; teach that sport is play for fun and enjoyment and not to make money, and that with devotion to the task at hand the reward will take care of itself; the philosophy of amateurism as contrasted to that of materialism; create international amity and good will, thus leading to a happier and more peaceful world.

48

p.30 in Brundage, A. (1963). The Olympic Philosophy. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 29-39. 49 This sounds a very strange sentence these days! But Brundages obsessive anti -commercialism was rigorously applied, especially in the case of the individual athlete, and drew the sobriquets Slavery Avery and Bondage Brundage. 50 p.39 in Brundage, A. (1963). The Olympic Philosophy. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 29-39.

38

The Philosophical Anthropology of Olympism

What are we to make of this bewildering welter of ideas, offered by various writers as values, aims, goals or principles of Olympism, the Olympic Movement or the Olympic Games? The ideas so far presented are highly suggestive, but they are not systematic or coherent, and I have been able to discuss only a fraction of them, and only at a relatively superficial level. We need to try to find a way to organise our thoughts in relation to all these ideas in order, if possible, to pull them together into a framework that renders some version of them systematic and coherent. Let us return to the idea of Olympism as a social, political and educational philosophy. Any such philosophy necessarily appeals to a philosophical anthropology - an idealised conception of the human being towards which the ideology strives in its attempted social reproduction of the individual. Social anthropology is the investigation of whole cultures, which are preferably, from the point of view of the researcher, quite alien to the researchers own society 51. A social anthropologist investigates the living instantiations of human nature - the quite different kinds of human nature that are to be found around the world - practically, scientifically, through observation and social scientific methodology. A philosophical anthropologist, however, tries to create a theory about human nature by thinking about the human being at the most general level. Hoberman 52 writes about the differing political conceptions of sport, but finds it necessary to refer to several levels of explanation and theorising: (Different societies) ... have distinct political anthropologies or idealised models of the exemplary citizen which constitute complex answers to the fundamental question of philosophical anthropology: What is a human being? He quotes John F Kennedy as a representative of centrist neo-Hellenism: ... the same civilisation which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of Western tradition; from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe. 53 54 In order to try to fill out just what were the ideas that have been handed down from classical times, to be reinterpreted and re-specified (by de Coubertin and others) we need to examine more carefully two central ideas.

51

This raises the interesting question of just what the differences are between sociology and social anthropology. For starters, anyway, it seems that, if Im British and I investigate Britain, Im called a sociologist but if Im British and investigate a group of people whose lives, language, culture and ideas are foreign to me Im called a social anthropologist. 52 p.2 in Hoberman, J. (1984). Sport and Political Ideology. London: Heinemann. 53 This point is given classical reference by de Coubertin (1918a, p44): Now if many centuries later ... an English general was able to say that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton, how much more accurate still is it to proclaim that the glory of Marathon and Salamis was forged in the precincts of the Greek gymnasium. 54 p.21 in Hoberman, J. (1984). Sport and Political Ideology. London: Heinemann.

39

The Ideas of Kalos Kagathos and Arete

Lenk says: Many representatives of the Olympic movement combine these values together to form a picture of the human being harmoniously balanced intellectually and physically in the sense of the Greek kalos kagathos. 55 This is also a theme in Nissiotis : ... the Olympic Ideal is what qualifies sport exercise in general as a means for educating the whole man as a conscious citizen of the world ... The Olympic Idea is that exemplary principle which expresses the deeper essence of sport as an authentic educative process through a continuous struggle to create healthy and virtuous man in the highest possible way (kalos kagathos) in the image of the Olympic winner and athlete. 56 Eyler pursues the meaning of the Olympic virtue of excellence in performance and in character, through Homer, early philosophers, Pindar and Pausanias. He concludes: In summary, arete has several meanings - distinction, duty (primarily to oneself), excellence, fame, glorious deeds, goodness, greatness, heroism ... valour and virtue. Some of the many implications of these meanings contextually are: man is born, grows old, and dies; performance is not without risks; winning is all; man achieves by his own skills ... human performance is the quintessence of life; and finally, man is the measure of all things and the responsible agent. 57 He quotes Kitto: ... what moves a Greek warrior to heroism is not a sense of duty as we understand it, i.e. duty towards others, it is rather a duty towards oneself. He strives after that which we translate virtue or excellence, the Greek arete (The Right Stuff). 58 Lenk emphasises the centrality of the ideas of action and achievement: The Olympic athlete thus illustrates the Herculean myth of culturally exceptional achievement, i.e. of action essentially unnecessary for lifes sustenance that is nevertheless highly valued and arises from complete devotion to striving to attain a difficult goal. 59 Paleologos echoes the mythical origins of the Ancient Games in the deeds of one of the great heroes of antiquity, Hercules: With the twelve labours depicted by the bas-reliefs on the two metopes of the Temple (of Zeus), the world is presented with the content of the moral teachings which Olympia intended with the Games. 60

55

p.206 in Lenk, H. (1964). Values, Aims, Reality of the Modern Olympic Games. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 204-211. 56 p.64 in Nissiotis, N. (1984). Olympism and Todays Reality. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 57-74. 57 p.165 in Eyler, M.H. (1981). The Right Stuff. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 159-168. 58 p.166 in Kitto, H. (1951). The Greeks. Harmondswoth: Penguin. 59 p.166 in Lenk, H. (1982a). Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of the Olympic Athlete. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 163-177.

40

The idea is that the sculptures of the demi-God Hercules in Olympia performed a morally educative function, standing as role models, especially for the athletes who were there to train for the Games, of physical, moral and intellectual virtue: ... Hercules is shown bearded, with beautiful features, ... a well-trained body, fine, proportioned muscles, ... as a representative of the kalos kagathos type, where the body is well-formed and harmonious, the expression of a beautiful soul, and the face radiates intelligence, kindness and integrity. 61 Nissiotis concludes: The Olympic Idea is thus a permanent invitation to all sportsmen to transcend ... their own physical and intellectual limits ... for the sake of a continuously higher achievement in the physical, ethical and intellectual struggle of a human being towards perfection. 62 So: a philosophical anthropology is an idealised conception of the human, and the Olympic Idea translates into a few simple phrases which capture the essence of what an ideal human being ought to be and to aspire to. From the above, and drawing on conceptions of Olympism presented in the previous section, I think we might try to work towards a consistent and coherent synthesis of the ideas presented there, and suggest that the philosophical anthropology of Olympism promotes the ideals of: individual all round harmonious human development; towards excellence and achievement; through effort in competitive sporting activity; under conditions of mutual respect, fairness, justice and equality; with a view to creating lasting personal human relationships of friendship; international relationships of peace, toleration and understanding; and cultural alliances with the arts.

Thats the general idea - the philosophical anthropology of Olympism directs us to a conception of a human being who embodies these ideals and values.

60

p.63 in Paleologos, K. (1982). Hercules, the Ideal Olympic Personality. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 54-71. 61 p.67 in Paleologos, K. (1982). Hercules, the Ideal Olympic Personality. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 54-71. 62 p.66 in Nissiotis, N. (1984). Olympism and Todays Reality. Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy, Ancient Olympia, Greece, pp. 57-74.

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Ethical Applications
Now we must ask ourselves: just how does that relate to ethical aspects of participation in sport? There are two ways of applying this kind of approach: First, when we try to state the philosophical anthropology of Olympism - when we attempt to describe what the ideal conception of the human being is from the Olympic perspective - that statement itself will straight away throw up ethical principles. The specification will already be packed with ethical indicators. For example, consider the value of respect for persons. If we are interested in individual development we are obviously interested in individuals - which raises some interesting questions about team games, but we may discuss that later. If we have a concern for someones educational development it is very difficult to express such a concern without respecting them and their rights. So already such a philosophical anthropology draws with it certain values and commits us to doing certain things in practice. Another value is one which we might call equality, or fairness, or justice; and it draws with it other subsidiary values. Anti-discrimination is one; and three examples are race, class and gender. If we seriously believe in fair play, if we seriously think that the athlete is a person who ought fully to understand and respect the conventions of fair play, it seems to follow that we have to take a stand on equality (racial, political, gender) and support equal opportunity and equal consideration initiatives in sport. The second way of applying this kind of approach is to notice that, if we have decided to which ethical principles we ought to be committed if we subscribe to the philosophical anthropology of Olympism, we are not out of the woods yet! For it still remains to be argued which principles are to be applied in what way to particular examples in ethical dispute. That is to say, there is still plenty of work for applied ethical argument to do here. How might all this be beneficially worked out in practice?

Is it permissible or wrong to take drugs in sport?

A knee-jerk reaction is to say: drugs are wrong and should be banned, so we should set up an apparatus to police such a ban, and pursue, prosecute and punish offenders. Now, perhaps this is the right thing to do; but I am asking that we should examine the values that underlie that conclusion, in order to establish whether they cohere with other values to which we claim to be committed. Does it, for example, respect the individual autonomy of the athlete to take decisions for him/herself? The method here is to work back to the ethical aspects of the philosophical anthropology. If we really believe in that philosophical anthropology and in the values that it throws up, then we should seek to see them applied in practice. And if we are not going to support their practical application, then there ought to be a large question raised as to whether we fully believe in them. Here we see a punitive authoritarian response to an issue and not an educative response - so we have to ask how this can be squared with an interest in was educational development? I would rather appeal to drug users to consider the values within Olympism, and to try to square them with drug taking. I would want to ask someone who is taking drugs, is it fair to other

42

competitors? If the answer is no, then that might be why drug taking is wrong. Or I might say that taking drugs makes one an instrumentalist - a self-instrumentalist - in using ones own body as an instrument to success. If we are sincerely interested in human values such as respect for persons (which includes not using persons as a means to ends; but seeing them as ends in themselves) then it seems wrong for them to be used (even by themselves) as an instrument. Now, it may well appear to be naively idealistic to rely on education to solve all our problems (eventually); for in the meantime cheats may prosper. The point, though, is not that an educational approach denies to us an interim punitive option - but rather that any approach to the problem which does not include as primary an educational element will not serve the interests of sport as Olympism sees it. This is precisely what was defective in the approach of the UK Sports Council's early materials for athletes, which relied mainly on poorly evidenced (and therefore risible) death warnings, and threats of punitive action. However, appeals to ethical principles, and to ethical reasoning, cut both ways. If an appeal to an ethical principle is allowed in the case of doping, it must also be allowed in considering other aspects of sports ethics, if we are to be consistent. The Natural Athlete - the Track versus the Laboratory For example, some say that what is wrong with drug-taking is that it removes competition from the track to the laboratory. But, if we are to be consistent, we should note that the development of sports science in general promotes competition between physiology, psychology and biomechanics labs as support services for training. If we are so worried about removing the competition from the track to the lab, maybe we should look again at the ethical status of sport science support more generally. Unfair Advantage or Inequality of Opportunity Others say that what is wrong with drug-taking is that it confers an unfair advantage. Notice that noone can (sincerely) make this objection to drug-taking unless he is sincere in his commitment to sport as embodying fairness, and as disallowing unfair advantages as being against the idea of sport. But many of those who hold this objection against drug-taking seem perfectly prepared to allow various kinds of very obviously unfair advantages, such as those enjoyed by rich countries. Rule-Breaking, or Cheating Others say that drug-taking is wrong simply because it is against the rules of competition. But pacemaking is against the rules of the IAAF, although it is allowed so as to facilitate record-breaking attempts in the commercial promotion of media spectacle, and no-one is disqualified. In fact, runners can earn large fees for performing this service. Conclusion So the drugs debate has made critics stand on ethical principle. But for those principles actually to count as principles, they ought merely not be used opportunistically over the drugs issue, but rather ought they to be acted upon consistently in the interests of truly fair competition and equality of opportunity. The drugs debate, then, could be genuinely educational, if it re-opens the debate about the ethical basis of sport, so that our sports practice (and the sports science and training theory that support it) becomes rooted in firm principles that encapsulate what we think sport should be. We shall revisit these issues in greater detail in Chapter 3.

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Equality?
If we really do believe in equality, that belief commits us also to anti-discrimination. People should be treated equally unless there is a good reason why not. But if we really do believe in antidiscrimination then we should be keen to see the idea applied in practice. On the race issue in South Africa, it was quite clear that there was racial discrimination - the Group Areas Act was quite explicitly a racially divisive act, whose intention was to reserve certain privileged conditions (including those in the field of sport) for those of a certain race. If our professed commitments are against that kind of thing, then we have to oppose it in practice. If it is so blatant, then we have to oppose it bluntly, and to the credit of the IOC that is what its members did. They didnt say: We dont like your politics and we dont play with people whose politics we dont like. (For if we all said that no-one would play with anyone!) They said instead: We cant play sport with people who dont play sport properly; and you cant play sport properly unless you have equality of opportunity and equality of consideration. A related example: why is it then that in the case of those countries who do not permit their women to participate at all, the IOC permits their men to participate in the Olympic Games? If we really believe in Olympism as philosophical anthropology and the values it generates of equality, justice, fairness to all, we do not appear to have a very good answer at present. This is a very thorny issue for the IOC and its President. It brings up the difficult matter of the definition of equality; and of contesting approaches to equality of opportunity and consideration. I have here the space merely to raise these questions, not to discuss them: What is wrong with separate development? What is wrong with promoting the equal development of womens sport whilst not allowing men to compete alongside them, in the same meetings and events? Another example: social class. If we are really committed to equality and fairness then we shall seek to eradicate distinctions on the basis of social class that have consequences for equal participation; and in my view that is what the amateurism debate was all about. It was about an historically generated class-based idea of who should be allowed participate at what. Years ago, only officers and not those in other ranks could participate in Olympic equestrian events. In order to overcome this rule, certain National Olympic Committees promoted team members to officer status for the period of the Games and then demoted them afterwards! The idea, I suppose, was that such inequalities should not have been permitted in practice, and deserved to be subverted. I do not say that I agree with this route to principle, since it involves the compromising of another principle - not to flout the rules - but the example makes the point.

44

Overview
In the above, I am seeking to recommend routes and strategies towards consistency in our principles, values, approaches and practices; and I have tried to suggest ways of thinking: either beginning from our basic values and trying to work them through to the conclusion; or beginning with an intuitive conclusion and working all the way back to our principles, in order to see whether and how the one resonates with the other. In other words: we can ask whether and how a particular practice exemplifies the principles that we can discover in Olympism; or we can ask ourselves how would a person who is committed to Olympic principles approach a particular ethical issue like drug taking or anti-discrimination. These are powerful ways of interrogating both our principles and our intuitions for their practical adequacy - just the kind of activity that qualifies as 'educational', if we value the development of critical reasoning and informed understanding as a basis for decision-making. I have tried to present an account of the Olympic Idea, and some examples of ethical aspects of the Olympic Movement. More importantly, though, I have tried to suggest, with examples, a systematic method of arriving at principled judgements about ethical matters through the values of Olympism. Our answers to our ethical dilemmas must resonate with some previously established set of values in this case relating to the philosophical anthropological nature of Olympism. We should be trying to make an argumentative relationship, a reasoned relationship, between principles, values and practical outcomes. There is no guarantee that even people who agree at the level of principle will agree on particular practical applications, since there are so many other variables. But at least we should be able to assess, from the various arguments, who has made a proper and consistent appeal to his own principles, which is at least an aid to clarity, and which might lead to the elucidation of moral issues.

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Practices, Virtues and Physical Education as Olympic Education

So far I have tried to show how philosophical anthropology, ethical principle and ethical practice can and should cohere. Now it remains for me to indicate how this might translate into the educational situation. At this point, let us remind ourselves of a thought of de Coubertins, quoted above: ... character is not formed by the mind, but primarily by the body. The men of antiquity knew this, and we are painfully relearning it.63 I said some time ago: Games are laboratories for value experiments. Students are put in the position of having to act, time and time again, sometimes in haste, under pressure or provocation, either to prevent something or to achieve something, under a structure of rules. The settled dispositions which it is claimed emerge from such a crucible of value-related behaviour are those which were consciously cultivated through games in the public schools in the last century. 64 and, a little later, that we should: ... seek to develop an account of culture and human experience which gives due weight to those forms of athletic, outdoor, sporting, aesthetic activities which focus on bodily performance, and which are generally grouped under the heading of physical education. Such an account, combining claims about human capacities and excellences with claims about the importance of a range of cultural forms, would seek to develop arguments which could justify the place of Physical Education on the curriculum ... 65 The suggestion here is that Physical Education activities should be seen as practices which act as a context for the development of human excellences and virtues, and the cultivation of those qualities of character which dispose one to act virtuously. In an oft-quoted passage66, MacIntyre describes a practice as: Any coherent and complex socially established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended. 67

63

de Coubertin, P. (1894b). Athletics in the Modern World and the Olympic Games . In Carl-Diem-Institut (Ed.), The Olympic Idea: Pierre de CoubertinDiscourses and Essays. Stuttgart: Olympischer Sportverlag, 1966, pp. 710. 64 pp.144-145 in Parry, J. (1986). Values in Physical Education. In Tomlinson, P., and Quinton, M. (eds). Values Across the Curriculum, Falmer Press, pp 134-157. 65 p.117 in Parry, J. (1988b). Physical Education, Justification and the National Curriculum. Physical Education Review 11, 2, pp 106-118. 66 See, e.g., p. 44 in Steenbergen, J., & Tamboer, J. (1998). Ethics and the Double Character of Sport. In McNamee, M., & Parry, J. (eds), Ethics and Sport. London: Routledge/Spon, pp. 35-53. 67 p.194 in MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. London: Duckworth.

46

Carr has applied the insights of MacIntyre and Gadamer to education:68 What is an educational practice? The answer I have tried to provide is one which is firmly grounded in those developments in post-analytic philosophy which seek to re-establish the classical concept of practice in the modern world. 69 Hirst, too, has picked up the theme: It is those practices that can constitute a flourishing life that I now consider fundamental to education. 70 and he goes on to suggest that a curriculum should be organised in terms of significant practices. However, just which practices constitute a flourishing life, or just which practices are to be deemed significant, remains opaque in his account. This paper has been an attempt to sketch out some considerations in favour of sport as a significant practice. Practices, then, promote those human excellences and values that constitute a flourishing life. But, more than that, practices are the very sites of development of those dispositions and virtues, for it is within practices that opportunities arise for (e.g.) moral education, including the nurturing and development of virtues. It is by participating in a practice (and by practising its skills and procedures) that one begins to understand its standards and excellences, and the virtues required for successful participation. As Piers Benn puts it:71 ... we do not become virtuous ... by learning rules ... We gain virtue, and hence learn to make right decisions, by cultivating certain dispositions ... ... we can see the importance of the education of character - the acquisition of these firm dispositions ... this does not come naturally but must be taught. ... there is some similarity between acquiring virtue and acquiring skills such as the mastery of a musical instrument; both require practice before the appropriate habits are acquired. You get the dispositions by first of all acting as if you had them - you train yourself to do the right things, and gradually you gain a standing disposition to do them.

68

Similarly, Arnold has outlined a practice view of sport from a MacIntyrean perspective (1992, pp. 237 -240); and the idea of sporting practices has been developed in McNamee, M. (1995). Sporting Practices, Institutions and Virtues. Journal of Philosophy of Sport, 22, pp. 61-82. 69 p.173 in Carr, W. (1987) What is an educational practice? Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, 2, pp. 163175. 70 p.6 in Hirst, .P. (1992). Education, Knowledge and Practices. Papers of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, April 26-28. 71 pp. 176-168 in Benn, P. (1998). Ethics. London: UCL Press.

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I would like to conclude by suggesting that the practice of sport, informed by the philosophical anthropology of Olympism, offers a context and a route for PE teachers to achieve a number of important aims relating to moral education: 1. to further their traditional concern for the whole person whilst working at the levels both of activity and of ideas (because the practical work can be seen as a kind of laboratory for value experiments); 2. to show coherence between approaches to practical and theoretical work (because the physical activity is designed as an example and exemplar of the ideas in practice); 3. to explore in upper years ideas implicit in work in lower years (because the practical work encapsulating the values and ideas can be taught well before the children are old enough to grasp the full intellectual content of the ideas). Of course, still to be worked out in detail is an Olympic pedagogy, since we still stand in need of a specification of ways in which the above considerations will impact upon the actual content and procedures of the educational process. However, confident in our ability to specify and achieve success in such working practices, I would wish to commend to teachers and coaches the principles of Olympism not just not just as historical anachronisms or moralising dogmas, nor as inert ideas to be passed on unthinkingly to students and athletes, but as living ideas which have the power to remake our notions of sport in education, seeing sport not as mere physical activity but as the purposeful physical activity of an educated and ethical individual, aiming at the cultivation of virtuous dispositions.

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Heroes and Villains: Doped Athletes and their Impact on Society and Education
Olympism
As we saw in earlier chapters, the core values of Olympism, as expressed in the Olympic Charter 72, might be summarised as: fair play and equality; anti-discrimination and justice; education and culture; effort and excellence; and friendship, solidarity and multiculturalism. And we saw that de Coubertin emphasised the core values of liberalism: equality, fairness, justice, respect for persons, rationality and understanding, autonomy, and excellence. Furthermore, we identified the key contemporary task of the Olympic Movement as the development of Olympism - to try to see more clearly what its Games (and sport in wider society) might come to mean. This task will be both at the level of ideas and of action. If the practice of sport is to be pursued and developed according to Olympic values, the theory must strive for a theoretical conception of Olympism which will support that practice. And that ideal should seek both to sustain sports practice and to lead sport towards a vision of Olympism which will help to deal with the challenges which are bound to emerge. This chapter will explore the important contribution to good practice that can be made by Olympians acting as role models for ethical sport.

Sport and Universalism

We live in a world of universalizing tendencies, where the economic and political forces of globalization meet the ethical and cultural imperatives generated by our need to co-exist in a shrinking and increasingly inter-connected global society. And sport is not immune to these tendencies. Rather, in the experience of many millions of people, it is a prominent example of them, graphically illustrating them in the processes of global dissemination and participation, commercialization, sponsorship, athlete migration, equipment production and distribution, media/sport symbiosis, politics/sport relations, and increasing rules clarification together with their progressively universal interpretation and application. Through our participation in (or consumption of) sport, such widespread tendencies and processes are rendered visible and potentially intelligible. Critics have often noted the conservative effect of sports in their naturalizing of human capacities and relations ( of course men and women are not equal - look at their relative performances in tennis or athletics ). But I suggest that this effect need not be conservative. It is also possible for radical restatements of capacities and reconceptualizations of human relations to be naturalized through sport. One example is the current re-examination of racism in Europe sparked by the racist chanting of football spectators in the European Champions Cup. European football (especially English football) is now so thoroughly international and interracial that it foregrounds the unacceptability of racism in society in a way unthinkable even 20 years ago. Sport leads the way in exhibiting universal ethics, and our sporting heroes are its vehicle. Of course, these same heroes are more often castigated as villains for their departures from ethical behaviour

72

International Olympic Committee (2008). The Olympic Charter. Lausanne: IOC.

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off the pitch or for their bad conduct on it, but these very judgements themselves reveal the ethical standards to which we (all) appeal in making them. For better or worse, then, our sporting heroes/villains appear as role models, especially as and when their behaviour is noticed and remarked upon by the media. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the media treatment of doping issues, and doping villains.

The Olympic Athlete as Villain

Opportunities for great achievement are also often occasions for great temptation. When the stakes are high and the rewards of success are possibly life-changing, a person might easily consider various kinds of rule-breaking to be not very serious offences. Taking doping as our example again - many athletes try out various kinds of enhancement techniques that are not actually illegal, but which seem quite similar to doping. They take creatine and whey protein, and other kinds of food supplementation; they use hypobaric chambers, applied sports science of all kinds, elective surgery, etc. Compared with some of these methods, doping might seem to be different only in degree, not in kind. However, here we must notice that athletes are not quite like ordinary citizens. Ordinary laws and moral principles apply to athletes as much (or as little) as anyone else but athletes are subject to another set of considerations just because they seek to enter the co-operative enterprise of competing with and against others in sporting contests. As contractors to contest, they must accept certain constraints in order to count as acceptable opponents. One such constraint is that against doping in sport. Much has been written on the theory, facts and morality of doping, and on the justification for banning it (e.g. Grayson, Waddington, Houlihan, Parry, and articles in Morgan & Meier, and Tamburrini & Tnnsj).73 Here and now, we just need to explore why athletes do it, and what makes it villainous.

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Grayson, E. (1999). Sport and the Law. London: Butterworths, 3rd ed. Waddington, I. (2000). Sport, Health and Drugs a critical sociological perspective. London: E&FN Spon. Houlihan, B. (2002). Dying To Win. Council of Europe Publishing. Germany, 2nd ed. Parry, J. (2006a). Sport and Olympism: Universals and Multiculturalism. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 33, 2, pp. 118-205. Morgan W & Meier K, (1988), Philosophic Enquiry in Sport. Urbana: Human Kinetics. Articles by: Simon, R.L. Good Competition & Drug-Enhanced Performance (pp. 289-296) Brown, W.M. Paternalism, Drugs and the Nature of Sports (pp. 297-306) Hoberman, J. Sport and the Technological Image of Man (pp. 319-327) Tamburrini C and Tnnsj T (eds), 2000, Values in Sport. Routledge. Articles by: Schneider, A.J. & Butcher, R.B. A Philosophical Overview of the Arguments on Banning Doping in Sport (pp. 185-199) Tamburrini C Whats Wrong with Doping? (pp. 200 -216) Munthe C Selected Champions (pp. 217-231)

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Why do athletes take drugs?

There are many reasons given for taking drugs, which refer to the supposed benefits of doping: Enhanced performance (direct and indirect) Decreased recovery period, allowing more intensive training Masking the presence of other drugs Making the weight Staying the course (simple endurance - e.g. long-distance cycling) Psychological edge (promoting the athletes confidence) Keeping up with the competition (coercion - pressure to follow suit)

Why do we think it is wrong to take drugs?

1. Pre-competition agreements
The primary wrong lies in simple rule-breaking. The rules function as a kind of pre-competition agreement which specifies an athletes eligibility to compete and his rights, duties and responsibilities under the agreed rules. Whats wrong with doping is the secretive attempt to evade or subvert such a contract to contest, an explicit example of which is the Olympic Oath, by which athletes swear that they have prepared themselves ethically, and will keep to the rules. To subvert the contract to contest threatens the moral basis of sport, jeopardises the integrity of the sporting community and erodes public support and trust. For me, this is the primary villainy involved in doping, because it threatens all that sport is. However, the rules themselves require a basis of justification, since the anti-doping rules must appeal to some issue of principle in addition to rule adherence. Considerations advanced include the following:

2. Unfair Advantage
Arguments against performance enhancement through doping are not simply arguments against performance enhancement, since that is what athletes constantly seek to achieve by training, coaching, nutrition, the application of sports science, etc. Neither is the argument simply against performance enhancement by means which confer an unfair advantage, since many legal means are beyond the resources of most countries. Rather, the argument is specifically against unfair advantage conferred by illegal means. This kind of argument therefore returns us to the first one, above, referring as it does to the contract to contest, which specifies what counts as illegal means.

3. Unnaturalness
Some argue that sport should be a contest between natural athletes, and that drugs are an artificial intrusion. However, some approved medical drugs are as unnatural, being artificially synthesised, and some prohibited ones are naturally occurring substances, such as testosterone and blood (as used in blood-doping), which we all manufacture in our bodies. So the distinction between the

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natural and the unnatural does not coincide with the distinction between the banned and the notbanned. In any case, we stand in need of an account the unnatural. It might be thought unnatural to pump iron so as to develop huge muscles, but that is allowed. It may even be that athletes, in order to become world class performers, have to be born unnatural (or at least to be genetically unusual even abnormal - in statistical terms), or have to develop profoundly unnatural characteristics or skills. It has often been argued that sport itself is unnatural, having unfortunately displaced play as the primary mode of human physical expression. Play is here seen as the natural expression of the exuberant physicality of humans, whilst sport is seen as an historically recent and artificial construction which is only temporarily expressive of a thwarted and oppressed personality. Whatever the truth of that account, it is clear that the word unnatural needs some elaboration before it will do the work required of it here.

4. Harm
Many argue that doping may be harmful, because the substances are inherently harmful, or because they have been administered without medical supervision, or because they have been inadequately tested. Further, it is argued that harm to other athletes is caused by the coercion they feel to follow suit in order to maintain competitiveness. However, there is scant evidence that medically supervised doping of adults is very harmful, although there is very good evidence that many sports themselves are hazardous activities, and this seems to be part of what gives them their appeal. Some people seek security by taking out mortgages with insurance policies, paying for superannuated pensions, buying cars with safety features, and so on, and then they go hang-gliding at weekends! The injury rate in certain sports is horrific, but arguments which point this out are dismissed as irrelevant by afficionados. So, even if it were proven that certain drugs are harmful, it still needs to be shown why this kind of harm should be of particular concern, whilst other harms go unremarked, or are even glorified - such as are many sporting harms.

5. Social Harm
Often it has been said that one great social wrong in the practice of doping lies in its perverse coercion of non-doping athletes, who are made to feel as though their choice lies between capitulation to the necessity to dope, or getting beaten in disadvantaged competition. In this way, there arises a harm of coercion to the sports practice community, or at least a harm of disadvantage to those who do not wish to dope. However, with the huge expansion outside of the sports practice community, in the market for drugs in gyms, fitness clubs and elsewhere, there is now an emerging claim for a further wrong: that, by modelling dope as a lifestyle, athletes contribute to the social problem of thousands of sport, fitness and body-building fans consuming substances whose longterm effects are unknown. Athletes, it is said, should be more aware of their social responsibility.

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The Olympic Athlete as Role Model

This potential for social harm, and the requirement of social responsibility on the Olympic athlete, is not a new thing, but it has recently taken on a fresh importance. It has long been thought that rock music has had at best a mixed influence on its audiences it has produced an alienated as well as anti-authoritarian culture; free-spirited as well as drug-fuelled personalities, and so on. But sport now has at least equal cultural power to rock music, and we must ask the question: what is its influence on its audiences? The jury is out. Some sports spectatorship seems fuelled by a love of violence, or seeks the humiliation of the opponent. Regionalism and nationalism are rife. Commercial values and personality cults sometimes override the values of sporting participation, and individual athletes prosper without a thought for putting something back into the community that nurtured them. Are there as many villains as heroes? Recently, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has experienced some success in persuading governments that sports-doping is an issue for them, and that they should support WADAs stance and activities. However, this is not because governments have suddenly realised that sports-dope is harmful to athletes, or that sports ethics is an important field. Rather, it is because of the huge increase in the amount of sports-dope being consumed by the non-athlete population, in the promotion of body image for personal and social reasons. This may have two kinds of consequences for government: the potential harm caused by the extension of medically unsupervised sports-dope usage into the general population, and a potentially massive contribution to the general extension of dope culture in society. So here we see a new issue: the use of sports-dope as social dope, which sheds fresh light on the notion of the Olympic athlete as social role model, and gives fresh impetus to the social responsibility argument. As an example, I shall recall the now infamous Ben Johnson episode.

Ben Johnson revisited

It is now over 20 years since the Games of the XXIV Olympiad ended in uproar and moral panic induced by the Ben Johnson episode. Or maybe it was shock occasioned by the scarcely credible and thitherto unthinkable event of a top athlete actually having been caught taking drugs. The Ben Johnson affair merely confirmed what we already had good reason to suspect had been going on for a long time. It is true that stimulant abuse had been virtually eradicated, because it is so easily tested for. But the evidence seems to show that in other areas the athletes were often one jump ahead of the testers, and the suspicion must be that Seoul medal-winners other than Johnson were drugassisted, and that the athletes and their advisers were maintaining their advantage over the testers. Nevertheless, 1988 produced on Olympic villain like none before or since. In Moscow back in 1980 there were no positives out of 1667 tests. In LA in 1984 there were twelve. Surely no-one believes that this represented the true level of drug-taking amongst Olympic athletes at the time. Rather it represents the spectacular failure of the doping police, despite their expensive resources. Johnson was caught because he had been taking a steroid which had been thought to be undetectable as he had been using it. A new test introduced at the last minute gave a success for the testers on this occasion, but it was rather tough on Johnson, who must be considered very unlucky.

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To explain the predicament in which people involved in sport at various levels find themselves I think we must see sport as a reflection and as a feature of modern life. Modern-day high-performance sport encourages us to see the body as an instrument; and a deep-rooted acknowledgement of the value of science and technology leads us to seek technical means for making the body go faster, higher, and stronger in the pursuit of records 74. The athlete is faced with a contradiction inherent in the nature of sport. The internal logic of highperformance sport looks towards continual record-breaking, not recognising that limits must exist. The Olympic motto citius, altius, fortius expresses in one breath an ideal of human striving and excellence, but also an internal logic of compulsion which must eventually be doomed to failure. The biological possibilities of the human frame must at some stage become exhausted. Athletes can go on setting records for as long as their support services can produce better shoes, better tracks, better diets, better training schedules, better psychological preparation and better equipment, but surely not forever. And the logical extension of this instrumental attitude towards sporting activity is that others seeking to compete will adopt whatever methods are necessary to win - in both the sporting and socioeconomic sense. It is not so long ago that moral crusaders in sport were waging war against the shamateurs, claiming that they were undermining the moral basis of sport and cheating by gaining unfair economic advantages. But now we have millionaire tennis and athletics stars at the Olympics. This is the background we must call to mind if we are to understand drug use in sport. Those athletes who use them see them as a logical extension of other technological and instrumental means which they use to achieve their ends more efficiently, and this kind of outlook coheres both with the overall evaluative position of modern sport and with wider social attitudes and beliefs. Of course, Johnson was a villain and so were his advisers, his coaching and medical staff, and some of his stablemates. As the Dubin enquiry found, this was a corrupt system, not just a villainous athlete and the same can be said of the BALCO affair. But we can see how and why such abuses occur. The problem is that any victory based on corruption cannot produce a hero. I have already said that I believe that the primary wrong in doping lies in simple rule-breaking in the secretive attempt to evade or subvert the pre-competition agreement, or contract to contest. This threatens the moral basis of sport, jeopardises the integrity of the sporting community and erodes public support and trust. It also calls into question the status of the Olympic athlete as role model, if the public perception is that a medal-winner is likely to have been doped. All are tainted by the suspicion generated by a few. However, I also think that the Ben Johnson affair shed fresh light upon the workings of doping systems, and called attention to the need for an urgent re-appraisal of sports ethics in general, and not just in the context of doping - and this includes attention to the fundamental nature of sport itself.

74

Parry, J. (2006b). Doping in the UK: Alain and Dwain, Rio and Greg - not guilty? Sport in Global Society 9, 2, pp. 279-307.

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The Ethical Basis of the Idea of Sport

So there is an important positive feature of the debate about performance-enhancing drugs. The drugs debate has forced everyone to think in ethical terms, and to appeal to ethical principles. But if we take these appeals seriously, and follow them through, there are some interesting consequences. Continue to assume that drug-taking in sport is wrong; and ask again the question: why is it wrong? The answers that we gave above were all stated in terms of some ethical principle that is claimed to be central to our idea of sport, which drug-taking allegedly violates. Let us revisit some of the arguments presented earlier, and see where the underlying principles lead us:

1. The 'Natural' Athlete - the Track versus the Laboratory

For example, some say that what is wrong with drug-taking is that it removes competition from the track to the laboratory. But, if we are to be consistent, we should note that the development of sports science in general promotes competition between physiology, psychology and biomechanics labs as support services for training. If we are so worried about removing the competition from the track to the lab, maybe we should look again at the ethical status of sports technology, or the sports sciences more generally, since they may contribute not only to advances in sport, but also to increased inequalities of access to. This is not normally regarded as a corollary of the natural athlete argument, but consistency requires that we should reconsider the whole issue of natural sport. For example, if you say you value the natural athlete, why not return to sprints in bare feet on grass, instead of the artificiality of personally-crafted shoes on special surfaces?

2. Unfair Advantage or Inequality of Opportunity

Others say that what is wrong with drug-taking is that it confers an unfair advantage. Notice that noone can (sincerely) make this objection to drug-taking unless he is sincere in his commitment to sport as embodying fairness, and as disallowing unfair advantages as being against the idea of sport. However, many of those who hold this objection against drug-taking seem perfectly prepared to allow various kinds of very obviously unfair advantages. For example, only certain countries are able to generate and enjoy the fruits of developments in sports science; and only certain countries are able to take advantage of the knowledge and technology required for the production of specialised technical equipment. Is this fair? The company that produced the so-called moon-bikes, that made use of space-exploring technology to make winners out of American cyclists at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, later shamelessly marketed them under the slogan: 'The Unfair Advantage'. Let us widen the issue: it seems to me a fact that international competition is grossly unfair, because some countries have the resources to enhance the performance of their athletes, and some do not. Those nurtured within advanced systems might take time to consider the extent to which their performances are a function not just of their abilities as individual sportspeople but also of the social context within which they have been nurtured. Have not their performances been enhanced? Are not their advantages unfair? Consistency requires that we revisit the whole idea of disadvantage, and also inequality. For example, why not include more ethnic sports in the Olympic programme, rather than continuing the present Western hegemonic domination? Kabbadi, a sport popular on the Indian sub-continent, is a sport based on the game form of tag, which is known in most societies in the world. It requires

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minimal facilities and no equipment. Why should we westerners not have to learn such sports and compete on those terms, rather than collude in the disappearance of indigenous sport forms in favour of our own curriculum? Anyone who relies on unfair advantage arguments in the case of doping must also revisit and reconsider such arguments in other contexts.

3. Rule-Breaking, or Cheating
Others say that drug-taking is wrong simply because it is against the rules of competition. But pacemaking is against the rules of the IAAF, although it is allowed so as to facilitate record-breaking attempts in the commercial promotion of media spectacle, and no-one is disqualified. In fact, runners can earn large fees for performing this service. If officials so readily flout their own rule s, they are poorly placed when athletes do the same, or when critics demand better justification for the rules that presently exist. In a world where the values of sport are sometimes forgotten under the pressures of medal-winning and the marketplace, it ill behoves those responsible to turn a moralistic eye on athletes. Why should athletes take any notice of the moral exhortation of those who have profited from the commercialisation of sport, when they see the true values lived and expressed by those around them?

Concluding remarks
The drugs debate has made everyone stand on some ethical principle or another. But think how sport might develop (what it might become) if those principles were not merely used opportunistically over the drugs issue, but rather were acted upon consistently in the interests of truly fair competition and equality of opportunity. I think that there is an opportunity here to open up debate again about the ethical basis of sport, so that our sports practice (and the sports science and training theory that support it) becomes rooted in firm principles that encapsulate what we think sport should be.

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The Ethics of Sport, and Fair Play as a Logical Requirement

In thinking about the ethics of sport, we cannot escape some consideration of one of the foundational values of sport - fair play. It often goes unnoticed that the primary nature of fair play in sport is not as a moral requirement, or an educational tool, but as a logically necessary feature of successful engagement. Let us recall our rough and ready definition of sport from Chapter 1: sports are institutionalised rule-governed competitions wherein physical abilities are contested. They are more formal, serious, competitive, organised, and institutionalised than the games from which they often sprang. Such a definition is useful as a crude starting-point, because it begins to suggest the logico-moral basis of sport, and thus suggest arguments that may be raised against doping, cheating, violence or other rule-breaking. For we may ask how cheating relates to the practice of sport; and whether one can have a successful sports practice in which cheating regularly occurs. Obviously, the answer depends on the kind and level of cheating involved but the primary wrong in (say) doping lies in simple rulebreaking. As we have already said, the rules function as a kind of pre-competition agreement which specifies an athletes eligibility to compete and his rights, duties and responsibilities under the agreed rules. What is wrong with doping is the secretive attempt to evade or subvert such a contract to contest, an explicit example of which is the Olympic Oath, by which athletes swear that they have prepared themselves ethically, and will keep to the rules. To freely choose to be accepted into a community of practice entails an obligation to duly respect the rules of the practice (or institution) as its lawful authority. To subvert such a contract to contest threatens the moral basis of sport, jeopardises the integrity of the sporting community and erodes public support and trust.

Deception and Cheating - a moral problem?

One major problem for such a principled approach to games-playing lies in the area of cheating and rule-infraction. McIntosh75 notices that one form of cheating involves breaking a rule with the intention to deceive. (Compare this with the immoral practice of lying, which involves not just telling untruths; but telling untruths with the intention to deceive). He also wishes to draw our attention to the fact that the intention to deceive is not necessarily wrong in sports, but is even regarded as good strategy (selling a dummy, feinting, disguising a shot, executing a deceptive change of pace, etc.). This problem has also been noticed by Jeu et al.76, who remark that the internal logic of some sports: ... consists in deluding the other ... Who does not approve of the feints of bodies or the dribble of football players who in this way mislead their opponent? How can we conciliate fair play with trickery ...?

75 76

Chapter 2 in McIntosh, P. (1979). Fair Play: Ethics in Sport and Education. Heinemann. p.216 in Jeu, B. et al (1994). For a Humanism of Sport. Paris: CNOSF - Editions Revue

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McIntosh 77 suggests two criteria for distinguishing morally acceptable forms of deception from deception which counts as cheating: (i) that the deception is only momentarily secret (i.e. the result of the deception makes the means obvious) (ii) the means are acceptable to other participants (even if they had not thought of that means and wished they had) But neither criterion will do, because: (i) would make robbery acceptable, if it were achieved by only momentarily deceptive means. (ii) smuggles in a moral criterion, for: surely a sine qua non of a means acceptable to all participants is that it is morally acceptable (in which case we remain in need of a criterion to distinguish morally acceptable means). The problem presented by McIntosh vanishes if we remind ourselves of his starting-point: one form of cheating involves breaking a rule with the intention to deceive. This already suggests that deception is permissible in sport when it is employed as a tactic which does not break a rule. What makes such deception morally acceptable is simply that, under the contract to contest, I have agreed to abide by the rules. Indeed, since I have also agreed to contest (i.e. do my best to win) there might even be an obligation to deceive (if I am any good at it). Deception involving rule infraction is morally unacceptable not because it is deception but because it is rule infraction. To reinforce this point, we may return to McIntoshs two criteria: deception involving rule infraction is morally unacceptable even when the means are only momentarily secret; and even if those means were acceptable to other participants. Here, McIntosh suggests that we need to consult one another in order to establish norms of deception, without which a game would lack an ethical basis. This is important, he thinks, so that children might not be misled into thinking that, since trickery and deception are permissible in sport, then they might be permissible in other spheres of life, such as commercial, political or domestic life. But he does not himself suggest a solution to his problem, unless he is implicitly relying upon the above two criteria, which we have already shown to fail. The reason why he is still at a loss for an answer is that he has not noticed that the deceptions involved in feinting, etc., are not morally relevant deceptions. Not only are such deceptions permitted by the rules of the contest; but also are they to be encouraged, as McIntosh observes, since they themselves are skills of the game. What he fails to realise is that what makes them morally irrelevant is that they are precisely the kind of skills which the rules constitutive of the activity call into play.

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McIntosh, P. (1979). Fair Play: Ethics in Sport and Education. Heinemann.

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Similarly, Jeu et al.78 regard sport as paradoxical because it is a practice within which deception and fair play can co-exist. I think that the foregoing discussion decisively demonstrates that there is no such paradox. Fair play outlaws deceptions which are against the rules, but allows deceptions that are within the rules. There is nothing paradoxical about that. As Pearson79 put it many years ago, we should distinguish strategic deceptions from definitional deceptions - the former being permissible, and the latter not. I hope to have demonstrated that the requirements upon us to play fairly are not simply requirements to play morally. They are also requirements to acknowledge the internal logic of the practices we call sports. Deceptions that involve cheating clearly eliminate the possibility of a true contest, since one party allows to himself advantages that the other denies himself, according to the rules. Only under conditions of fair play can we see real performances, and a true contest.

The Olympic Movement and International Understanding

This point is of the first importance at the educational and interpersonal level. There is so much good that can be done by positive role models working with young people if they can be trusted; if their performances and victories were real; if they understood the importance of the logical requirement for fair play. For there are also wider issues to be considered, in social ethics and in politics. Let me draw attention to the emerging relationship between the Olympic Movement and the United Nations, two global organizations facing similar problems in regard to universality and particularity. The general problem faced by both is how they are to operate at a global (universal) level whilst there exist such apparently intractable differences at the particular level. Olympism seeks to be universal in its values, including those of mutual recognition and respect, tolerance, solidarity, equity, anti-discrimination, peace, multiculturalism, etc. This is a quite specific set of values, which are at once a set of universal general principles; but which also require differential interpretation in different cultures - stated in general terms whilst interpreted in the particular. This search for a universal representation at the interpersonal and political level of our common humanity seems to me to be the essence of the optimism and hope of Olympism and other forms of humanism and internationalism. In the face of recent and on-going conflicts in various parts of the world, this might seem a fond hope and a naive optimism; but I dont see why we should not continue to argue for and work towards a future of promise, and I still see a strong case for sport as an efficient means. I believe that sport has made an enormous contribution to modern society over the past 150 years or so, and that the philosophy of Olympism has been the most coherent systematization of the ethical and political values underlying the practice of sport so far to have emerged.

78 79

Jeu, B. et al (1994). For a Humanism of Sport. Paris: CNOSF - Editions Revue. Pearson, K. (1973) Deception, Sportsmanship and Ethics. Quest, 19, 115-118.

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It also has radical political potential. We noticed in chapter 1 the possible effects of the Moscow Games of 1980 on the events of 1989, after which many of the former Eastern bloc countries joined the European Union. We also suggested that we might be in a position to assess the results of Beijing 2008 ten years or so after the event. And we might also notice the importance of (especially televised) sporting interactions for their influence on our everyday perceptions and conceptions in the fields of race, gender, disability and ethnicity. And this is why, I repeat, the renewal of our commitment to the development of global forms of cultural expression such as sport, and to international understanding through ideologies such as Olympism, are ways that we as individuals can express our commitments, ideals and hopes for the future of the world. As Nelson Mandela in 2000 has said: Sport has the power to change the world, the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else can. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all kinds of discrimination ... spreading hope to the world. 80 This is the challenge for the 21st century: to promote universalism and humanism in sport as an everyday reality, in order to produce a better and more peaceful world for us all. And no-one is better placed to do that than the Olympic athlete as positive role model. We need heroes.

80

Mandela, N. quoted in Ten Years of Laureus 2000-2010, Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, 2010, p. 5.

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The Youth Olympic Games Ethical and Value Issues

Introduction
Given the close relation of Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), to the Universities of Ghent and Louvain-la-Neuve, with the institution in 2009 of the Olympic Chair Baillet Latour - Jacques Rogge, it is unsurprising that holders of the Chair (and their local collaborators) have been especially interested in what many have seen as the 'legacy project' of the President - the Youth Olympic Games (YOG). I am happy to have this opportunity to acknowledge a special debt to my friend Marc Maes, with whom I first discussed some of the following issues, and also to Steffie Lucidarme, whose own work on this topic also provoked my deliberations. This chapter is evidence of the continuing reward of my relationship with the Chair. Jacques Rogge is quoted as saying that the YOG were: a project that I had in my mind for a long time. When I was elected President of the European Olympic Committees in 1989, Europe was divided into two with the Berlin Wall in between. There was very little contact for young people between the two divided areas. I thought that a youth competition could help remedy that and we started the first edition of the European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF) in Brussels in 1991. 81 Two years later the first EYOF for winter sports was held in Aosta (Italy), and since then the event has taken place both in summer and winter every two years. After Rogge became President of the IOC it resolved, during the 119th IOC Session in Guatemala City in July 2007, to introduce a new sporting event for young athletes the Youth Olympic Games, first held in Singapore, 14-26 August 2010, with 3500 athletes between 14 and 18 years of age (birth years 1992-1995) from all 205 National Olympic Committees (NOCs). The sports programme included all 26 sports on the programme of the London 2012 Olympic Games (OG), albeit with a limited number of disciplines. The first Winter YOG took place in Innsbruck in January 2012, and future editions of the YOG will follow the traditional cycle of four years, with the Summer YOG in the year of the senior Winter OG and the Winter YOG in the year of the senior Summer OG.

81

Shokoohi, K. (2010a). Games They Can Call Their Own, IOC Newsletter 6 August 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympic-Games/?articleNewsGroup=-1&articleId=96176 Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Since the YOG will be the first new event the IOC has introduced since the 1924 Olympic Winter Games 82, it has a good claim to being the most significant innovation for more than 80 years. At the XIII Olympic Congress of 2009 in Copenhagen, the Factsheet for Theme 4 (Olympism and Youth) gave three aims for the YOG: to provide a platform to the 14- to 18-year-old elite athletes in all Olympic sports and introduce to them the Olympic spirit at a younger age; to combine the sports event with an educational programme linked to important issues such as the fight against doping and healthy lifestyles; to reach out through young people worldwide on the basis of appealing and powerful communications initiatives that allow young people all over the world to benefit from the sports and educational programme offered to the athletes and the public at the YOG. (IOC, 2010). As Rogge says: The vision of the Youth Olympic Games is to inspire young people around the world to participate in sport, but also to teach the traditional values of the Olympic Games, which are the pursuit of excellence, friendship and respect for each other, respect for social values like the environment. We also want them to learn about important issues such as the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, the dangers of doping or their role as sports ambassadors in their communities.83 So, one aim is the obvious one of bringing together some of the most talented athletes from around the world to participate in a high-level Competitive Programme (CP), perhaps as a stepping-stone to the senior Olympic Games. But the idea is also that the sporting competitions should be held in an educational and cultural environment, so the athletes stay at the Youth Olympic Village, just as at an OG, but with the addition of a Culture and Education Programme (CEP) to provide educational experiences and to support learning.84 The focus of this paper will be to address ethical and value issues attending the organisation of the YOG, and arising during it. Much has been written about Olympic values 85, but my purposes here will be served simply by noting the concern of Olympism for promoting individual and social development through ethical engagement with sport, in pursuit of values such as participation, effort, excellence, equality, respect for others, fairness and justice, peace and international understanding.86 Let me begin by considering some general issues before examining some specific events and features arising from and within the First Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.

82 83

Slater, M. (2009). Youthful Outlook. Olympic Review, 71: 26-43. Shokoohi, K. (2010a). Games They Can Call Their Own, IOC Newsletter 6 August 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympic-Games/?articleNewsGroup=-1&articleId=96176 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 84 Despite the significance of the CEP initiative, I will be unable to discuss it in detail here. Rather, a separate paper on the YOG CEP is in preparation. 85 Anyone wishing to explore these issues might be directed to the five papers on Olympic Philosophy in the Journal of Philosophy of Sport, XXXIII, 2, 2006, 144-217 (by Loland, Dacosta, McNamee, Parry and Reid). Another useful source is Girginov, V. (ed.), The Olympics: a critical reader (London: Routledge 2010). 86 See p. 199 in Parry, J. (2006). Sport and Olympism: Universals and Multiculturalism. Journal of Philosophy of Sport, 33(2): 188-204.

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General Issues
1. Values and the Sports Programme
Whilst the same 26 sports were chosen for the Competitive Programme (CP) as for the Olympic Games, there were important modifications and innovations, reflecting chosen values: some of the events were modified in order to reflect youth culture or to cohere with maturity and developmental levels. For example, the highly popular basketball competition was played in a half-court three-on-three format; gymnastic vault difficulty was limited; and the pentathlon contained only four events; one important innovation was the many mixed-gender and mixed-nation team events in archery, athletics, cycling, equestrian, fencing, judo, modern pentathlon, swimming, table tennis, tennis and triathlon raising questions in regard to traditional divisions by gender and nation; in the four team sports (handball, hockey, volleyball and football), with the exception of the hosts, Singapore, only one NOC team from each continent was allowed to participate across the four 6-team tournaments thus permitting 37 NOCs to participate, and promoting the value of wider participation; in each individual sport, a specific number of Universality Places were reserved to ensure that at least four athletes of each National Olympic Committee (NOC) were able to participate. This meant that some athletes received a wild card to enter the competitions. Again, this rule promotes wider participation within excellence, and the Olympic value of universality. I shall return to discuss some of these matters in more detail later, when I consider specific issues arising from the YOG that raise value issues. For the moment, though, it is important to note that there appears to have been little or no discussion regarding the composition of the Olympic Programme, especially concerning the suitability of various sports for youthful participants, and their coherence with Olympic values. For example, it may be said that boxing is a violent sport, that weightlifting is too physically demanding, that shooting is ethically dubious, that yachting and horseriding exclude many on the ground of expense, that football never sends its elite athletes, and so on. Conversely, it may be argued that there are many candidate sports for inclusion that would better respect the Olympic value of universality than the present hegemonic dominance of western sports.87 This debate was avoided, and an opportunity missed to re-evaluate the sports presently included on the Olympic Programme.

87

p. 201 in Parry, J. (2006). Sport and Olympism: Universals and Multiculturalism. Journal of Philosophy of Sport, 33(2): 188-204.

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2. Values and Participation

a. Equality of opportunity Since the eligible cohort is of 4 age years (14-18), and an Olympiad is a period of 4 years, it looks as though everyone in the world could (theoretically) aim to participate. However, age groups for each sport were restricted to a maximum two birth years, which excludes the other two birth years from participation. Moreover, no sport included 14-year-olds. Thus, at least half of the worlds youth athletes have no chance ever to participate in a YOG and, as we shall see, three-quarters in football. b. Age and Fairness A possible reason for limiting age groups to two birth-years might be to ensure fairness of competition, given the effect of age and maturity on results at youth level. However, there are still significant problems regarding early-year births and early maturers. Teenagers born in the first months of the calendar year are often over-represented in youth sport competitions; and early maturers have an advantage in age-limited contests. However, it is not clear what could be done about this the limitation to two birth-years seems a reasonable solution. c. Immaturity and Harm In some sports, late maturers are advantaged, for example in gymnastics. In the 1980s and 1990s virtually all female gymnasts competing at full international level were between 14 and 18 years of age, which raised issues of damagingly high training levels at an early age. Health concerns resulted in a minimum age restriction of 16 years to compete in senior-level events. However, the YOG reintroduces top-level international competition to the under-16 cohort, and provokes the more general question of harm to juniors across the YOG sports programme. d. Talent Identification and Early Specialisation Similarly, there are concerns that the YOG present a serious risk of reinforcing the practices of early talent identification and early specialisation. If NOCs start taking YOG medals as seriously as OG medals, then the YOG may encourage NOCs to intensify their efforts, despite the associated health risks: over-training injuries, growth and developmental problems, nutritional issues, psychological difficulties and drop-out. e. Exploitation of Young Athletes The lives of young athletes at this level are largely in hands of NOC officials, coaches and parents. It is likely that at least some NOCs will be drawn into excessive nationalism, and that some coaches and parents will exhibit the achievement-by-proxy syndrome projecting their own ambitions onto their young athletes. So the danger exists that young athletes will find it very difficult to resist abuse and coercion into malpractice. f. Winning and Losing As with the OG, many athletes take part in the YOG, but only some will go home with a medal. Of course, all athletes experience (and need to learn how to cope with) both winning and losing, and the greatest experience for many athletes is simple participation being present at the highest level, in OG or YOG competition. However, it is possible to organise an event so that as few competitors as possible suffer early and direct elimination, and to provide additional opportunities to compete.

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So the overall challenge in organising the YOG will be to preserve the fairness and integrity of the Games, and its coherence with Olympic values, in the context of these general issues, some of which will be addressed when considering the following specifics.

Specific Issues
1. Sport Forms (disciplines and events)
Many values are expressed through sport forms, and YOG organisers strove to come up with some striking innovations. Here are just a few: a. FIBA33 FIBA33 is a 3-on-3 form of basketball played on a half-court with one basket and five-minute play periods, with wipe-outs prevented by a maximum 33 point score 88. Part of the aim is to replicate informal games in the school-yard, at the beach or in a park, in order to be appealing to younger participants and spectators. With non-stop music, fast-paced action, two game running at a time, and a game lasting less than 15 minutes, Prince Albert of Monaco expressed excitement at this intense and dramatic format 89 90 . President of the international federation, FIBA, Bob Elphinston, commented on plans to include FIBA33 basketball as part of the Olympic Games, and it was reported that Carlos Nuzman, a leading official for the Rio 2016 Olympics, wanted 3-on-3 at the beach volleyball venue on Copacabana Beach, as well as the fast-tracking of other innovations into the Olympic Games. 91 92 93 b. First Moonlit Dive According to officials of FINA, the international federation for swimming, the diving finals at the YOG was the first time that diving had been contested in the open at night. Jesus Mena, FINAs diving technical committee chairman and the 1988 Olympics 10m platform bronze medallist, said, Before, it was a myth that you couldnt dive at night in an outdoor pool. Now we know its possible. This could change the sport 94.

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Degun, T. (2010a). Basketball stealing the show at Youth Olympics, 16 August 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/blogs/10314 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 89 Hula, E.D. (2010). New Basketball Event for YOG, 8 August 2010, available at http://aroundtherings.com/articles/view.aspx?id=35381 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 90 s.a. (2010a). Monacos Prince Albert praises 3-on-3 basketball, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100819_monacos_prince_albert_ praises_3on3_basketball.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 91 Mackay, D. (2010a). Rio 2016 wants to stage 3-on-3 basketball on Copacabana Beach, 23 August 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/summer-olympics/rio-2016/10361-exclusive-rio-2016-wants-to-stage-3on-3-basketball-on-copacabana-beach- Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 92 th s.a. 2010b. Rio 2016 president calls for sporting innovations at senior Olympics, Sportsbeat, 18 August 2010, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1812157-rio-2016-president-callssporting-innovations-senior-olympics Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 93 s.a. 2010c. Junior Womens Archery World Record Shattered In Singapore, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100819_daily_wrap_junior_wome ns_archery_world_record_shattered_in_singapore.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 94 Ang, J. (2010). Worlds First Moonlit Dive Impresses All, 23 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100823_worlds_first_moonlit_div e_impresses_all.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Observers commented on the sheer beauty of the event, but there is more to it than that. There were worries that swimmers would have trouble judging the pools surface under artificial light, but that problem was solved with the use of sprays to agitate the water. Instead, diving at night has added a technical benefit. A bright day can spell trouble for divers who can mistake the blue of the sky for the colour of the water. But, under the stars, 10m platform world champion Tom Daley said: There was better contrast between the sky and the pool. That helps the divers. 95 c. Gymnastics Gymnastics planned certain differences between the YOG and the Olympic Games, citing safety grounds: The competition rules and difficulty level of the routines to be performed by the male and female gymnasts at the Youth Olympic Games have been modified in order to safeguard the health and proper development of the athletes 96. In particular, the required difficulty elements were reduced in number, and difficulty value restrictions were imposed. This means that the young athletes are only allowed to perform easier and safer vaults, but it also has the child protection consequence that their trainers will have no gain in forcing enhancement of the difficulty level, although they will still be able to focus on improving performance. d. First Horse Draw For the first time in Olympic history, riders drew lots to determine which horse each would ride. The draw was conducted at the Singapore Turf Club Riding Centre. The assigned horse-rider combinations were to apply throughout the competition for the team and individual events 97. Of course, there are objections to such a procedure. Adjusting to an unfamiliar horse shortly before competition is a novel challenge for many of the riders, and might raise safety concerns but at least it is the same challenge for all. Drawing horses by lot might seem to make a lottery of the outcome, if you think that a good horse is what makes a winner but at least it rules out the possibility that one might be able to buy success, by buying the best horse. The horse draw seems to me to make it more likely that the best rider will win, and this is what we should be looking for. It is about both the rider and the horse, of course but it should be primarily about the rider, if it is to be an Olympic sport. This is one case of the more general point: the sport should find ways of testing the athlete, not his equipment. e. Pistol Shooting with laser pistols New laser pistol technology was used for the first time in the sports history in the modern pentathlon competition at the YOG, replacing the standard pellet-firing air pistols. The issues here are equity, cost, safety and gender. The cost of shooting will be cut by two-thirds, because laser guns are lighter and require no pellets, and so more people (and more countries) will be able to compete.
95

Ang, J. (2010). Worlds First Moonlit Dive Impresses All, 23 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100823_worlds_first_moonlit_div e_impresses_all.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 96 s.a. (2010d). Differences Between the YOG and the OG, Issued by FIG Media Operations, 3 August 2010, available at http://www.sportcentric.com/vsite/vfile/page/fileurl/0,11040,5240-202655-219878-166493-0file,00.pdf Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 97 s.a. (2010e). Historic First Horse Draw In Olympics, 15 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100814_historic_first_horse_dra w_in_olympics-.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Since safety issues will no longer be a major concern, competitions can be held in parks, gardens and even shopping malls, thus increasing the visibility and popularity of the sport. And lighter guns mean that there should be no reason why shooting should not become a mixed gender sport. Reports say that this experiment at the YOG was so successful that laser guns will be used in the modern pentathlon competition at the London 2012 Olympics 98. f. Sailing only two classes, with the least expensive equipment In view of the Olympic value of universalism (entailing equality, or inclusivity), one of the main criticisms of expensive sports such as sailing (and horse-riding, etc) is that they are socially exclusive, being available mainly to the higher social classes in wealthy nations, and to hardly anyone in poorer nations. The Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic regatta included only two classes because of the limitation on numbers, but a (possibly unintended) consequence of this was that the two disciplines selected, the Techno (windsurfer) and the Byte (a small one-person dingy), were the cheapest. 99 In the Olympic Games, there are many different sailing classes, and the potential for the proliferation of disciplines and events is enormous. Of course, this goes for other sports, too. But we rarely see any reference to Olympic values within the reasons being offered for the introduction of additional disciplines and events.

2. Mixed Teams (gender and nation)

Olympic values of friendly competition and internationalism have often been thought to be threatened by excessive nationalism in the OG, fuelled by medals tables and international team rivalry. De Coubertin argued that that the focus of the Olympic Games should be the individual adult male 100, and that team games and womens competitions would be at best secondary.101 How he would have viewed the progressive equalisation of womens participation in the OG, and the innovation of mixed gender team events in the YOG, we can only wonder. In the YOG, after the individual events, mixed-NOC doubles events or continental team events took place in many sports, including many mixed gender events, too, thus again raising the general issue of open competitions.

98

Kok, L. M. (2010). Laser Pistols To Be Used At London 2012, 23 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100823_laser_pistols_to_be_used _at_london_2012.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 99 s.a. (2010f). Sailing boss determined to learn from other sports innovations, 24 Aug 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100824_sailing_boss_determined _to_learn_from_other_sports_innovations.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 100 p.582 in de Coubertin, P. (2000b). The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Olympism (1935). In Pierre de Coubertin. Olympism. Selected Writings, edited by N. Mller. Lausanne: IOC, 580-584. 101 p.583 in de Coubertin, P. (2000b). The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Olympism (1935). In Pierre de Coubertin. Olympism. Selected Writings, edited by N. Mller. Lausanne: IOC, 580-584.

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Here are some examples: In swimming, the mixed 4x100m freestyle relay was the first ever mixed-gender relay in an Olympic event.102 On the track, the medley relay saw athletes compete in continental teams, with the team of four running 100 metres, 200m, 300m and 400m in that order.103 In modern pentathlon, Nathan Schrimsher from the USA and Leydi Laura Moya Lopez of Cuba were chosen at random as a team for the boy/girl mixed relay. Nathan said, I really dont know all the politics and stuff. The people were all the same. Nathan and Leydi finished 16 of 24. She doesnt speak much if any English. I dont speak any Spanish. But, he said, we got along really well ... we both do speak pentathlon.104 In fencing, nine continental teams one African, four European, two from Asia-Oceania and two from the Americas were formed by placing each continents highest-ranked competitors from the individual events together. Each team consisted of three male and three female athletes, with epee, sabre and foil fencers equally represented.105 In table-tennis, intercontinental teams competed in a mixed nation and mixed gender team event consisting of a girls singles, boys singles and mixed doubles match.106 Triathlon introduced a 4 x mixed team relay event, in which two men and two women from each continent, selected according to their finishing positions in the individual events, completed a 250m open-water swim, 7km cycle ride and 1.7km run. Jacques Rogge described it as exciting but refused to be drawn on its chances of being included in future Olympic Games.107 108 In archery, Abdul Dayyan Mohamed Jaffar (Singapore) won bronze medal in the mixed team event with partner Elif Begunham Unsal of Turkey, defeating opponents from Spain and Bangladesh.109

102

Lim, L. (2010). China Glitter In Pool As Crowd Roars, 16 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100816_china_glitter_in_pool_as _crowd_roars.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 103 Degun, T. (2010b). Bolarinwa and Tagoe win relay medals at Youth Olympics, 10 August 2010, available at http://www.insidethegames.biz/youth-olympics/singapore-2010/10366-bolarinwa-and-tagoe-win-relaymedals-at-youth-olympics Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 104 Shokoohi, K. (2010b). Modern Pentathlon at the Youth Olympic Games makes history, 8 August 2010, http://www.olympic.org/en/content/YOG/YOG-news-face/YogNewsContainer/Modern-Pentathlon-at-theYouth-Olympic-Games-makes-history/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 105 s.a. (2010g). Countries unite for mixed NOC fencing event, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/YOG/YOG-news-face/YogNewsContainer/Countries-unite-for-mixed-NOCfencing-event/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 106 Xinyi, L. (2010). Best partnership: Gu Yuting and Adem Hman, 10 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100825_Best_partnership_Gu_Yu ting_and_Adem_Hman.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 107 s.a. (2010h). Jacques Rogge praises triathlon relay, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100819_jacques_rogge_praises_t riathlon_relay.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 108 s.a. 2010i. Triathlon hope mixed relay has taken first step on road to Rio 2016, 19 August 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/youth-olympics/singapore-2010/10339-triathlon-hope-mixed-relay-has-taken-firststep-on-road-to-rio-2016 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 109 Chen, F. (2010a). Singapore archer Dayyan wins Mixed Team bronze, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100819_spore_archer_dayyan_wi ns_mixed_team_bronze.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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In interviews with journalists, athletes mentioned, as values of such events, enjoyment 110 111, friendship and respect 112 113, breaking the language barrier112 appeal to a younger audience and inspiration for young athletes 114, and feeling the Olympic spirit.112 115 These events added an extra dimension, offering a different kind of competitive experience for the athletes, showing that the OG can and should mean more to the athlete than just turning up to compete in ones own specialist event.

3. Age Falsification
In the same month that the first YOG took place, August 2010, the US Olympic womens gymnastics team of 2000 finally received their bronze medals from the Sydney Games, after a lengthy investigation by the IOC had concluded that a Chinese gymnast, Dong Fangxiao, who was supposedly 17 years of age, was in fact 14 at the time. This was in breach of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) ruling that raised the minimum age to its current 16 in 1997.111 Age falsification has been a problem in gymnastics since the 1980s, when the minimum age was raised from 14 to 15 to help protect developing athletes from serious injuries.114 Five Chinese gymnasts suspected of being under age at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 were cleared after Chinese officials provided original passports, ID cards and family registers showing all of the gymnasts were old enough to compete. Chinese sports officials promised that tighter checks introduced after the Sydney scandal would eradicate the problem, and that their Youth Olympic Games athletes had been thoroughly checked. Weve scrutinised every athletes age for the Youth Olympic Games to make sure there is no-one going to Singapore with a fake age, Cai Zhenhua told the China Daily. We have to make our Chinese delegation very clean and transparent. This is for the benefit of the athletes and the fair play spirit of the Olympics. Cai added that as well as the documentation analysis on the 70strong squad, x-ray bone analysis had been carried out on the teams under-16s.114 Despite such assurances from the Chinese for 2010, and the extreme lengths to which they went in order to evidence age compliance, the US gave up its womens gymnastics place at the YOG, citing problems with the limitation on coaching accreditations.116 Since it is not at all clear why problems

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s.a. (2010i). Triathlon hope mixed relay has taken first step on road to Rio 2016, 19 August 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/youth-olympics/singapore-2010/10339-triathlon-hope-mixed-relay-has-taken-firststep-on-road-to-rio-2016 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 111 s.a. (2010j). China FINALLY loses 2000 Bronze medal, August 11th, 2010, available at http://gymnasticscoaching.com/new/category/ethics/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 112 Xinhua. (2010). Europe win fencing mixed team title at YOG, 18 August 2010, available at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90779/90867/7108889.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 113 Chen, F. (2010b). Work together for Australasia, 18 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100818_work_together_for_austr alasia.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 114 s.a. (2010k). Chinese confident over age checks for gymnasts, 29 July 2010, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/gymnastics/8866162.stm Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 115 s.a. (2010g). Countries unite for mixed NOC fencing event, 19 August 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/YOG/YOG-news-face/YogNewsContainer/Countries-unite-for-mixed-NOCfencing-event/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 116 Normile, D. (2010). Regarding the Youth Olympics. International Gymnast Magazine, 2 July 2010, available at http://www.intlgymnast.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1691:usa-gymnastics-officialstatement&catid=2:news&Itemid=53 Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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with the attendance of coaching staff should present a difficulty for only one NOC, this has led some to speculate that the real reason for the US withdrawal was a reluctance to compete at this level with the Chinese. Age falsification prejudices the whole point of the competition, which is to permit fair contest under agreed conditions. It damages sport in bringing the integrity of the contest into question, raising issues of trust and tacit contract. An inevitable response to non-compliance is suspicion, mistrust and reluctance to compete again. No-one wants to lose to cheats. However, the US was either unwilling to accept rules with which all others were able to comply, or they are guilty of contest refusal (of which more later). It is hard to see how either position is tenable. Age falsification is an attempt to evade the provisions of contest-limitation. We see (or have seen in the past) limitations on who is to be regarded as a legitimate opponent, described in terms of weight category, gender, nationality, employment history (professional/amateur), pharmacological status, etc. (In Paralympic sport, of course, it is universal since all contests are open only to those within a certain disability category.) Contest-limitation inevitably brings problems of categorisation, supervision, detection and policing and this applies to age as much as doping. At the YOG, age falsification was alleged against Bolivias gold-winning boys football team (Mackay 2010b). The claim was first made in the Bolivian newspaper La Razn by Arturo Garcia, chairman of the Coaches Association of Santa Cruz, who wrote that several of the team were aged between 16 and 19, in a competition for 15-year-olds. Montenegro coach Sava Kovaevid, whose team was knocked out by Bolivia in the semi-finals, said that they asked FIFA to look into the matter following Garcias allegations, but FIFA claimed that technical staff had made the relevant checks, and they had no plans to open an inquiry.117 If the allegations are correct, this is obviously a scandalous state of affairs, since the integrity of the whole competition has been systematically compromised. With only six teams competing, the results of Bolivias games would have affected all the other competitors in some way. But even more of a scandal is the failure to investigate adequately. From Bolivia, where Garcia said he received death threats for going public 118, and despite reports that Deputy Sports Minister Miguel Angel Rimba had ordered an investigation 117, there have been no reports of enquiries or outcomes over the year since the allegations emerged, no assurances that the Bolivian participants were all eligible, no defence of the reputations of the NOC and the players, and no legal action taken against the accuser.

117

Mackay, D. (2010b). Bolivian Youth Olympic gold medallists were over-aged, it is claimed, 12 September 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/youth-olympics/innsbruck2012/10500-bolivian-youth-olympicgold-medallists-were-over-aged-it-is-claimed Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 118 Tan, L. (2010). Youth Olympic Football: Were some of the Bolivians overaged? Red Sports, September 7th, 2010, available at http://redsports.sg/2010/09/07/youth-olympic-football-bolivia/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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From FIFA, the international federation responsible for the transparency, accountability and governance of the game, there has not even been an investigation. FIFA stand on the routine paperwork checks made at the time, and dismiss as illegitimate any further objections, citing FIFA YOG Regulation 10.3 119, which reads: Protests regarding the eligibility of players nominated for matches shall be submitted in writing to the FIFA headquarters in Singapore no later than five days before the first match. This is a curious provision, which FIFA seemingly interpret as allowing ineligible players to play, so long as no-one objects in time. However, even if such a rule prohibits later protests from other competitors, it should be no hindrance to a proper investigation by FIFA, if there is evidence that this foundational rule had been broken by a competitor. In age-limited competitions, such as this, all reasonable steps should be taken to ensure the age fairness of competition. FIFA have shown no ethical appetite for upholding the primary principle of competition for the YOG, and in so doing have brought the competition into disrepute.

4. Football and Excellence

There is another aspect of the YOG football competition that requires comment. The tournament was widely criticised for the absence of any countries with high football status, and for the low standard of football on view. FIFA were responsible for the format of the tournament, and they invited countries which currently had no realistic hope of qualifying for any of their age-group championships. Jacque Rogge is reported as commenting: In football, we did not have very strong teams. This was the deliberate policy of FIFA.120 Why would FIFA deliberately design a sub-standard competition? The answer reveals both the general attitude of FIFA to the Olympic Games, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophy of Olympism on the part of the President of FIFA, Joseph (Sepp) Blatter. Firstly, consider the general attitude of FIFA. Despite his appointment as a member of the IOC, Blatter persistently undermines the Olympic value of excellence, in the interest of FIFA, with FIFAs eligibility rules for participation in the Olympic Games. According to the IOC Charter, Rule 40, Eligibility Code, Bye-law 1 121, each International Federation has responsibility for establishing its sports own eligibility criteria. For 2012, FIFA has re-asserted its rule of limiting OG eligibility to under-23 players, with the exception of including up to three over-23 players.122 No such restrictions apply to the womens competition.

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p. 18 in FIFA (2010). Regulations Youth Olympic Football Tournaments, Singapore 2010, 12-25 August 2010, available at http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/tournament/competition/01/26/73/88/yoft_regulations_en.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 120 Tan, L. (2010). Youth Olympic Football: Were some of the Bolivians overaged? Red Sports, September 7th, 2010, available at http://redsports.sg/2010/09/07/youth-olympic-football-bolivia/ Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 121 p.75 in IOC, 2011. The Olympic Charter, available at http://www.olympic.org/Documents/olympic_charter_en.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 122 Valcke, J. (2010). FIFA Circular No. 1218, 15 Feb 2010, available at http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/administration/01/18/04/45/circularno.1218olympicfootballtournamentslondon2012-mensandwomenstournaments.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Clearly, this is a rule designed to maintain the status of the FIFA World Cup as the premier football event as the only competition for the very best in the world. In so doing, however, it necessarily downgrades the Olympic competition as something less than excellent. Yet it is clearly contrary to the ethos of excellence in Olympism, with its motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius faster, higher, stronger. All other sports are supposed to send their elite, so why is football granted exception? Presumably, the IOC permits this because FIFA is powerful enough to insist upon it, and the IOC wishes to retain football of some kind in the Olympic Programme. Secondly, consider what Blatter reveals as his understanding of Olympism. Whilst there was only the senior version of the Olympic Games to think about, any further potential conflict between FIFA and the IOC could not arise. However, the inception of the YOG brought a possible conflict with the FIFA Under-20 and Under-17 World Cup competitions, since players of 16-18 might already be involved in these competitions. Since also there were, after all, no 14-year-olds at the YOG, the only way to avoid conflict was for FIFA, exceptionally, to specify just one birth-year for the four-year cohort, and to organise a competition for 15-year-olds only (thus, incidentally, rendering three-quarters of the four-year cohort ineligible for the YOG). Furthermore, since even some 15-year-olds from the major soccer countries might be expected to be involved at the Under-17 level, and for these especially to be the likely stars of the future, the only way to exclude them from the YOG would be to select countries that otherwise would have no chance of participation or success. This is just what FIFA did. Blatter sought to justify the policy as follows: The principles of this tournament are education, respect and bringing peoples together. As set forth by Pierre de Coubertin (founder of the modern Olympics), the aim of the Olympic Games is to bring youth together. So we took the decision that Youth Olympic Football Tournaments will have teams representing each continent and that these representatives should be countries that dont have a chance to compete at the Olympic Games.123 On this basis, UEFA decided that its four lowest-ranked associations at junior level would compete for the European place at the Youth Olympics. I cannot discover on what basis the other teams were selected, but in the boys competition the one-per-continent line-up was Bolivia, Montenegro, Singapore, Vanuatu, Haiti and Zimbabwe. However, it is not clear how choosing poor teams is able to bring people together any better than choosing good teams. In any case, six will be brought together. Nor is it clear why Blatter has chosen the bringing together motif as the operative criterion on this occasion. Presumably this would not do for an edition of the FIFA World Cup! His justification seems to be ... the original idea of it being more important to participate than to win, which was set forth by de Coubertin 123. But this misunderstands de Coubertins meaning here. He is not saying that winning is unimportant quite the reverse, since he sees competition and victory as a potent incentive.124 Nor is de Coubertin saying that excellence is unimportant quite the reverse, since he sees excellence as one of the primary values of Olympism, and Olympic athletes

123

Blatter, J. (2010). Bringing youth together. Boys Youth Olympic Football Tournament Singapore 2010, FIFA.com, Wednesday 11 August 2010, available at http://www.fifa.com/mensyoutholympic/news/newsid=1283578.html. Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 124 p.543 in de Coubertin, P. (2000a). Why I Revived the Olympic Games (1908). In Pierre de Coubertin. Olympism. Selected Writings, edited by N. Mller. Lausanne: IOC, 542-546.

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as a meritocratic elite striving after records.125 This is echoed in the YOG motto of Excellence, Friendship, Respect.126 In addition, Blatter seems to see participation as merely taking part. Olympism, however, sees the value of participation as foundational to the enterprise of sport, and as necessary to the realisation of its ethical aims. Clearly, no-one can win unless others participate, and there are many more losers than winners, so sport needs participants first and foremost. But that is only the start. Olympism recognises participation not only as necessary to competition and to victory for some, but also as an achievement in itself, which is not attained by everyone. For those at higher levels, participation itself is an honour. And since so many of the 10,500 athletes at an OG never get near a medal, the pinnacle of achievement and their honour lies in simple participation in having managed to achieve selection for participation in an OG. FIFA policy for the YOG discriminated against excellent athletes (or teams), who were denied the right to participate a right, it might be said, that their excellence had earned for them. Blatter does not explain why the value of participation should be regarded as especially vital for the poorer teams. Whoever the six continental representatives are, for better or poorer, the participation/winning ratio is just the same: three of the six will get medals. This simple fact goes some way to explaining the (alleged) Bolivian age-fraud. Especially for a country chosen because it otherwise would have no chance of participation or success, one can only reflect upon the temptation to cheat occasioned by such a rare and unearned opportunity to win an Olympic medal. As mentioned earlier, there was in fact a rule at the YOG permitting only one boys team and one girls team per NOC across the 4 team sports, plus a one-per-continent rule. Together, these rules sought to promote wider participation at the possible and marginal expense of excellence. But a rule that excludes one excellent team in favour of another is very different from a rule that permits no excellent teams at all. Furthermore, de Coubertins emphasis on excellence at the OG lay in his reason for reviving the OG in the first place: that such a witness to sporting excellence and virtue would carry messages for sports ethics, and for education through sport, around the world. In sending some of its poorest, FIFA has shown either misunderstanding of or contempt for the Olympic idea. Blatters failure to understand the Coubertinian value of participation is lamentable, FIFAs failure to respect the Olympic value of excellence is mischievous, and the IOCs failure to insist upon it undermines its own values.

125

pp. 580-581 in de Coubertin, P. (2000b). The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Olympism (1935). In Pierre de Coubertin. Olympism. Selected Writings, edited by N. Mller. Lausanne: IOC, 580-584. 126 s.a. (2010l). Youth Olympic Games are about far more than just medals, 24 Aug 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/olympic-games?articlenewsgroup=-1&articleid=95904 Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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5. Cultural and Religious Diversity Football and the hijab

One major issue for Olympism (and for any international sports federation) is the reconciliation of cultural diversity with the requirements of universal rules and requirements. Before and during the YOG, one issue took centre stage: the wearing of head covering for Muslim girls in the football competition. According to Mackay 127, Law 4 of Association Football used to permit headwear to be worn only by the goalkeeper (although the Laws for 2011-12 mention only tracksuit bottoms as legitimate additional basic clothing for goalkeepers see FIFA 2011, 65). Presumably, headwear is not permitted in order to keep dress to a uniform minimum, and perhaps also for safety reasons. In March 2007, FIFA passed a ruling on a Canadian case, confirming Law 4 as above, and forbidding the Islamic hijab to be worn.127 In 2010, the Iranian womens football team qualified to compete in the YOG competition, but were informed by FIFA that they would not be allowed to compete wearing the hijab, according to Law 4. The Iranian Football Federation wrote to FIFA asking them to reconsider, since the team would only be able to participate if allowed to observe Islamic dress code. FIFA reiterated their position, and were backed by the IOC.128 Iran withdrew, and their place in the competition was offered to Thailand.129 The Iranian Olympic Committee called on Muslim states throughout the world to protest to FIFA and the IOC, claiming that the decision was a violation of Muslims rights.130 A spokesman said, Hijab is related to the Islamic culture and Muslim women cant take part in social activities without it.127 However, Iranian representatives travelled to Zurich to hold talks with FIFA President Sepp Blatter. They proposed a new set of clothing that would still cover the players heads in accordance with Islamic custom but would not break the laws of the game. FIFA and Iran agreed on a kit that included a cap, below-the-knee pants, long stockings and long-sleeved shirts, and the ban was lifted. Blatter said, They have fulfilled the requirements we asked, not to play with the hijab and with a cap. For

127

Mackay, D. (2010c). Iran replaced by Thailand over Olympic hijab row, 5 April 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9348:exclusive-iran-replaced-bythailand-over-olympic-hijab-row&catid=97:football-news&Itemid=143 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 128 Mackay, D. (2010d). Blatter set to face tough questions in Iran after hijab ban, Sunday, 11 April 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9393:blatter-set-toface-tough-questions-in-iran-after-hijab-ban&catid=97:football-news&Itemid=143 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 129 Mulvenny, N. (2010). Iran soccer girls banned from Youth Games over hijab, available at http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100406/ten-uk-olympics-soccer-hijab-eaebf69.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 130 Mackay, D. (2010e). Iran angry after womens football team banned from wearing hijab at Youth Olympics, 3 April 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9337:iranangry-after-womens-football-team-banned-from-wearing-hijab-at-youth-olympics&catid=1:latestnews&Itemid=73 Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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me its important that football is open to all cultures.131 The new cap, replacing the hijab, covers the hair, but not the ears and neck.132 In its letter to the IFF, FIFA said that if the hat covered the hair without violating the games laws, then Iran could use it. However, the problem here is that it is not at all clear just how such a hat would be permissible according to FIFAs 2011-12 Laws of the Game. According to Law 4 133, The basic compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements. Further, a player may use equipment other than basic equipment provided that its sole purpose is to protect him physically and it poses no danger to him or any other player.134 So headgear, such as used by Petr ech, or facemasks/goggles, such as used by Edgar David, are permitted, but for the sole reason of physical protection. Headwear is mentioned nowhere in the rules, apart from this reference to headgear, and neither are hat or cap, but it is quite clear from the above that Law 4 would not permit any such clothing or equipment to carry religious messages or meaning or symbolism. Nor would it permit any other equipment at all, including headwear, for any reason other than physical protection. Since the only reasons advanced by the Iranians were religious ones, their claim should have been disallowed under Law 4 as it presently exists. In the event, FIFA permitted headwear with religious significance, against the laws of the game. If any confirmation were required, that FIFA were in fact in breach of their own rules, we might consult Section 11 of the FIFA Regulations for the YOG 135, where we find that players are not allowed to display political, religious, commercial or personal messages in any language or form on their playing or team kits ... or body ... There are several value issues here to pursue: a. Cultural exceptionalism Those who have seen the film Chariots of Fire will recall that Christian observers of the Sabbath are not excepted from Olympic Programme requirements, and that no special arrangements are made for them. If they are scheduled for a Sunday (or a Jew for a Saturday), the problem is theirs. If they cannot or will not compete, it is their loss. No-one expects that the rules or the schedules will be changed for them. And we can see why: if the organisers had to take account of ALL religious and cultural preferences, it is hard to see how a global event could ever take place. We do not need to

131

s.a. (2010m). Iran Girls Beat Turkey in YOG Opener, 12 August 2010, available at http://aroundtherings.com/articles/view.aspx?id=35363 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 132 th Reynolds, T. (2010b). Israeli team claim Iranian withdrawal was politically motivated, 16 August 2010, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1612111-yog-2010-israeli-teamclaim-iranian-withdrawal-was-politically-motivated Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 133 p.22 in FIFA (2011). The Laws of the Game, available at http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/generic/81/42/36/lawsofthegame_2011_12e.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 134 p. 64 in FIFA (2011). The Laws of the Game, available at http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/generic/81/42/36/lawsofthegame_2011_12e.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 135 pp. 19-20 in FIFA, 2010. Regulations Youth Olympic Football Tournaments, Singapore 2010, 12-25 August 2010, available at http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/tournament/competition/01/26/73/88/yoft_regulations_en.pdf. Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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believe in the universality of value to notice that anyone who insists upon his local variant might be seen as imposing it on the rest of us. And there are obvious and good reasons why such insistence should be stoutly resisted one exception cannot be permitted without permitting many others. b. Genuine universalism On the other hand, the rules should not, even unwittingly, unreasonably exclude people or groups from competition. And it would be a sign of intolerance and imposition (even if thoughtless or unconscious) if an existing rule were not reconsidered for its relevance and adequacy in light of some difficulty in local implementation. In this case, we should re-visit the reasons for a universal ban on headwear, especially for groups for whom headwear is an issue (e.g. the yamulka for Jews, the hijab for Moslems, and the turban for Sikhs. The latter has raised legal issues in the UK regarding the compulsory wearing of uniform hats for bus drivers, or crash helmets for motor-cyclists), and the hijab has raised legal issues in, for example, France, where its use is prohibited on public premises such as schools and colleges. So the question is: is the ban on headwear something that can be defended in principle? Some have claimed that the issue is one of safety, but I can find no actual example of harm being caused. If there are concerns that certain kinds of headwear might be capable of causing harms, then I am certain that it is not beyond the wit of mankind to design a safe 'sporting hijab' - that is, a garment that will both satisfy the requirements of Moslem modesty and be safe. Appeals to safety seem to me spurious. There seems to be a much stronger case against the motor-cyclist's turban, given the evidence of efficacy of crash-helmets - but the turban is nevertheless accepted in the UK as a 'religious exception' to the law. The problem with this solution, however, is that FIFA's own rules do not allow it, since they outlaw religious exceptionalism. c. Consistency Other athletes had worn the burka, or the hijab: Several athletes competed at the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 wearing a hijab, including Bahrain sprinter Ruqaya Al-Ghasara, the 2006 Asian Games 100 metres champion who carried her countrys flag in the Opening Ceremony.136 If so, it might seem unfair to disallow the hijab for footballers. However, this is not simply a question of the clothing item, but also the legitimate requirements of the sport. To begin with, sprinting is not a contact sport, and this might be a genuine reason for treating it differently from football. A head covering might have implications in a sport where the head is used to play the ball, and it is an extra item in which a player might get entangled. This are, at least, matters for discussion and evaluation in any rule change.

136

Mackay, D. (2010e). Iran angry after womens football team banned from wearing hijab at Youth Olympics, 3 April 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9337:iranangry-after-womens-football-team-banned-from-wearing-hijab-at-youth-olympics&catid=1:latestnews&Itemid=73 Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Had FIFA previously allowed the hijab to be worn? Faride Shojaee, the vice-president of the womens department of the IFF, claimed that FIFA officials had previously allowed Iranian athletes to participate with their Islamic hijab before denying them the right to do so in the letter they sent on Monday.137 On the face of it, this seems like an inconsistency, and we can see why the Iranians would be shocked and dismayed when their expectations were overturned. However, the failure to ban the hijab on a previous occasion might have been simply an oversight, or a locally sanctioned concession, which required amendment for such a significant and global occasion as the YOG. Previous practice does not settle the matter. d. Racism, sexism and religious discrimination. Allegations made against FIFA include those of religious ignorance (that they mistook the religious hijab for mere national dress 137), of religious discrimination (that FIFA simply did not want to see Muslim women on the pitch 138), of sexism (wanting to stop the sport developing among Islamic women and creating obstacles in the way of the womens progress 138) and of racism. However, the fact that there was a womens competition in Singapore, and that there were nonIranian Muslim women competing (for example, Irans first game was against Turkey), undermine the force of these unsubstantiated allegations, which were in any case not repeated after Irans readmission to the competition. Furthermore, it is only in some Muslim countries that women wear or are required to wear a head-covering. So this is far from being a case of discrimination rather an occasion of special pleading that resulted in concessions and religious exceptionalism. Thus, of all faiths and creeds, only a version of Islam was able to represent itself in the competition. I conclude that FIFA permitted headwear with religious significance, against their own rules, resulting in religious exceptionalism. Furthermore, FIFA shows no sign of re-visiting Law 4 to interrogate the reasons supporting a universal ban on headwear, with a view to amending the Law in light of its decision at the YOG. The situation remains contradictory and unresolved.

6. Cultural and Religious Diversity Ramadan

London 2012 officials will certainly have been watching how their counterparts at Singapore 2010 coped with the decision to organise the Olympics during Ramadan (which in 2012 will take place from July 21 to August 20, right in the heart of the Games) a decision that was heavily criticised when announced five years ago. Singapore 2010 organisers said that they were mindful of the clash when scheduling their Games, but that the overlap with Ramadan was unavoidable because of the tight overseas sports calendar. The IOC stipulated that the Games had to be held in August 2010, and last not more than 12 days.139

137

Mackay, D. (2010c). Iran replaced by Thailand over Olympic hijab row, 5 April 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9348:exclusive-iran-replaced-bythailand-over-olympic-hijab-row&catid=97:football-news&Itemid=143 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 138 Mackay, D. (2010f). FIFA lift Olympic dress ban on Iranian womens team, 2 May 2010, available at http://insidethegames.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9541:exclusive-fifa-lift-olympicdress-ban-on-iranian-womens-team&catid=97:football-news&Itemid=143 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 139 Reynolds, T. (2010a). London 2012 to learn lessons from Ramadan scheduling, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1212036-yog-2010-london-2012-learn-lessonsramadan-scheduling Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Here is an issue that might have been expected to raise serious objections, since it would appear that dietary requirements for Muslims observing Ramadan impose significant additional demands on athletes in competition. It is remarkable that the hijab was an issue of contention, whereas Ramadan was not. I can find no complaints and no special claims that were made in relation to sporting events at the YOG, with regard to the religious requirements of fasting at this time. However, no religious exceptionalism does not mean no religious accommodation. The YOG took many steps to accommodate nutritional needs and preferences, such as providing early-morning breakfast and snack bags for those who need to breakfast during the competitions, serving halal food at the village, setting up prayer rooms for the athletes use, and so on. Still, fasting could be expected to pose an additional challenge for the athletes, on top of the physical and mental stress of competition. Some were not be able to eat or drink from sunrise till sunset each day, whilst enduring the rigours of training and competition. And with some events such as football and hockey taking place in the evening when Muslims break fast, some had to wait till 9pm or 10pm before they could eat.140

Some of the National Olympic Committees (NOCs) of countries with Muslim athletes recognised the extra difficulty they faced, but believed they could deal with it. For example, like the Jordanian Olympic Committee, most tweaked training to suit their Muslim athletes, and made meal arrangements with SYOCOG.140 The decision whether to continue fasting was mostly left to the athlete and coach. Ahmad Al Kamali, the UAEs chef de mission, agreed that fasting would affect his countrys athletes. But we hope that they will be able to cope well, give their best performance and achieve good results. Similarly, Sieh Kok Chi, honorary secretary of the Olympic Council of Malaysia, said that performances should not be affected, since the athletes had been trained from a young age to treat fasting as part of their lives, and they go through it each year. Bruneis NOC took an even more positive view regarding their sole Muslim athlete, Maziah Mahusin, 17, who they thought would not be affected by her fast. Fasting month is not a factor for her to slow down in her training, said the committees spokesman. In fact, it will give her spiritual strength, which hopefully could lead her to success.141 It seems to me that, if the Olympic calendar had been in the hands of Muslim sports administrators, a convenient way of avoiding the Ramadan period, at least for very important competitions such as the Olympic Games and the YOG, could easily and inconspicuously have been designed, to the detriment of no-one. When these events fall across or within Ramadan, as they do, it is not by design, but because it was never considered by non-Muslim administrators - and yet, at least for athletes in certain sports, it must be a significant extra challenge, if not a handicap.

140

Reynolds, T. (2010a). London 2012 to learn lessons from Ramadan scheduling, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1212036-yog-2010-london-2012-learn-lessonsramadan-scheduling Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 141 Chee, F. (2010). Fasting Not An Issue For Athletes, 12 August 2010, available at http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_news/en_stories/en_20100812_fasting_not_an_issue_for _athletes.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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7. Sport and Politics Iran/Israel

At the Youth Olympic Games, officials of the Iranian team withdrew their 16 year-old finalist in the under 48kg weight category of taekwondo, Mohammad Soleimani, when he won through to face a competitor from Israel in the gold medal bout.142 Officials cited an ankle injury, and then announced that the athlete would also not attend the presentation ceremony to collect his silver medal, as he was en route to hospital. The International Olympic Committee was sufficiently perturbed to order an immediate investigation, headed by its medical expert Dr Patrick Schamasch. 143 Iran have a history of avoiding competition with rivals from Israel since the Athens 2004 Olympics, because Iran does not recognise Israel politically as a state. Iranian Arash Miresmaeili, twice world judo champion, refused to compete against Israels Ehud Vaks in the opening round of Olympic judo competition in Athens, citing solidarity for the Palestinian cause. At the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, Irans wheelchair basketball team forfeited their game against the United States and withdrew from the competition, avoiding a possible match against Israel in the next stage.144 A few weeks earlier at the Olympics, Iranian swimmer Mohammad Alirezaei refused to race in a preliminary heat because Israeli athlete Tom Beeri was competing in the same pool. There are many issues here, including dishonesty (fake injury), instrumentality (towards the sport), exploitation (of the young athlete) and contest refusal. Faking an injury for any reason is a dishonest act that disrespects sport. Using sport to make a political point is the clearest possible case of instrumentality in this case using a fake injury in sport as a means to some end external to the sports contest itself. As well as instrumentalising sport, this is an example of the instrumentalising of the athlete, who was exploited for political interests. We should remember that Soleimani was just 16 years of age it is difficult to see him as anything but a victim, regardless of how his actions are viewed by his compatriots. Taking up the final issue, this is a clear case of contest refusal, and it seems to me untenable for an NOC to enter international competition with such an attitude and such a policy. International competitions would become impossible if everyone could decide for themselves who they will and will not compete against. Of course, sometimes the international community excludes someone on principle (as the IOC did with South Africa over the issue of apartheid, for example). Such cases apart, individual NOCs or participants cannot be permitted to choose who to play and who not to play. Their choice is either to withdraw themselves from competition entirely, or to be disqualified and disciplined. What cannot be countenanced is that contest refusal be permitted, or go without punishment. The venue of the sporting event should not be used to make such political points.

142

Magnay, J. (2010a). Youth Olympic Games 2010: Iranian fighter pulled out of Israeli clash, 15 August 2010, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/taekwondo/7946792/Youth-Olympic-Games-2010th Iranian-fighter-pulled-out-of-Israeli-clash.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 143 th Magnay, J. (2010b). Political row overshadows Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, 16 Aug 2010, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/7947737/Political-row-overshadows-YouthOlympic-Games-in-Singapore.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 144 th Reynolds, T. (2010b). Israeli team claim Iranian withdrawal was politically motivated, 16 August 2010, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1612111-yog-2010-israeli-teamclaim-iranian-withdrawal-was-politically-motivated Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

th

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However, I can find no record of further discussions on the matter and, so far as I can discover, there is no IOC policy decision regarding conditions for future Iranian participation. This is a most undesirable state of affairs. Iran is either in or out it should decide and the IOC should take firm action against contest refusal. So long as it does not take a position on this matter, it prejudices the efforts of its President to to inspire young people around the world to participate in sport145 without discrimination of any kind.146 It is one thing to talk the talk of Olympism, but another for young athletes to see it in action. The Olympic Charter states that the Mission of the IOC includes a commitment to oppose any political or commercial abuse of sport and athletes.147 Now, it may well be the case that the IOC is pursuing its aims with quiet diplomacy, in the hope that this will bring better results than confrontation or a ban. But it should leave no doubt that contest refusal will not be tolerated again in London 2012 or, indeed, ever. 148 149

Conclusion
Young athletes (even child athletes) have always participated in the Olympic Games, but the YOG represents a new step towards the systematic distribution of elite sport into the child population. This brings with it serious ethical risks and important value questions, and so its effects should be carefully monitored. However, it also brings great opportunities, and I have tried to highlight some examples of challenges, innovations and issues that invite reflection. I think that these examples show that, whilst some novel questions are thrown up by a Youth edition of the Olympic Games, many of the issues covered simply highlight already-existing challenges for the Olympic Movement, although sometimes in a novel form, and many of the ethical and other value questions raised have much have wider application and consequences. They also show that it is essential that serious efforts are made towards an effective education and culture programme at the YOG. To the great credit of the IOC and the Singapore hosts, the organisation of and provision for educational and cultural activities set new standards for a sporting event, and it will be interesting to see how this develops. This, however, is a topic for another paper.

145

Shokoohi, K. (2010a). Games They Can Call Their Own, IOC Newsletter 6 August 2010, available at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympic-Games/?articleNewsGroup=-1&articleId=96176 Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 146 p.10 in IOC, 2010. XIII Olympic Congress of 2009 in Copenhagen, Factsheet for Theme 4 (Olympism and Youth). 147 p.15 in IOC, 2010. XIII Olympic Congress of 2009 in Copenhagen, Factsheet for Theme 4 (Olympism and Youth). 148 Magnay, J. (2010b). Political row overshadows Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, 16 Aug 2010, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/7947737/Political-row-overshadows-Youth-OlympicGames-in-Singapore.html Last accessed on 12 August 2011. 149 th Toney, J. (2010). Sad Soleimani the only loser and Rogge must act, Sports Beat, 16 August 2010, available at http://www.morethanthegames.co.uk/youth-olympics-2010/1612125-sad-soleimani-only-loser-and-roggemust-act Last accessed on 12 August 2011.

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Part 2: Lectures of Susan Brownell

The Olympic Games in the World System: Reflections on the Future of Globalization
The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games were only the third Olympic Summer Games held outside the West and its former colonies, after Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988. If one adds the 1972 Sapporo and 1998 Nagano Winter Games, they were the fifth Olympic Games outside the West. China in 2008 was arguably the least Westernized nation to yet home the Olympic Games. It was also the first East Asian country to hold the Games that is not host to U.S. military bases. When measured by the numbers of Westerners in China, it was the greatest-ever meeting of East and West in peacetime. The Beijing Olympics marked the moment when the most populous nation in the world, and the one that is located farthest from the political centres of the West both geographically and culturally, became incorporated into the global system more than ever before in human history. As we saw from the protests surrounding the international torch relay and the ultra-nationalist response among some segments of Chinese society, the process of Chinas incorporation was not smooth. It seems apparent there is a deep-seated mistrust and fear of China in the West, a fear of an unknown Other.

The French intellectual tradition, the Olympics, and China150

Actually China should not be that that unknown anymore after 400 years of interaction with the West. Since you are a French-speaking audience, I thought it might be interesting for you if I outline some the connections between the French intellectual tradition, the Olympics, and China which was part of the historical background for the Olympic Games. From the 16th to the 18th century, the Jesuits were the main group to introduce Chinese culture to the West. By describing Confucian thought as a secular philosophy, not a religion, they allowed converts to continue to practice ancestor worship and Confucian rites, which, they argued, were civil rites and not idolatry. This also proved that Christianity was not necessary for morality, and that a secular moral system was conceivable. This eventually kicked off the Rites Controversy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which lasted one hundred years. The Church finally condemned the Jesuit standpoint in 1742 with a papal decree. But this heated debate inspired the Philosophes in the Enlightenment as they sought to escape the limitations of Christian thought. In 1764 Voltaire wrote of China: the organization of their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen [...] when we [Europeans] did not know how to read, they knew everything essentially useful of which we boast today. 151

150

This historical section, up to the discussion of the Beijing Olympics as a turning point, incorporates material from Susan Brownell, Western-centrism in Olympic Studies and its Consequences in the 2008 Beijing th Olympics, 18 Earle F. Zeigler Lecture Keynote Address, Pathways: Critiques and Discourses in Olympic th Research, 9 International Symposium for Olympic Research of the International Olympic Studies Centre of the University of Western Ontario, Beijing, China, August 7, 2008; Susan Brownell, China's Olympic Debut - its Place in Olympic and East Asian History, delivered before the Carroll R. Pauley Memorial Endowment Symposium on "The Great Common Denominator: Sports in History, History in Sports," University of NebraskaLincoln, October 22-23, 2009.

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This positive view changed to a negative one at the end of the 18th c. with Montesqieu, who wrote: Our missionaries inform us that the government of the vast empire of China is admirableMight not our missionaries have been deceived ? *+ China is therefore a despotic state, whose principle is fear. 152 Although there were thinkers who argued against him, his negative view of Chinese government as oriental despotism ultimately prevailed. The Jesuit writings about Confucius were foundational in forming the concept of a secular religion and answering in affirmative the question of whether a non-Christian moral code could possibly exist. These new ideas were crucial in the overthrow of European monarchies with authority underpinned by the Church; the Christian symbols were replaced by non-Christian symbols of state authority and celebratory festivals. The vast majority of these non-Christian symbols were ultimately derived from ancient, pagan Greece. It is important to give the Jesuit writings about China their due role in this change of thinking, because what China provided was an example of a non-Christian state and moral system. Two hundred fifty years later, the concept of secular religion would be a very important concept for Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. Coubertin attended a Jesuit high school, the Externat-Saint Ignace, Paris from 1875-80. Collections of the revised letters of the Jesuit missionaries in China were part of the teaching materials used in Jesuit schools. He was aware of Confucius at least by 1902, when he mentioned that he had consulted Confucius in constructing his ideas about "sportive pedagogy. In 1925-26 he published L'Histoire Universelle, which included a section on Asia with several mentions of Confucius, including the assessment that the person is sympathetic, but his doctrine is poor. Jesuit influence can be seen in Coubertins philosophy of internationalism and in his recognition that in the modern world it was not possible for a single faith to be valid for everyone, and therefore moral education should teach tolerance; mutual respect was the foundation of democracy. The Olympic Games were an attempt to form a secular religion religio athletae - in the pursuit of world peace. In many ways, the Olympic Games still are an attempt to create a global secular religion. And in this sense, the grandiose ceremony that we saw in Beijing manifested the fact that the Olympic Games had returned home to the country where the idea of secular religion had originated. By the way, there was also another very important French Jesuit connection with the Chinese Olympic Movement. The International Olympic Committee member in China, He Zhenliang, spent seven years attending the Jesuit-run Ecole Franco-Chinoise in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, after his family escaped to the French concession in Shanghai when the Japanese bombed their silk factory and occupied the city where they lived. It was there that he learned the French that later enabled him to be a leading figure in Chinese sports diplomacy.153 He began his

151 152

Voltaire, as quoted in H. G. Creel, Confucius: the Man and the Myth (New York: John Day, 1949) 89, 256. Spirit of the Laws VIII: 21. 153 Liang Lijuan, He Zhenliang and Chinas Olympic Dream (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2007), translated by Susan Brownell, p. 6.

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career in the 1950s as a French interpreter for Premier Zhou Enlai and occasionally for Chairman Mao. He was switched to sports diplomacy in the years of ping-pong diplomacy, and he was put forward by the Chinese as Chinas first member of the International Olympic Committee in 1981 because he was one of the few people in the sports world whose facility in either French or English was good enough. He was greatly respected in the IOC, and since Olympic Games are awarded to host cities as much based on personal feelings as on rational logic, it is possible that Beijing would not have gotten the Games without him. In 2008 an IOC member once told me that actually the Olympic Games were a lifetime achievement award for Mr. He.

Thought Experiment
With this background, I would like to begin with a thought experiment. As we know, in the search for new cultural forms that followed the French Revolution, reformers increasingly turned to the symbolism of ancient, pagan Greece, and that is why today the buildings of government in the West are modelled after ancient Greek architecture. The first known call for a revival of the ancient Olympic Games appeared in 1790 in France. But there was a time before the end of the eighteenth century and before Montesquieu when China had as good a chance of becoming the model for good government in the West as did ancient Greece. If things had turned in a different direction in the late eighteenth century, today instead of gleaming marble neoclassical facades, the U.S. White House and Capitol Building, the city hall in Ghent, and government buildings in Europe and North America might have been styled as neoOriental architecture, with curved and layered roofs with brightly painted under-eaves like the Temple of Heaven because when we were toppling monarchies and constructing our new democracies in the Western hemisphere, these symbols legitimized it with their reference to the ancient and civilized government of China. For the past century or more, the world would have been coming together in peaceful exhibitions and competitions of taiji quan, wushu, and dragon boat racing, and the West would feel embarrassed by its barbaric sports that overly emphasize savage competition, while lacking a philosophical framework connecting civilized humans with the entire cosmos. Almost every instalment of this World Eastern Sports Games, the grandest festival of humanity on the planet, would have been held in the Eastern Hemisphere - except for three excursions into the Western hemisphere, which would have made Europe and North America feel like they were on the periphery of the world system. With this little excursion into history, let me now move forward to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

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Olympics as a Turning Point?154

Inside China, it was often said that the Beijing Olympics would facilitate Chinas integration into the world community. Outside China, it was often said that the Beijing Olympics were a coming-out party marking Chinas emergence as a superpower on the world stage. In either case, the idea was that the Olympics would be a turning point for China as well as for the global power structure. Now that the Beijing Games are over, we can ask whether anything turned, and if so, in which direction? And really, the larger question is: Do the Olympic Games really have the power to turn the world system? In what follows, I want to deal with a central paradox of the Olympic Games they reinforce nationalism and internationalism at the same time. A one-sided focus on nationalism, such as characterized much of the media coverage of the Beijing Olympics, can lead to the erroneous conclusion that the Olympic Games exacerbate rather than moderate political conflicts. Wishful thinking that the Beijing Games would be a turning point for human rights and democracy led to the conclusion by China watchers in the West that the Beijing Games were not the turning point that was hoped for. But let us place the Beijing Games into a historical perspective. Most of the modern Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1988 took place in the shadow of wars, past, present, and future. The political animosity surrounding Beijing 2008 was especially highlighted by contrast with the comparatively tranquil background of the four preceding Olympics. The Albertville 1992 Winter Games had been the first Olympics in history considered to have 100% participation, with no boycotts or IOC-dictated exclusions. South Africas exclusion since 1964 had ended in 1988, but the tail end of the Cold War had extended into the Seoul Games with the boycott by North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia. The Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics were marred only by the IOCs barring of Yugoslavia; both there and at the preceding Albertville Games, the former Soviet Union was represented by the Unified Team. From the Barcelona Olympics onward the Games were considered to forward integration and reconciliation, and the political issues that dominated public opinion were domestic or regional - Catalonian sovereignty in Barcelona 1992; the rise of the American South and racial integration in Atlanta 1996; Aboriginal rights in Sydney 2000; Greece taking its place as a respected EU member in 2004. The last time there had been anything as intense as Beijing, it had been a long time ago. There had been the African anti-apartheid boycotts of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet Unions invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Of course, many parallels were drawn between the Beijing Games and the 1936 Berlin Games. I frequently responded to journalists who brought up this parallel by remarking that there was one huge difference between Berlin and Beijing and that was that China was not getting ready to invade its neighbors and initiate a world war.

154 The following discussion utilizes material from The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? Chinas First Olympics in East Asian Perspective, in The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Localism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism, William Kelly and Susan Brownell (eds.) (New Haven: Yale Council on East Asian Studies Monograph Series, 2011), pp. 185-204; Susan Brownell, The Beijing Olympics as a Tu rning Point? Chinas First Olympics in East Asian Perspective, The Asia -Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 23-4-09 (June 8, 2009). www.japanfocus.org/-Susan-Brownell/3166.

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Another way of looking at the difference was that despite all the heated rhetoric in the media, leading up to the Beijing Olympics, no serious athlete asked for a boycott of the Games - nor sports administrator, nor even politician. A few politicians boycotted the opening ceremony, but in the end 204 national Olympic committees - more than in any previous Games - brought a total of 11,196 athletes. Over 100 national dignitaries - of which about 85 were sovereigns and heads of state - took part in the opening ceremony, more than had ever attended any previous opening ceremony. It was the first opening ceremony outside the U.S attended by an American president. So the 1936 Berlin Games are not a good comparison, because the world was very different in 1936. If we want to understand what, if anything, turned in 2008, the best comparison is with Chinas East Asian neighbours. Reflection on what actually turned in Japan and South Korea helps us to see what we should actually be looking for in the case of China. This retrospective offers a more optimistic prospect for Chinas peaceful integration into the international community.

Tokyo Olympics as a Turning Point

Japan was the first East Asian nation to host an Olympic Games. Its coming-out party was originally scheduled for 1940. Tokyos bid for those games was so politically controversial that the IOC had to postpone its vote on them for one year. The Games were finally not held due to World War II. By the time the Olympic Games actually took place in Tokyo in 1964, Japan was a nation defeated in war. Many of the symbols of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics re-established pre-war Japanese national symbols.155 Japan did not have an official national flag or anthem in 1964: the Rising Sun flag and the national anthem had been proscribed by the occupation authorities after World War II and were not officially reinstated as the national flag and anthem of Japan until 1999, and indeed, they have been plagued by controversy ever since. However, the logo of the Tokyo Olympics consisted of the rising sun over the five Olympic rings, which was also used in the first of the four official posters. But in the Olympic Games, instead of the Japanese public seeing this flag flying above military troops, they saw it placed it in a peaceful context among the other flags of the world. The Tokyo 1964 torch relay passed from its origin in Olympia, Greece through six countries that Japan had once invaded (interestingly, not Korea) - and finally to Okinawa, which at that time remained a U.S. military colony, a situation that remains a source of protest in Japan to this day. An Okinawan movement for return to Japan was gaining strength as the Olympics neared. During the relay in Okinawa, rising sun flags were waved by spectators on the roadside and the proscribed national anthem was played.156

155 Christian Tagsold, The Tky Olympics as a Token of Renationalization, in Andreas Niehaus and Max Seinsch, eds., Olympic Japan: Ideals and Realities of (Inter)Nationalism (Wrzburg: Ergon, 2007); Tagsold, Die Inszenierung der kulturellen Identitt in Japan. Das Beispiel der Olympischen Spiele Tky 1964 (Munich: Iudicium, 2002); Jilly Traganou, Design and National Identity in the Olympic Games of Greece, Japan, China, paper presented at the conference From Athens to Beijing: West Meets East in the Olympic Games, International Olympic Academy, Greece, May 24, 2008. 156 Shimizu, Satoshi, Rebuilding the Japanese Nation at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics: The Torch Relay in Okinawa and Tokyo, in The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Localism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism,

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In the opening ceremony, Japans portrayal of itself as a victim was embodied by the atom boy who lit the Olympic cauldron, a child born on the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Japanese militarization was resumed by the prominence of Self-Defence forces in the opening ceremony. Emperor Hirohito declared the Games open even though he was not officially the head of state called for by IOC protocol. While detailed scholarship on U.S. and Asian reactions to the use of symbols associated with emperor, nation, American killing, and the Asia Pacific War is lacking, it appears that neither the U.S. nor the Asian victims of Japanese colonialism and war publicly opposed the use of contested symbols. Because all of this was largely unremarked in the West, the Tokyo Olympics are recalled today as a peaceful turning point in Japans integration into the international community. In China, many people consider that this period in Japan was the beginning of the re-growth of Japanese militarism, and they blame the U.S. for not stopping it. Christian Tagsold in his book about the Tokyo Olympics,157 demonstrates that in the Olympic educational programs in Japan, national identity was re-located within a larger international context. In China, too, the educational project was oriented toward leading youth toimagine China taking its place in the international community. The content of the school programs largely imparted knowledge about the world outside China, and in this respect it differed markedly from the inwardlooking focus of previous national educational/propaganda campaigns. Western observers tended to dismiss Beijings Olympic education as just another nationalist propaganda campaign, but I believe they were missing the important point: true, one major goal was patriotic education but as in Tokyo, the old nationalist symbols were re-shaped by association with symbols of internationalism, the global community, and world peace. This is the paradox of the Olympic Games they reinforce nationalism and internationalism at the same time. Perhaps the national identity itself is not greatly changed, but it is an important shift in orientation if the holders of that identity start to see their nation as an equal partner among friendly nations instead of a victimized nation among hostile nations.158

William Kelly and Susan Brownell (eds.) (New Haven: Yale Council on East Asian Studies Monograph Series, 2011), pp. 39-60. 157 Tagsold, Die Inszenierung der kulturellen Identitt in Japan. 158 Susan Brownell, Beijings Olympic Education Program: Re-Thinking Suzhi Education, Re-Imagining an International China, China Quarterly, vol. 197(2009): 44-63.

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Seoul Olympics as a Turning Point

Looking back on the 1964 torch relay and Olympics from the perspective of 2008, one wonders why the Tokyo Games did not incite a furor as the Beijing Games did. But the lead-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics was even worse, because it involved outbreaks of actual violence. The President was assassinated in 1979, eighteen days after officially announced the intention to bid for the Olympic Games; the next year General Chun Doo-hwan seized power in a military coup. In September 1981, Seoul was selected as the host city by the IOC. In October 1983, a North Korean assassination attempt on the President killed 14 South Korean officials. And then less than one year before the Olympic Games, North Korean operatives carrying out a personal order by President Kim Jong-Il left a bomb on a Korean Air jet, killing 115 people. Primarily because of this act North Korea was listed as a State Sponsor of Terrorism by the U.S. State Department in 1988. It was not removed from the list until October 11, 2008. This history has since been overshadowed by the positive recollection that the Olympics brought democracy to South Korea just before the Games in 1987. This rosy view of Olympic history neglects the subsequent events in which Chun and Roh were convicted of mutiny, treason, and bribery and blamed for the 1980 Kwangju massacre of several hundred pro-democracy protesters.

Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point?

There were many people, including IOC members and Chinese journalists, who wondered if the Beijing Olympics could stimulate a democratic transition in China like that attributed to the Seoul Olympics. If they were looking for a dramatic change, they were disappointed. But there were key differences in China. One difference was the lack of a real external military threat. One hope of the South Korean government was that, by focusing world attention on South Korea, the Olympics would increase world awareness about the North Korean threat and purchase a form of insurance against northern aggression. It would appear that the Games succeeded on both counts. In the analysis of IOC member Dick Pound, the military gained a sense of security from the expressions of support for the Games issuing from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as well as other members of the socialist bloc. Because of this insurance the conservative military stood back and allowed a democratic transition to begin before the Games had even started.159 Unlike South Korea, in the past three decades China has experienced peaceful transitions of power in the midst of sweeping social and economic change, and there is currently widespread popular support for gradual instead of dramatic political change. In 2008 the Tibet uprisings and the violent acts, or foiled intended acts, of groups classified as terrorist had an internal function similar to the external threat to South Korea; they strengthened the conservative position of the Chinese security system. It was not clear to me how well the political history surrounding the Seoul Olympics was known by intellectuals and policy-makers in China but if it were fully understood, I can imagine that South Koreas move toward democracy would serve as a counter-model because of the massive

159

Richard W. Pound, Five Rings over Korea: The Secret Negotiations Behind the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul (Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1994), pp. 320-23.

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popular demonstrations that accompanied it, while in China there is currently a strong aversion toward mass protests. This does not, however, mean that the same forces that pushed South Korea toward political reform were not at work in China. The presence of the international media, the negative image of South Korea it conveyed to the world, and the legitimacy it conferred on demonstrators and opposition politicians forced the ruling party to make significant political concessions. Global scrutiny of China in 2008 was much greater and it does appear that this pressure had effects. The domestic pressure for greater media freedom and government transparency has increased since 2008, not just because of the Olympics, but also because of the Wenchuan earthquake and the tainted milk scandal. The government has been pushing back with tighter controls over freedom of expression, especially on the internet, but we should be clear about why it is doing this: the Olympic Games increased Chinas exposure to the ideas of the outside world, and there is still a faction in the Communist Party that does not like this. The Olympics stimulated active debates about Chinas inability to effectively communicate a national image to the outside world that are now going on, and in 2009 the government announced a large investment of US$6.6 billion dollars into foreign communications and public diplomacy. This resulted in the creation of three China National Image television advertisements that aired on BBC and CNN and on the screen in New Yorks Times Square, as well as the launch of an online television platform, CNTV, that web streams China Central Television live. You can now watch all nine channels of China Central Television live on your iPhone. Free copies of the English-language China Daily are being distributed in selected cities around the world since January, and my sister has been receiving one on her doorstep every Friday in Houston. This is part of Chinas effort to promote its soft power abroad, which refers to the use of a positive national image and the attempt to attract supporters, rather than the use of military and economic power to force people to support you. These days people in the U.S. have a growing fear of Chinas increasing military strength. But when I had the opportunity to attend banquets with government officials in China and listen to them talk to each other in Chinese, I discovered that they were not talking about military power, but they were very proud of Chinas civilization and culture, and what they really wanted was to see Chinese culture play a more prominent role in global culture. The temporary Olympic law that guaranteed more freedom to foreign journalists was extended indefinitely just as it expired on October 15, 2008. A higher level of organized dissidence in comparison with recent years was revealed when Charter 08, a document calling for political reform signed by 303 Chinese intellectuals and activists, was initiated in late spring 2008 and publicly issued in December 2008. China published its first Human Rights Action Plan in April 2009. Of course, we then saw the limits of change when the political dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, and became the first recipient who did not have a representative present at the ceremony to receive it. Still, I believe that a ferment that was stirred up by Chinas intensified interaction with the outside world in the process of organizing the Games. This ferment may produce some immediate changes, or it may produce no concrete changes at all; most likely it will produce some gradual changes, which is what Chinese people seem to support. China is changing but only greater distance will allow us to look back and assess it.

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Why we remember Tokyo and Seoul as peaceful turning points

When we carefully re-examine the 1964 and 1988 Olympics, it is surprising that we remember them today as turning points in the peaceful integration of Japan and South Korea into the global community. Why would peace be associated with these events so clearly connected with war? Maybe the Olympic ceremonial pageantry and the sports events themselves worked their magic to leave lasting memories segregated from the surrounding politics and remembrances of war. Tagsold presents an argument that is very thought-provoking about the difference between the world in 2008 and the world in 1964. He says that one reason the Tokyo Olympics did not erupt into heated political debates was the general historical context: in the Cold War era, the effort to delimit the Olympic Games as apolitical was stronger than it is now because the international political stakes were higher.160 It is worth reflecting upon the fact that the Beijing Olympic Games were the first East Asian Olympics to take place in a nation that is not host to U.S. military bases, and U.S. military bases are surely an indicator of potential instability. In 1964 this produced a stronger will not to know than was present in 2008. In a sense, people knew when to keep their mouths shut and just try to keep moving forward. If this argument is correct, then the conclusion about the Beijing Olympics is that the heated public arguments were actually made possible by the fact that the world order is much more stable and peaceful now than in 1964; this provides a foundation upon which people feel freer to express criticism in the context of the Olympic Games. The 2008 Olympics were a media mega-event far exceeding what the Tokyo Olympics were, and this provided a platform for human rights and Tibet advocacy groups with a higher level of media savvy and organization than had heretofore been seen in the Olympic context. It was easy to be misled by the heat of the media coverage into believing that profound political conflicts were occurring, but the conflicts were not between politicians. The politicians were apparently having a good time and making deals. For example, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs quietly announced on its website that after discussions held during the Beijing Olympics, it was altering its position on the status of Tibet, which it had held since 1913, to finally recognize Chinas sovereign authority over it. This was a big step forward in resolving conflicts over the Dalai Lama. Spectators might have been observing the race for medals between the U.S. and China, wondering how the U.S. would respond to defeat, but wellinformed observers felt that Sino-U.S. relations had been strengthened through the Games and perhaps had become closer than they had ever been since 1949. In sum, if the 1964 Games were a turning point in Japans peaceful integration into the international community, we can probably point to a similar outcome of the 2008 Beijing Games. Perhaps as the heated emotions surrounding the Beijing Olympics fade into the distance, they will look similar to the Tokyo and Seoul Olympics in hindsight, and we will also remember them as a turning point in Chinas peaceful integration into the world community.

160

Christian Tagsold, The Tokyo Olympics: Politics and Aftermath, in The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Localism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism , William Kelly and Susan Brownell (eds.) (New Haven: Yale Council on East Asian Studies Monograph Series, 2011), pp. 61-74.

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The Rise of East Asia

I would like to conclude with an observation about East Asia as a region, which will finally return me to the thought experiment that began my talk. Chinas rise as a sport superpower may have seemed very rapid, but actually it had a one -hundred year history. As early as 1908, patriotic YMCA educators had asked when China would be able to invite the nations of the world to an Olympic Games; for them, this symbolized Chinas taking its place as an equal among the world powers. East Asias modern Olympic history dates to the Far Eastern Olympic Games first held in Manila in 1913. They were the first regional games in the world, and originated when the American YMCA used the Philippines as a launching point to spread sports throughout East Asia. The IOC regarded them as enough of a threat to the Olympic Games that they were requested to remove the word Olympic from their title, and after the first instalment they became the Far Eastern Athletic Championships. This was one of the earliest cases of the IOCs protection of its image. So the enthusiasm of East Asia for the Olympic Movement is over one century old. In 1964 Japan placed third in the gold medal count and in 1988 South Korea placed fourth, their highest placements of all time. In 2008, at its own Olympics, China came in first in the gold medal count with 51 gold medals to the U.S.s 36, but the U.S. beat China in the total me dal count, 110 to 100. Intelligence collected by the Chinese revealed that Japan had targeted China as its main rival. The Japanese government established a National Training Centre in 2000 and a system of subsidies for top athletes in 2003, leading to a fifth-place finish in the gold medal count at the 2004 Athens Olympics, the first time that it had defeated Korea (ninth) in the gold medal count since the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Athens 2004 Olympics marked the rise of East Asia as a region, since this was the first time that China, Japan, and South Korea had all finished in the top ten in the gold medal count (excepting the socialist bloc-boycotted 1984 Olympics). In 2008, China won, South Korea surprised in seventh, and Japan slipped to eighth due to South Koreas gold medal over Japan in the U.S.s own national sport of baseball.
Table 1: East Asia Rankings in Olympic Gold Medal Counts

Country China South Korea Japan Three-country total

1988 11 4 14 29

1992 4 7 17 28

1996 4 10 23 37

2000 3 12 15 30

2004 2 9 5 16

2008 1 7 8 16

So East Asia as a bloc has been steadily moving up the medal count since China rejoined the Olympic Movement in 1984. Furthermore, East Asias rise has stimulated other countries to increase investments in sport. When Germany found its sixth-place finish behind Japan unacceptable at the Athens Olympics, it initiated the revival of several of the former East German sports schools. In addition to Germany and Japan, a number of other sport superpowers were shamed by their performance in Athens, and their governments increased funding for sport, including Russia,

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Australia, and Great Britain; the British Olympic Association is currently pressing for greater funding on the premise that it, like China, should make a good showing at its own Olympic Games in 2012. In Beijing, Great Britain redeemed its national honor with an unexpected fourth (up from ninth), Germany climbed back into fifth place, Australia dropped to sixth (from fourth), South Koreas gold medal in baseball, which added salt to Japans wound. So part of a bigger picture here is that government investment in Olympic sport seems to be on the increase worldwide, stimulated in part by East Asias rise. However, leadership in the leading organizations of the Olympic Movement is still firmly dominated by Western Europe.
Table 2: Representation in IOC Structures by Region of the World, 2008

Region Europe Western Eastern Asia Africa Middle East South/Central America North America Oceania Total

IOC Members 48 37 11 14 18 6 14 5 5 110 44% 34% 10% 13% 16% 5% 13% 5% 5% 100%

IOC Executive Board 9 8 1 3 1 0 2 0 0 15 7% 0% 13% 0% 0% 100% 60% 53% 7% 20%

IF Headquarters 30 28 2 3 0 0 0 2 0 35 9% 0% 0% 0% 6% 0% 100% 86% 80% 6%

The NOC of Israel is a member of the continental association for Europe (European Olympic Committees, EOC) and is classified as European by the IOC, therefore its NOC and IOC member are counted there. Figures current as of January 2008, taken from the official IOC website, www.olympic.org.

East Asias influence has been slowly growing, but it is still small. Increasing Chinese power in the international sports world is easier said than done. One important obstacle for Chinese people is language. While younger people in the big cities are now starting to study English in the first grade of primary school, most older Chinese do not speak good enough English to function smoothly in international organizations. They are not fluent enough to think on their feet and stand up and speak from the floor without prior planning. Although it is changing quickly, China also does not have a large number of people trained in leading-edge sport management. The Beijing Olympics helped to push sport management forward very quickly because it gave a lot of people high-level experience, and this was the reason that China insisted that all its venue managers should be Chinese. We can probably expect to see them emerge as international leaders in the next decade. Chinese are also hindered in back-room dealing because they dont have the custom of sealing deals while drinking in bars late at night. They try to do it because they recognize that this custom is important for strengthening relationships, but they dont like it. Actually, the Foreign Affairs Discipline rules for interactions with foreigners in official settings require that they should not exceed 2/3 of their alcohol capacity. So, for the time being, leadership in the IOC and other international sport federations largely lies in the hands of Westerners.

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But another balance of power has already changed, and perhaps it is already weighted more toward the East than the West. This is the financial balance. If you include not just East Asia, but also the Middle East, this is even clearer. This is where the money to mount bids for major events and create new events is currently coming from.

World Martial Arts and Combat Games as a Turning Point

Let me now return to the thought experiment that began my presentation. Speaking of historical turning points, in the 18th century history did not turn in such a way that the U.S. Capitol Building looks like the Temple of Heaven. But it still might. The World Martial Arts and Combat Sports Games were held in Beijing in October 2010. This was the first multi-sport event organized by SportAccord (formerly, the General Association of International Sport Federations), the umbrella association for all of the International Sport Federations, whose chairman is Hein Verbruggen. As it happens, Verbruggen is the man who was the IOCs liaison with Beijing during the process of organizing the Beijing Olympics, in his capacity as the Chairman of the IOCs Coordination Commission for the 2008 Olympics. The Combat Games built upon relationships he formed through the Olympics. They included 13 combat sports, with the only Western sports being boxing and wrestling. The other 11 sports originated in East Asia: aikido, judo, ju-jitsu, karate, kendo, kickboxing, muaythai, sambo, sumo, taekwondo, and wushu. These are all popular sports worldwide and surely have the potential to grow into a big event with a lot of spectator appeal. The Combat Games could be interpreted as a power shift in the global sport system that involves competition with the IOC coming from collaboration between China, Russia, and SportAccord. Russia won the gold medal count with 18; China was second with 15; Great Britain was 26th with 4; the U.S. was 40th with no golds. Russia is now planning to host the second instalment. One thing that we have seen in recent years is that a financial shift of power in global sport toward the East is already underway. China has the economic resources to host major sports events, and many oil-rich Middle Eastern countries are starting to aggressively bid for major international events, including the Olympic Games. India hosted the Commonwealth Games and may not be too far behind if its economy continues to grow. To continue my previous thought experiment: maybe what did not happen in the 18th century will happen in the 21st century. Along with Chinas rise as a world superpower, Chinas system of government will once again become a model for the West as we start to feel that a highly centralized, one-party system is a more effective way to govern than a fragmented multi-party democracy. The World Martial Arts and Combat Sports Games will become the premier international sporting event, surpassing the Olympic Games. The center of balance of global economic power will be located in East Asia. So East Asia will be more important in the future, and in this respect the Olympic Movement will probably reflect global society. We will be less Western and perhaps more influenced by East Asian cultures and sports and values and virtues. Maybe its too much to say that the Olympic Games have the ability to make the world system turn. But rather they are a reflection of whats happening in the world on a global scale.

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Commercialism, Values, and Education in the Olympic Movement Today

In todays lecture, I will speak about the complex interrelationship between commercialism, education, and values in the Olympic Games. I will discuss two major tensions in the Olympic Movement. For over a century, there has been a tension in the Olympic Games between the European emphasis on culture and values vs. the utilitarian and commercial approach of Americans. Underlying this tension is a tension between nationalism and the transnational nature of global capitalism. The Olympic Games are used as a tool by both, but this instrumental use of the Games helps to maintain a balance of power between the two. Currently, there is tension in the Olympic Movement between the marketing view of the Olympic Games as a commercial brand, and the academic view of the Olympic Games as an educational movement. Actually, it is both, and each side complements the other. The fact that the Olympics are taught to schoolchildren as a part of their national history explains the resilience of the Olympic brand. The fact that the Olympics are an attractive marketing package makes them an effective vehicle for education; they are also a good vehicle to overcome the limitations of national education toward the creation of global citizens. The main point of this presentation is to show that the Olympic Games are a multifaceted phenomenon, and that we need a holistic social science perspective to better understand them. Neither the IOC nor the academic world owns the Olympic Movement or is the true keepers of the flame; the Olympics are not merely a political tool, nor merely a tool of big business. Actually, the Olympic Movement is not fully owned or controlled by anyone, but it is the desire of multiple interests to have a piece of it that has contributed to its growth in the past 150 years. The day when no one wants to hijack the Olympic Games for his own interest is the day when the Olympic Movement will truly be dead.

When Greece Saved the Games from America

A look at Olympic history reveals that marketing has always been a part of the modern Olympic Games. Even in the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the largest single source of revenue for the organizing committee had been the sale of commemorative postage stamps. Furthermore, since the beginning, there has been tension within the Olympic Movement between the Western European emphasis on culture and values and the American emphasis on commercialism and profit. This tension first emerged in the third modern Olympic Games in St. Louis in 1904 - the first to be held on American soil and outside of Europe - and it has continued ever since.

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In particular, the St. Louis Games are remembered by European historians today as one of the low points of the Olympic history due to Anthropology Days.161 Like the preceding Paris 1900 Olympics and the following London 1908 Olympics, the St. Louis Olympics were held in conjunction with an international exposition. With the exception of the special situation in Greece, where citizens and the wealthy Greece diaspora supported the first Olympics in 1896 and the Interim Olympics in 1906 for reasons of their national identity, the Olympic Games were not strong enough to stand on their own financially until the fifth modern games in 1912. In St. Louis, some 1,400 native peoples were on display inside the grounds of the Worlds Fair, and when added to the number in the concessions on the unofficial amusement zone outside the fairgrounds proper (the Pike), the total was around 3,000. Anthropology Days was an event in which the indigenous peoples who were on display at the Worlds Fair were persuaded to engage in Western sports so that the performances of the savages could be measured against those of the civilized Olympic athletes in order to demonstrate who was physically superior. One of the main motivations for Anthropology Days was revenue. The head of the Anthropology Department of the Fair, WJ McGee, counted on ticket sales to help finance the event and also help pay for his departments large grocery bills. In 1904, American organizers had already recognized the commercial potential of sport and used it as a publicity tool. The Europeans in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) viewed Anthropology Days with distaste. Pierre de Coubertin, the renovator of the modern Olympics, later wrote that the only original feature offered by the program was a particularly embarrassing one, and called Anthropology days a mistake, inhuman and the Olympic Games flawed. The promotional blurb on the back cover of a book about the 1906 Athens Olympic Games by the Olympic historian Karl Lennartz states that the 1906 Olympic Games saved the Olympic Movement after the organizational problems in 1900 in Paris and in 1904 in St. Louis.162 The notion that the Interim Olympic Games in Athens in 1906 saved the Olympics is the common storyline in Olympic history. But from what did Athens 1906 save the games? The St. Louis Games crystallized a long-term conflict in the Olympic Movement between American and European notions of what purposes Olympic sport should serve. Coubertin stated that he had wanted Rome to host the next Olympic Games because there alone, after its excursion to utilitarian America, would Olympism be able to don the sumptuous toga, woven with skill and much thought, in which I had wanted to clothe it from the beginning. He said that transferring the Games to St. Louis had been a misfortune with regard to his goal of including the arts in the Olympic Games, and this was one reason that he summoned an Arts Advisory Conference in May of 1906 to re -establish the link between Art and Sport. It is significant that Coubertin claimed that out of that conference came one of the most important protocol innovations of the Olympic Games: The Parade of Athletes in the

161

This discussion is from Susan Brownell, ed., The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). In particular, see Brownell, Introduction: Bodies before Boas, Sport before the Laughter Left, pp. 1 -58, and Nancy Parezo, A Special Olympics: Testing Racial Strength and Endurance at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, pp. 59 -126. 162 Lennartz, Karl, and Walter Teutenberg., Die Olympischen Spiele 1906 in Athen (Kassel: Kasseler Sport Verlag, 1992), back cover.

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opening ceremony.163 Actually, Coubertins claim was incorrect, because the first Parade of Athletes took place at the 1906 Interim Games in Greece, along with the raising of the flags of the first three medallists, and it appears that these were an innovation of the Greek organizers. So if we study the developments after 1904, it seems that there was a kind of European backlash against the messiness of the St. Louis Olympics, which were not only uncultured, but also were not organized according to national affiliation, since athletes represented clubs and not countries. The European response was to consolidate expressions of nationalism in the 1906 and 1908 Games by delegating the power to select teams solely to National Olympic Committees and by creating and elaborating on the Parade of Athletes, the Victory Ceremonies, and other expressions of national identity. This reflected the rise of nationalism in Europe leading up to World War I. However, if Greece saved the Olympic Games temporarily by injecting Western civilization and national identity back into the Games, it was ultimately unable to save them from American capitalism. In 1904, this was the wave of the future. A.G. Spalding & Bros. Sporting Good Company promoted its products by stating that they had been used in the Olympic Games. In 1928, Coca-Cola began its sponsorship of the Olympic Games, the longest-running Olympic sponsorship. One hundred years later, the pattern was repeated again As had happened in 1904, the Atlanta 1996 Olympics were criticized by Europeans for their hyper-commercialism, poor taste, and lack of culture, while the Americans felt satisfied because the level of the sports performances was high and many records were set. Greece saved the Olympic Games again when, as the official slogan put it, the Olympic Games went home to Athens in 2004. In sum, one century after the 1904 Olympics, Greece and the U.S. still represented two poles in the global order: old world culture vs. new world commercialism. The point of this discussion of Olympic history is to demonstrate that since its beginning there has been tension between the nationalism that divides the worlds peoples and the transnational commercial trade that ties them into global economic networks. The European view of sport has emphasized the former; the American view has emphasized the latter.

When the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics Saved the Games from Boycotts
In the middle of the journey from 1904 to 2004 stood the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, when the process was reversed. It is commonly said that the new levels of commercialism at those Games saved the Olympic Movement from the excessive nationalism that had resulted in national boycotts. A widespread understanding of Olympic history is to consider the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games as a turning point in Olympic history when they moved away from a money-losing event that required large subsidies from city and national governments. As the story goes, the IOC was on the verge of bankruptcy when Lord Michael Killanin was replaced by Juan Antonio Samaranch in 1980, and one of the reasons had been the problem of boycotts, especially the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow 1980 Olympics. According to Olympic legend, it was Peter Ueberroth, the President of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, who resurrected the Olympic Games by generating a

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de Coubertin, Pierre , Olympism: Selected Writings, ed. Norbert Mller (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), pp. 620, 408.

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large profit of $225 million through leading-edge sports marketing techniques, including sponsorship deals, television broadcasting rights, and even selling legs of the torch relay. Although the Soviets and their allies boycotted the Los Angeles Games, that would be the last major Olympic boycott. Those Games ultimately resulted in the reorganization of the financing of the Olympic Movement, and to that topic I now turn.

The Commercial Legacy of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics

Australia and the U.S. are the only developed countries where the National Olympic Committee receives no funding from the national government. But in Australia, the state governments invest in Olympic sport by way of voluntary contributions to the Australian Olympic Foundation. In the U.S. there is a large amount of indirect investment by the federal government - and even more by so state governments - due to the fact that school and university sports are the pillar of the U.S. sports system, and these receive government allocations (state universities receive allocations from state governments). But there is no direct investment by the federal government. So where does the USOC get its revenue, if not from the national government? The 1978 Amateur Sports Act chartered the U.S. Olympic Committee and gave it the authority over all the national governing bodies for the Olympic sports. It also gave the USOC the right to use the Olympic rings and the word Olympic and to sell those rights to corporate suppliers. According to the IOCs Olympic Charter, every National Olympic Committee is entitled to use the rings under certain conditions. The U.S. government did not own the rights to the Olympic marks; nevertheless, the tacit agreement in 1978 was that the federal government would permit the USOC to raise revenues via ownership of the Olympic marks, and based on that the government would stay out of sport. The USOC argues that the domestic law supersedes the Charter. Perhaps it was done with good intentions at the time, because there was a huge amount of unapproved use of the Olympic marks in marketing and the Amateur Act was intended to get it under control and direct the revenues into Olympic sport. However, the Amateur Sports Act was in 1978, ten years before the IOC established The Olympic Partner (TOP) program. In 1984, the Los Angeles Olympics generated a profit and the IOC took notice. In 1988, the IOC tried to consolidate control over the use of the Olympic marks in various countries so that it would have the ability to create global sponsorships that could be sold to multinational corporations. Michael Payne, the Director of Marketing at the IOC, was the one who led this effort under the leadership of President Samaranch.164 But the IOC was at that point one step behind the Americans. For them, allowing the IOC to sell global sponsorships meant sacrificing their own ability to sell domestic Olympic sponsorships. Therefore, a contract was negotiated in perpetuity in 1988 that gave the USOC twenty percent of the TOP sponsorship and 12.75% of the rights fees paid by the American broadcaster of the Olympic Games. The result was that a large amount of the IOCs revenues from TOP sponsorship program and TV broadcast rights fees went to one Olympic committee - the USOC. The original perpetual agreement with the USOC had been based on the fact that the sponsors were all American companies, and the

164

Michael Payne, Olympic Turnaround: How the Olympic Games Stepped Back from the Brink of Extinction to Become the World's Best Known Brand (New York:Praeger, 2006).

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U.S. broadcaster paid far more than any other national broadcaster. It is true that to some extent at that time, U.S. corporations were bankrolling the Olympic Games. But by the time of the most recently completed Top VI (2005-2008) only five of the twelve sponsors were American, while the remaining seven were not. However, some people within the IOC did not even accept the original argument, because the headquarters of those sponsors might be in America, but the money comes from around the world. The growth of the business in American companies in recent years has mainly been abroad, not in the United States. The IOC gives them the marketing platform that contributes to that growth. The USOCs share amounted to $173 million from both the Torino and Beijing Olym pics, which were covered in the 2005-2008 TOP VI program ($866 million), and $114 million from the fees that NBC paid for the Beijing Olympics ($894 million).165 If you look at the division of the Olympic revenues,166 you see that the IOC only keeps less than 10% percent of the total revenues. The IOC earned $866 million from TOP VI. Out of the TOP VI revenue the IOC starts deducting certain amounts. The first item is the 20 percent that goes to the USOC and after that 50% goes to the organizing committees of the winter (20%) and summer (30%) Games (BOCOGs share was $260 million). The remaining 20% goes to all the other NOCs. From TOP VI $139 million went to the 203 NOCs around the world combined which was less than the $173 million that went to the USOC alone. Out of the 10% that it retains from the TOP program and its other revenues, the IOC gives money to the NOCs (via Olympic Solidarity), the International Paralympics Committee (IPC), the Paralympic Games Organizing Committees, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In 2010 it also started contributing funds to the summer and winter Youth Olympic Games. The NOCs and IFs also support the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne from the amounts they receive from the IOC. The television broadcasting revenue is allocated differently but it still begins with a large amount going to the USOC, because it gets 12.75% of the amount paid by the American broadcaster, which is far larger than the fees paid by any other broadcaster. In 2008 the fees paid by NBC were about twice as much as those paid by the second-biggest broadcaster, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) ($443 million for 2008 vs. $894 million for NBC). After the USOCs share is deducted, out of the remaining broadcasting revenues ($233.6 million in 2008) a share is given to the 26 International Federations on the schedule of the upcoming Olympic Games, in differential amounts by four categories. The international track and field federation (IAAF) is the only federation in the first category, and it receives twice as much as the seven sports in category two (gymnastics, tennis, cycling, soccer, swimming, etc.); the other twenty get even less. So from the Beijing Olympics the IAAF got $26 million, but the swimming federation only got $13 million. The federations in the third tier got only $8 million. The International Federations became increasingly unhappy seeing the Americans taking away such a huge amount of money. Since these were percentages the gap increased in absolute terms as the revenues increased.

165

United States Olympic Committee Consolidated Financial Statements, December 31, 2008 and 2007, USOC 2008 Annual Report, p. 43, note 10, Broadcast Rights Income. 166 Figures from International Olympic Committee Marketing Factfile 2010.

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The USOC today probably still considers it better if the federal government does not finance sport, because the USOC is a relatively independent entity, and there are often conflicts between it and the federal government. But these days, many European and Asian members of the IOC see this from a completely different perspective: they feel that Olympic sport plays a positive role in society and that therefore governments should support it, but the U.S. government is shirking its moral duty and skimming a profit off the Olympic Games that rightfully should be distributed to world sport. Since 1984, national governments have been increasingly willing to guarantee finance for an Olympic Games, but not the U.S. government. In the U.S., Olympic Games are privately funded and the organizing committee has to gain most of its initial funding from sponsors, and that is difficult. Therefore, American candidatures, especially for the Summer Olympic Games, have become increasingly problematic. In 2009, when Chicago bid for the 2016 Games, the bid committee was unable to provide the financial guarantees from the government that were required by the candidature guidelines, and the Chicago bid committee requested that the Host City Contract should be changed. At the bid presentation in Copenhagen, President Obama said that he would help with security, but he did not say that if there were financial problems he would cover them. It was used against him by Brazils President Lula, who said of Rio de Janeiros bid, In our case its not just words. These days, the IOC is looking for those kinds of financial guarantees from governments. So at the IOC Executive Board meeting in Athens in June 2008, Hein Verbruggen, the president of SportAccord (formerly the General Association of International Sport Federations) called the USOCs share of the Olympic revenues an immoral amount of money. The President of the USOC at that time was none other than Peter Ueberroth. It was not until Peter Ueberroth left office and there were several shuffles of the leadership of the USOC that negotiations proceeded. The USOC agreed to contribute a share to the IPC, WADA, and CAS, and to reconsider the contract after 2013. Meanwhile, the IOC did not open the process for TOP VIII, keeping open the possibility of simply discontinuing the program as a way of nullifying the contract with the USOC. Looking at the big picture of the period from 1984 to the present, the commercialization of the Olympics on the one hand simply reflected the development of marketing as a whole, and the increasing use of sport as a marketing tool - particularly in the U.S., but also in other developed countries. On the other hand, there was something unique about the organization of Olympic sport and that was the desire of the IOC, the USOC, and other sport organizations to develop enough revenue from sponsorships and television broadcasting fees that they were not dependent on governments for their livelihood. This allowed them some independence from the whims of politicians; without this independence Olympic sport would always be vulnerable to being used as a political tool and, in particular, Olympic boycotts would always be a possibility. It is no coincidence that the beginning of the era of profit-making Olympic Games led to the end of the era of boycotts. However, by the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, many critical commentators felt that big business had become the driving force of the Games, and that the IOC and their sponsors wanted to hold the Beijing Olympics no matter what the cost in terms of human rights abuses in China, because their main goal was business as usual. I will discuss these issues in later lectures. So it seems that whether the Olympic Games are seen as a political tool or a tool of big business, there will always be critics who think they are just a tool and serve no bigger cause. At this point, I would like to return to my original thesis and point out that even if the Olympic Games are just a tool, at least they are

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a tool that is used to maintain a balance between national governments and transnational corporations. However, I believe it is reductionist to argue that the Olympic Games are just a tool of either governments or corporations. Yes, they are a tool of governments and corporations, but they are more than that. How do we know that they are more than that? There are many ways of answering this question, but in my lecture today, as one way of leading toward an answer, I would like to address the concept of the Olympics as a brand.

The Power of the Olympic Brand

Starting in 1983, Michael Payne introduced marketing concepts into the IOC while he was in charge of its marketing. In the marketing worldview, the Olympic marks are a brand, the Olympic Games are a product, and the image of the Games is an asset. In fact, it is virtually the only asset that the IOC possesses. With that asset - the image of the Olympic Games - the IOC creates a product, and that product is the Olympic Games. And thats marketing. The Olympics are a very strong brand; the five rings are one of the worlds most recognized trademarked symbols. Their success depends upon public opinion - upon the fact that four billion people want to watch this product.167 Switzerland has a brand name that says quality. Worldwide studies have shown that consumers are prepared to pay 15% more when Made in Switzerland is on the label compared with the names of other countries. This point was illustrated to me when I made a research trip to Lausanne before I came to Belgium. When I was searching for airfares online, I discovered that the price of the same colisted flight on the same airplane from Geneva to Brussels varies depending on whether one buys the ticket that is sold through Brussels Airlines or through Swiss International Airlines. The Swiss International Airlines ticket cost more than the Brussels Airlines ticket even though the carrier was Brussels Airlines and Swiss International Airlines was merely co-listing the flight. The image of a country is a very tangible thing that can bring in a lot of money. If the 15% over price that the Swiss manufacturers can get from their product because its from Switzerland is reduced to 10% because Switzerlands image is negatively affected by an event, it would have a multi-billion dollar effect on the economy - an effect, in fact, that is so large that it cannot be measured. China has a severe image problem. Made in China means that a product is cheap and poorly-made. That affects the ability of Chinese manufacturers to ask higher prices for their products. The Beijing Olympics were part of a major effect to increase Chinas soft power in the world by improving its national image. Thats why China made its first-ever 90-second television commercial, the China National Image Ad, and aired it on CNN and BBC just after the opening ceremony, followed by a commercial for Made in China in January 2010, and a second China National Image Ad that was aired in New Yorks Times Square and on CNN in January during President Hu Jintaos state visit with

167

From 2009 to 2011 I conducted over 30 hours of interviews with Hein Verbruggen, past President of the International Cycling Union, President of SportAccord, and Chairman of the IOC Coordination Commission for the Beijing Olympic Games. A large part of the analysis of the financing of the Olympic Movement today and the concept of the Olympic brand comes from those interviews, and I am grateful to him for sharing his wisdom. The opinions expressed herein are my own.

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President Obama in 2011. In the U.S., almost immediately after the Beijing Olympic Games, one started to hear comments about China that were unlike what had been heard before such as that they are better organized than us, they own us financially, they work harder than us, and (in a Republican television ad during the mid-term elections in 2010) soon we will be working for them. The satirical television cartoon South Park featured a show in which the child star of the show had a nightmare about the drummers in the opening ceremony, and waked up shouting, The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are going to take over the world! This change in the image of China was very sudden; before this time there had been a vague feeling of threat from China, but one did not hear frequent concrete mention in the popular media about China buying America or surpassing America as the worlds biggest economy. It demonstrates the strength of the Olympic Games that apparently the country itself has not been able to achieve a positive image in many years (although in the case of China, they were not trying very hard until recently), but by organizing the Olympic Games they could effect an immediate change in the image of a country of 1.3 billion inhabitants which has played a major role in the history of the world. When you are looking at five thousand years of history of the country, what does two weeks of sport matter? But look at the issue from the other side: If you didnt host the Olympic Games, what would you need to achieve the same result? You could spend billions of dollars investing in advertising, communications, and so on, and you would probably never achieve the same thing that you did with the Games. The operations budget of the Beijing Olympics Games was only slightly higher than that of the Athens Olympic Games due to the low cost of labour and living in Beijing it was US$2.783 billion. At the end of 2009 the Chinese government announced that it planned to invest nearly three times that much, US$6.6 billion, into Chinas foreign propaganda and public diplomacy effort. This included the Made in China and second China National Image ads just mentioned, as well as launching an online television platform, CNTV, that streams China Central Television live. I can now watch all nine channels of China Central Television live on my iPhone, something I cannot do with American commercial networks. Since January 2011 my sister, who lives in Houston, Texas, has received a free copy of the China Daily, the central governments English-language newspaper, on her doorstep every Friday. (Two weeks ago she was surprised to find that it contained a commentary by me on the reform of Chinas state-supported sport system!). Probably the image of China in the imaginations of everyone in this room was influenced by the Beijing Olympic Games, but how many of you have been influenced by China Network Television, the China National Image television ads, or China Daily? The operating expenses of the Olympic Games were just under US$3 billion dollars, and the investment in foreign communication was US$ 6.6 billion. From that perspective, when you calculate the investment that it took to achieve the change in image accomplished by the Beijing Olympic Games, it is very cheap compared with the result. This is why the competition to host the Olympic Games has become increasingly heated; they are recognized as an excellent vehicle for city branding and national image building.

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Reputational Risk and Limits of the Marketing Worldview

If you have a product that is mainly based upon an image - an excellent brand name - it is very vulnerable. Remember the Tylenol episode when a person put poison into Tylenol bottles in stores in America in one day, your image can be ruined. The challenge for the Olympic Games comes from the fact that the IOC licenses the use of its brand to a vast number of stakeholders, among which are the local organizing committee, the corporate sponsors, the television broadcasters, the national Olympic committees, and in some ways, the athletes themselves. In marketing language, trying to anticipate what can go wrong is called reputational risk assessment. (This is different from security risk assessment, which had occupied much more of the IOCs attention since the Munich terrorist attacks. Security risks are also a risk to reputation and image, of course.) Serious reputational risks could emerge in the case of poor organization, excessive commercialization, misuse of the symbols through ambush marketing, terrorist acts, government-led boycotts, protests, and other things. Therefore, as this line of argument goes, the IOC needs to carefully manage and control all uses of its brand. The experience of the Beijing Olympic Games made the IOC realize it needed to have a better way of broadly assessing the risks of taking the Games to different countries, and so in 2009 it announced the implementation of the 360 degree management policy, which was designed, among other things, to provide a broader reputational risk assessment than had previously been done. However, this marketing line of reasoning runs into a problem. If the Olympic Games are nothing but a brand and their image is the only real asset that the IOC owns, then the future of the Olympic Movement depends on the IOCs ability to carefully assess the risks to its brand that might emerge, starting from the early stages of the bid until after the Games have been staged and their legacy is managed by the host cities. In order to do this, the IOC must accurately understand what the image of the Games is. However, it is not easy to assess what the image of the Games is across sales territories managed by 205 national Olympic committees around the world. The Olympics are associated with competition, excellence, determination, celebration and fair play; with humanity, international friendship, peace, mutual respect between countries, global community; with patriotism, national identity, the display of national strength. Participation is the most important thing, but an Olympic medal is the highest honour most athletes can achieve. The Olympic Games are a festival of world peace, but the stadium is filled with nationalistic displays, the superpowers win most of the medals, and most of the nations present will win no medal at all. In other words, the meanings of the Olympic Games are multiple and contradictory. They also mean different things to people from different parts of the world. What is the difference between the Olympic Games and a chocolate bar? A normal product, whether it is tea or a chocolate bar, or a car, or a table, or a pen, is a concrete object bought by individual consumers. If you promise in advertising that the chocolate bar is a good chocolate bar, and you list the ingredients on the wrapper and promise satisfaction or your money back, then you have to make sure that the chocolate bar you sell is the chocolate bar you promised. People know exactly what they can expect and if you dont give it to them, you have committed the crime of fraud. Its not just a brand but its also a product, and the concrete nature of the product allows you to be held accountable by consumer rights laws. The Olympic Games are a product that comes out once every four years and never looks the same way twice. The IOC does not know exactly what people are

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expecting and the people do not know exactly what they will get. In fact, the suspense of wondering, What will happen? is part of the thrill of the Games. This is not anything like buying a chocolate bar. So if the expectations of the Olympic Games are so vague in the first place, how does the audience know if theyve gotten less or more? Is it possible for the Olympic Games to give the audience a little bit less than what they think they should get? How do you know? And since you are not held accountable for your product by consumer rights laws, what is the accountability of the IOC? Look, for instance, at the judging scandal in pairs figure skating at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Games. What is the negative effect of that on the IOCs product, the Olympic Games? IOC Presidents Samaranch and Rogge operated on the assumption that a bad judging system affects the sport itself. If it happens during the Olympic Games, it probably affects the Olympic Games as a whole, perhaps even more than the individual sport. When the boxing federation had a very poor judging system with a lot of corruption, Rogge refused to pay them their Olympic revenue until they had introduced a fair judging system. Figure skating, likewise, changed its judging system after 2002. Weightlifting has been threatened with exclusion if it does not clean up its doping problem. And yet, it does not appear that any of this has had much effect on the Olympic Games - if you consider that they have continued to grow in numbers of participants, numbers of sports, amounts of corporate sponsorships, television audience, and a whole host of indicators. So, from a marketing point of view, the Olympic Games dont quite make sense. Why is this product so strong, this brand so resilient? Could it be that there is a difference between the Olympic Games and a chocolate bar after all? Could it be that the Olympic Games do not follow the rules of a commercial product? Could it be that, in fact, the marketing worldview is not able to fully embrace all that the Olympic Games are?

Olympic Education as the Counterbalance to Commercialism

I would answer: the Olympic Games are much more than a brand. This marketing worldview has severe limitations. It is true that in the first decade of the 21st century marketing has become very important in this world that we live in; marketing now governs many aspects of our social life. But it does not govern all aspects of our social life. Market and society are not yet one and the same. And this is what explains the resilience of the Olympic brand. It is what explains the fact that terrorist attacks, corrupt judging, doping, over-commercialization, boycotts, and protests have not yet destroyed the Games, and by many measures they are bigger than ever. Because unlike a chocolate bar, the Olympic Games occupy an important place in national history and education in many countries in the world. This probably includes all of the developed countries, as well as increasing numbers of developing countries. So, the Olympics may be a brand, but they are much more than a brand. Schoolchildren do not learn about the history of chocolate bars in school. There is only one book on the Mars and Hershey chocolate companies, The Emperors of Chocolate, published in English. Thousands of books and articles on the ancient and modern Olympic Games have been

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written since the 18th century in all the major languages of the world.168 Probably millions of press reports have been written. The reason the Olympic brand can withstand attacks that would destroy a mere brand is that it has a name that is three hundred years old, certainly older than most brands in todays world; its reputation includes hundreds of stories and heroes and colourful pageantry, which give it a depth and complexity that no brand has; and it has consumers in every corner of the planet earth. In short, by comparison with the Olympic Games, a brand is a very shallow and simple thing. This, of course, implies that actually, no matter how hard the IOC might try to control the use of the Olympic marks through intellectual property protection, it really plays only a minor role in the creation of the worldwide image of the Games. The IOC believes that it owns the Olympic Movement, and that the stakeholders in the brand are the National Olympic Committees, the International Federations, local organizing committees, corporate sponsors, and television broadcasters. But who really owns the Olympic Movement? Actually, it is not completely owned by any of the key players who claim to own it. A large section of the Olympic Charter is devoted to the protection of the Olympic symbols, which consist of the five interlocked rings, the flag, the motto, the emblem, the anthem, the flame and torches, and a vague catch-all category of Olympic designations. It is control of these marks that gives the IOC the ability to generate huge revenues by selling corporate sponsorships and to prevent unwanted organizations from diluting the brand by, among other things, labelling their sports games Olympic. But Fundamental Principle #1 of the Olympic Charter also says that the Olympic Movement is an educational movement: Olympism is a philosophy of lifeblending sport with culture and education. Coubertin was primarily an educational reformer, and the first IOC included a number of prominent educators. Since its inception there has been a close link between the Olympic Movement and the academic world. Juan Antonio Samaranch is credited with overseeing the commercialization of the Olympic Games, but he also increased the IOCs attention to education. Although he was not much of a philosopher and did not explicitly state it, some scholars feel that he considered education to be the counterbalance to commercialism in the Olympic Movement. In 1995 he revitalized the Commission on Culture and it began organizing sport and art contests. As a result of the IOC reforms of 2000, the IOC created a new amalgamated Commission on Culture and Olympic Education, the largest commission in the IOC. The Olympic Museum in Lausanne, a special project under the Olympic Museum Foundation of which he was president, opened in 1993, and it contains a library and the Olympic Studies Centre. He established the Research Council in 1997, attached to the Olympic Studies Centre, which selected recipients for the Postgraduate Grant Programme that Samaranch authorized. I was a member of this committee from 2000 to 2008, and I had the pleasure of serving together with Belgiums Marc Maes in that time. Beyond these efforts, Olympic Education is largely conducted outside the formal structure of the IOC. The International Olympic Academy (IOA) in Olympia, Greece is funded by the Greek government; the IOC gives money not for operating expenses, but for NOCs to buy plane tickets for their participants. The IOA runs sessions for several hundred people each summer and coordinates the 122 National Olympic Academies worldwide. There are also a number of Olympic Studies Centers

168

Susan Brownell, Beijings Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 21-3.

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worldwide. The center at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona (UAB), founded by Miquel de Moragas leading up to the Barcelona Olympic Games, had an Olympic Chair, which was funded by the IOC under Samaranch but discontinued under Rogge. Other Olympic Studies Centers worldwide do not receive IOC funding. The Olympic Movement is not simply a corporate franchising structure; it owes its long existence in large part to its ability to mobilize people behind an idea. But ideas are produced by intellectuals who are not bound by trademark laws and franchise contracts. And therein lies a central dilemma of the IOC: it is an organization that has increasingly followed the corporate model since Rogge became its president; but the IOC gains legitimacy by claiming that it is about more than just commercialism. In the corporatization of the IOC, educators and academics were not defined as stakeholders. This conflicted with their own self-perception: purists among Olympic scholars consider themselves the keepers of the flame, while they consider those who were identified as the true stakeholders as merely participants in a commercial sell-out.

Beijings Olympic Education Programs

I would like to conclude by describing aspects of Beijings Olympic education program169 to illustrate my contention that in the end the Olympic Games are much more than a brand, that they cannot be fully owned by anyone, and that the role of education in shaping the image of the Games is at least as important as marketing, and perhaps more important. Like all recent host cities, when Beijing signed the host city contract in 2001, it committed to carry out Olympic education programs. During the 2007-2008 academic year, I was affiliated with the Olympic Studies Centre at the Beijing Sport University, and I was added to the Academic Experts group that was collaborating with the Olympic Education Standing Office of the Beijing Municipal Commission on Education (BMCE). Starting in 2005, the largest Olympic education program ever implemented by an Olympic host country was carried out in schools in Beijing and across China. The BMCE selected a total of 200 primary and secondary schools in Beijing City and 356 schools nationwide as Olympic Education Demonstration Schools with the responsibility of devoting at least two hours per month to Olympic education activities. By the end of 2007 hundreds more schools nationwide had engaged in hand-inhand sharing with the Olympic Education Demonstration Schools, taking the total number of schools involved to 1,100. It was estimated that these programs touched the entire school-age population of 400 million students nationwide (a figure that is just a wild guess). Actually, there was also a subterranean, non-official peoples or civil history. The key person was Pei Dongguang, whose English moniker is Donnie Pei, who received a Masters Degree from the International Olympic Studies Centre at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. In 1999 at the International Olympic Academy, Pei had been inspired by his conversations with the Dean, Kostas Georgiadis, who had led the Olympic education projects for the 2004 Athens Games. After the

169

This section is taken from Susan Brownell, Beijings Olympic Education Program: Re-Thinking Suzhi Education, Re-Imagining an International China, China Quarterly, vol. 197(2009): 44-63.

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success of Beijings bid in July 2001, Pei started collaborating with P.E. teacher Zhou Chenguang at Yangfangdian Primary School. While Zhou knew almost nothing about Olympic history and philosophy, he was immediately attracted by Peis discussion of sports as a way of teaching values. In 2002 Pei and Zhou initiated Chinas first experiential Olympic education activities in a school, a re enactment of the ancient Greek pentathlon. Pei had gotten this idea at the International Olympic Academy, where it was an annual tradition initiated by Ingomar Weiler, a professor in classics at the University of Graz in Austria. By late 2004, Yangfangdian Primary School had already held three annual instalments of its mock Olympic Games, complete with an opening ceremony in which students marched into the stadium representing different countries, wearing their traditional dress, shouting One World, One Dream in their language, and performing their traditional dances. Before each mock Olympics, Zhou Chenguang had faxed multiple invitations to BOCOG with little response from it or other official VIPs. In the 2005 opening ceremony for the mock Olympics, the group of students who marched onto the sports field as the U.S. wore blue jeans and cowboy hats, their interpretation of American ethnic costume. An Olympic angel holding a cardboard imitation of the Beijing Olympic torch lit the Olympic flame (red crepe paper blown by a fan fire being too dangerous) to the accompaniment of the Olympic anthem. The school turned its choral group into the Little Olympic Angel Chorus, which performed a moving rendition of Beethovens Ode to Joy or the Olympic Volunteers Song while wearing angel wings. Following Yangfangdians example, dozens of schools organized their annual sports meet as a mock Olympic Games with an opening ceremony. In 2005, Yangfangdian was designated the Pioneer Olympic Education Demonstration School. Because of this history, Pei and Zhou believed that Olympic education originally came from the people and not from the government or BOCOG. My point here is that Beijings Olympic education did not really come from the IOC. It came from the community of scholars who are located in Olympic Studies Centres around the world, and who meet each other in the summer sessions at the International Olympic Academy. This huge global network is facilitated by the IOC, but it is independent of the IOC. It engages in education, not marketing. Education is able to teach Olympic values with a depth that is not possible in marketing. Of course, marketing and education are not completely independent. Educators have found that the Olympics are a good vehicle for teaching values because children are excited by the thrilling sports event, pageantry, and aesthetically appealing symbols and mascots. In China, this was particularly exciting for teachers and students who were accustomed to the dry and politicized unified curriculum dictated by the Ministry of Education. Both education and marketing are complementary elements in the total phenomenon that is the Olympic Games. The examples from Beijings Olympic education that I described above illustrate that educators adapt the Olympic values to the local culture in creative ways, which leads to a tremendous diversity in the image of the Olympics worldwide, while Olympic marketing strives to achieve one voice and a unified message in the Olympic brand. So I have returned to the tension that started this presentation, the tension between national identity and transnational commercialism that is a fundamental dichotomy in the Olympic

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Movement. Because of their transnational nature, the Olympic Games also provide an opportunity for a new kind of education to create citizens for a world with less rigid borders between nations. As the Beijing Olympics approached, Ren Hai, a professor at the Beijing Sport University and the founder of Olympic education in China, looked back over his 15 years of designing curricula and reflected: Todays world lacks an education that focuses on a global horizon and is firmly based on the interests of humankind as a whole. It was precisely this lack that sparked the emergence of Olympic education. Olympic education aims to cultivate qualified citizens of the global village, to help them break through the various limitations of their respective societies, to impress the seal of a world citizen on top of the existing identity of a national citizen.170

Conclusions: The Interrelationship of Commercialism, Education, and Values

It is my opinion that our understanding of the total phenomenon of the Olympic Games is currently deficient because it is dominated by disciplines that concentrate only on one part of the phenomenon, like the blind man trying to describe the elephant by feeling its trunk. Sport marketing has become increasingly important in the Olympic Movement, and they like to see the Olympic Games as a brand. Physical educators are also important; they like to see the Games as a way of teaching values and training character. Historians like to see the modern Olympic Games as carrying on an ancient tradition of Western civilization. Political scientists like to see the Games as a tool in international relations. Economists like to analyse the impact of the Games on the local economy. And philosophers like to analyse the ethical values of sport in the abstract. The list goes on. I am a socio-cultural anthropologist: we are a discipline that applies a holistic perspective to human social and cultural life. I hope that the anthropological perspective that I have provided in this lecture today has helped you more accurately recognize the multifaceted, complex interrelationships of commercialism, education, and values in the Olympic Games.

170

Ren Hai, Olympic Education and Cross-Cultural Communication, in Hai Ren, Lamartine Dacosta, Ana Miragaya, Niu Jing, eds., The Olympic Studies Reader, vol. 1 (Beijing: Beijing Sport University Press, 2010).

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Women and Children in State-Supported vs. Market-Oriented Sport: China vs. the U.S.
I was a member of the first generation of American female athletes to benefit from the sports opportunities created by the passage of Title IX in 1972.171 I took advantage of the opportunities opened up to me, and competed at the national level in the US from 1978-1990. My event was the pentathlon and, after two more events were added in 1981, the heptathlon. I was a high school state champion and a Division I collegiate All-American, was nationally-ranked as high as seventh, competed internationally, and took part in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Trials. Since I was a child I had always dreamed of making the U.S. Olympic team, but the closest I would come was a seventh place finish in the 1980 Olympic Trials pentathlon. No Americans went to the Olympics that year, however those were the Moscow Olympic Games boycotted by the U.S. The Olympic Trials were depressing because we already knew that no one would be going to Moscow. There was heated discussion about the U.S. governments sudden interest in sports, which was regarded with a measure of bitterness since in those days all Olympic athletes were nominally amateurs, and except for a handful of celebrities, most of us were supported either by university scholarships or part-time jobs as waitresses, postmen, and other menial positions. It was a system that was reaching its breaking point at that time, since the international rivalries of the Cold War had pushed the levels of top competition in track and field so high that one really needed to train full-time to reach them. Athletes in the USSR and other socialist countries were state-supported, and there was discussion that this might be a better system than the U.S. system. What, we asked, gave our government, which never gave us any financial support, the right to turn around and prevent us from fulfilling the dream of participating in the Olympic Games, for which we had sacrificed so much? This was the time at which my interest in socialist sport was sparked. (Later, as I came to understand the system better, I realized that I would never have been able to start as a national-class athlete and end as a university professor if I had been a socialist athlete tracked into the sports school system, which was separate from and academically inferior to the regular universities.) I first went to China in 1985 to study Chinese. 22 years later, in 2007 to 2008, I returned to the Beijing Sport University and was affiliated with its Olympic Studies Centre doing research on the Beijing Olympic Games, supported by a Fulbright Research Award. By that time I was the worlds only nonChinese expert on Chinese sports with over two decades of involvement in Chinese sport. I gave interviews to over 100 journalists from over 20 countries, and often found myself trying to correct the misconceptions of journalists who interviewed me. In that highly politicized atmosphere the media focused more on Chinas sport policies than is typical for other countries because of the fascination with its state-supported sport system.

171

This biographic sketch is from Susan Brownell, Beijings Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 6-8.

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The widespread stereotype of the Chinese sport system was that it was a government-controlled machine for producing gold medals. The policy that received the most attention was Project 119.172 It had been conceptualized after the 2000 Sydney Olympics in response to disappointing performances in the two sports with the largest number of gold medals track and field (47) and swimming (34). The number 119 referred to the total number of gold medals available in those two sports as well as kayak and rowing (beyond these four it was not clear which sports, if any, got increased funding). In the Western media, Project 119 was presented as the centerpiece of Chinas Soviet-style effort at global sports domination. Actually, Project 119 was an internal strategic plan inside the State Sport General Administration and not a publicly-promulgated policy like, for example, the Olympic Glory Plan promulgated in 1995, which was an actual policy that oriented Chinas sports system toward the pursuit of gold medals from that time on. I had never paid much attention to Project 119 until I started getting questions from Western journalists because its content was not new. Since they are the marquee Olympic events, and for historical reasons, swimming and track and field had been important in China since the early twentieth century, long before the founding of the Peoples Republic (est. 1949). Chinas first Olympic participation was at the Los Angeles 1932 Olympics, where the Republic of China was represented by the lone sprinter Liu Changchun, whose elimination in the first round -at a time when the north of China was occupied by Japan- became a key symbol of national weakness. Track and field embodies a pure athleticism that resonates with masculine nationalism. This is why the hurdler Liu Xiang became Chinas biggest sport hero when he won the gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics. When he withdrew from the preliminary round in Beijing it was a national tragedy. The Sport General Administration has invested a large amount of funding and effort into improving track and field and swimming in China since rejoining the Olympics in 1984, but 24 years later track and field had gone backwards while progress in swimming was minimal. This background was lost on Western journalists and U.S. Olympic team leaders more interested in a sensationalized story about a secret government project to dominate world sport. Even less so did these male-dominated professions want to face up to the fact that it was not because of a secret government project that China won 51 gold medals to the U.S.s 36, since the U.S. hammered China 20 to 3 in the Project 119 sports (thanks to Michael Phelpss eight medals in swimming). The bigger factor was that the state-supported sport system in China provides equal funding to womens sports and minor sports, while in the U.S. system female athletes often have less financial and media support than their male counterparts, and sports that are not part of the college scholarship structure struggle to attract participants and train them to the top levels. In both China and the U.S. gender constitutes a fundamental structure in nationalism that is often overlooked and is particularly evident in the world of sports.173 Here I understand gender in a broad sense as a system of cultural beliefs about manhood, manliness, and masculinity as they exist in complimentary opposition to womanhood, womanliness, and femininity. Nationalism is also

172

The discussion of Project 119 and the medal race are from Susan Brownell, Did the Olympics Change China, or Did China Change the Olympics?, in Proceedings of the International Olympic Academy 49th International Session for Young Participants, 10-14 June 2009 (http://www.ioa.org.gr/photo/Young%20Participants%202009~37885-600-2%281%29.pdf). 173 The following discussion utilizes material from Brownell, Beijings Games, pp. 97-128.

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understood in the broad sense as a system of cultural beliefs about a certain kind of social grouping the nation-state - and the sense of identity that emerges among those who feel that they belong to it. As European ideas about nationalism were introduced into China in the late nineteenth-century, Chinese intellectuals and statesmen began to argue that a key reason for China's weakness lay in the physical weakness of Chinese women, who were kept bound-footed and in a condition of virtual servitude. They contrasted the Chinese woman with women from Western nations, who were said to be strong, natural-footed and nearly equal with the Western man, if not in some ways superior. Thus, physical education and sports for women became linked with nationalist ideology. The oppressed Chinese woman became a symbol of Chinas backwardness and weakness as a nation. With the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, the assumption was that national liberation had also liberated women. The system of sport boarding schools that is the core of the Chinese sport system was established in 1955 and it gave equal support to both men and women athletes. If one takes Title IX as a marker of a commitment by the U.S. government, then Chinas official commitment to sexual equality in sport precedes the U.S. by 27 years. There was also a cultural difference between China and the U.S. in the connection between gender and nationalism. In China, the centuries-old Chinese tradition of the woman warrior provided an archetype of a woman who sacrifices herself or wins glory for the nation through physical pain and prowess. Chinas star female athletes were described with classical phrases like headdress heroines and were likened to Chinas most popular woman warrior, Hua Mulan. Woodblock prints of Mulan from the eighteenth through early twentieth century generally depict her as thick-bodied with a big nose unattractive by the standards of the time but she was a popular figure because of her loyalty to her father and family. In the 1990s the world record-setting 1500, 3000, and 10,000 meter runners were known as the Ma Family Army. The label Ma Family Army was a play on the title of the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty novel Yang Family Generals, in which a matriarch and her daughtersin-law take up arms to avenge their male kin. The popularity of women warriors was striking to me when I was a college athlete in China in the 1980s, and I wondered what it would be like to grow up surrounded by women warriors, and why they were so ever-present in Chinese popular culture and not in US popular culture at that time. Looking back over my own athletic career after exposure to the Chinese tradition, I felt deprived. If I had had access to cultural images of the woman warrior, it would have given me a richer and more positive understanding of myself as a female athlete. Joan of Arc simply did not fulfil this need, since she got burned at the stake for aspiring to male martial glory. Research on this topic led me to the conclusion that the gender politics in the US after World War II and through the womens movement were not conducive to the woman warrior until the mid-1990s, when the woman warrior re-emerged in US culture in a big way when Xena the Warrior appeared on television in 1995. Xenas emergence also happened to be the year before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the womens Olympics, in which gold medals by the US womens softball and soccer teams over the Chinese were widely considered to mark the coming of age of womens sports in the US. It marked the emergence of women in sports previously stereotyped as masculine such as soccer and basketball - as popular national celebrities. As the woman warrior fad continued in the US, producers of popular culture turned to China for the heroines that the US lacked: Disney released the animated feature film Mulan in 1998, and the Chinese/Hong Kong/Taiwan joint production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, won the Academy Award for Best Film in 2001. In China, the vast majority of athletes only end up in the sports boarding schools because their parents expect that it will be a path of social mobility for them. This is even more true of athletes

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who come from peasant backgrounds, because if they are accepted into the provincial sports team they will receive an urban residence permit. This is a ticket to a better life because it allows a peasant to live legally in a city. For most peasants, urban residence permits are extremely difficult to acquire the major route is through excelling at school and getting accepted into a good university, and therefore parents generally only agree to send their child to a sports boarding school if they feel the child is not a good student. Female peasants are at the very bottom of the social scale and therefore sports are particularly important for them. They are the main talent pool for sports regarded as particularly bitter. All of Chinas female race walkers, weightlifters, and judo players typically come from peasant backgrounds. Female athletes took advantage of the opportunities opened up to them after China rejoined international sports starting in 1979. The Chinese womens volleyball teams victory in the 1981 World Cup in Tokyo was the turning point in the revival of national pride and patriotism after the end of the Cultural Revolution. This was Chinas first world championship in an Olympic sport (table tennis was not included in the Olympics until 1988). In the years following the womens volleyball victory, female athletes generally had greater success in international sports than male, and so they became the symbolic figureheads in the revival of Chinese nationalism. There was a public debate about why the yin waxes and the yang wanes, or the phoenix takes off before the dragon. Surrounding the Beijing Olympics there was a lot of negative coverage of Chinas sports system that described it as systematic child abuse, sports factories, a sports machine, and even an assembly line of pain. The idea was that government-support of sport gave China an unfair advantage that would enable it to win the medal count. It was the rare journalist who pointed out that this advantage primarily shows up on womens sports, and that is because state-supported sport gives women more equal opportunities in sport than does market-driven sport. In the 1990s, the state control of the sports system loosened. While this change liberated some female star athletes from the disciplinary rigor of the state, it subjected them to the even more inevitable forces of the market. The relative equality in financial resources devoted to mens and womens sports was shattered in 1995 with the commercialization of mens soccer and basketball and the formation of corporate-funded professional leagues. Mens basketball and soccer were judged to have the potential to earn money; womens basketball and soccer were not. This was true even though the womens teams were among the top five in the world, while the mens teams were not. One of the key arguments in support of this capitalist-style professionalization was that it would improve the level of competition and propel Chinese men toward Olympic gold medals. While mens basketball began to show results in the recent Olympics, with China reaching its best-ever Olympic showing with its 5th place in Beijing led by Yao Ming, it did not help mens soccer. Their Beijing performance was considered a national embarrassment. Afterwards the leadership of the Chinese Soccer Association was disbanded for half a year as some retired and the president was sent to the University of Finance Administration for studies. In 2009 a journalist wrote a book that revealed widespread corruption throughout the soccer league, including fixed matches, embezzlement by soccer officials, death threats by organized crime, and more. The book kicked off a government investigation that is still going on, and most recently a former vice minister of sport was held for interrogation.

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However, as a whole the Chinese men improved relative to the women in Beijing. In Athens the men had won 41% and the women 59% of the total gold medals; in Beijing the men won 47% and the women 53%. I wanted to compare the 1988 Seoul Olympics with 2004 Athens because the 1984 Olympics are not a good measure of China's starting point in the Olympic Games since the Eastern bloc was not there. I think that even though Chinese people were very upset over their performance in Seoul, actually it reflected China's real level. Also, those were the last Olympics before the break-up of the Eastern bloc, so you can also compare what happened to those countries after they moved away from statesupported sport.
Table 3: Women's medals as percent of a country's total medals: Seoul vs. Athens

country 1. USSR 2. German Democratic Republic 3. United States 4. Korea 5. Federal Republic of Germany 6. Hungary 7. Bulgaria 8. Romania 9. France 10. Italy 11. China country 1. United States 2. China 3. Russian Federation 4. Australia 5. Japan 6. Germany 7. France 8. Italy 9. Korea 10. Great Britain 11. Cuba

1988 Seoul Olympic Games % % % Total gold silver bronze medals 24 23 35 132 54 46 50 102 33 13 37 94 33 20 9 33 36 21 20 40 9 33 17 23 30 50 54 35 71 64 83 24 0 0 0 16 0 25 0 14 60 64 42 28 2004 Athens Olympic Games % % % Total gold silver bronze medals 33 38 48 102 59 65 64 63 41 59 32 92 47 44 50 49 56 44 33 37 46 44 40 49 27 67 54 33 20 45 18 32 33 42 44 30 33 22 42 30 22 43 55 27

# 36 51 26 7 10 4 16 17 1 1 15 # 40 39 39 23 17 21 16 9 12 10 11

% 27 50 29 21 29 17 46 71 8 7 54 % 42 63 42 47 46 47 48 28 40 40 41

mixed events*

4s 4g, 1b

2g, 1s, 1b

mixed events* 1g, 3s, 2b 1g

1g, 1s, 2b 1g

1g, 2s, 2b

Medals won in mixed events were subtracted from a country's medal total before calculating the percentage of medals won by women. Thus the percentage reflects percentage of a country's total medals in events that are divided by sex. Mixed events: equestrian, sailing, mixed doubles in badminton.

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You can see from this table that, in general, state-supported sport produces better performances for women relative to the men of that country. In 1988 four socialist countries benefited from this effect, and among those in the top eleven, only Hungary did not show this effect. Interestingly, the Soviet Union did not benefit from this effect. I think this is important because it also indicates that there are other factors supporting the Soviet Union's success besides state-supported sport, i.e. a culturally-grounded sporting culture. In 2004, the only countries benefiting from a high percentage of medals by women were China and Ukraine. In Ukraine the main reason was the strength of the women's gymnastics team, so I think you cannot argue that it is due to the after-effects of socialism. China's percentage of 63% was the highest of all the percentages I calculated. The two big reasons were women's weightlifting and judo.

Table 4: Overview of the womens medals of the countries of the Former Sovie t Union, Athens 2004

2004 Athens Olympic Games country 3. Russian Federation 12. Ukraine 26. Belarus 32. Georgia 34 (tie). Uzbekistan 40. Kazakhstan 45. Lithuania 50. Azerbaijan 58. Latvia 64. Estonia Total % gold 41 56 50 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 38 % silver 59 40 33 0 0 0 50 0 25 0 42 % bronze 32 56 57 0 0 0 0 50 0 0 35 Total medals 92 23 15 4 5 8 3 5 4 3 162 # 39 12 7 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 62 % 42 55 47 0 0 0 33 40 25 0 39 mixed events * 1s

If you add all the countries of the former Soviet Union together, the condition of their women athletes seems similar to 1988, and in both cases the percentages are similar to the capitalist Western countries. China has not improved much in those sports and events that existed in the 1988 Olympics - there has been no improvement in swimming, volleyball, rowing, and weightlifting, and an improvement of one medal in track and field. Most of its improvement was in artistic gymnastics, but this was largely because of the decline of the Soviet Union. Chinas improvement from 5 to 51 total gold medals between 1988 and 2008 is due to 26 gold medals in new sports and new events sports that have been added in old sports since 1988. A critic of the Chinese sport system could point out that all the government investment did not lead to any improvement in those original sports; but it can also be taken as a criticism of the U.S. system, because the U.S. sporting system is good for producing top athletes in a few important sports, but it is not a broad-based system that encourages the elite development of many different kinds of sports. Even though the U.S. has excellent grassroots

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participation in almost all Olympic sports (if not all), in many sports that are excluded from the college sport system, it does not have ideal conditions for enabling talented athletes to reach the very top world levels. In Chinas system, any child who is recruited by a team will have a chance to develop his or her talent without financial obstacles, and many of Chinas top athletes come from poor rural backgrounds. This is not true in market-based systems, where a familys financial resources might limit childrens sport opportunities. In July 2008 Money Magazine compared the finances of the families of two young women who were members of the Chinese and American Olympic teams for taekwondo (a minor sport in the U.S.). It found that the Chinese family was relatively well off, but the American family had been forced to sell their home to finance their daughters sport expenses, and had saved no money for college. The Chinese athlete would have automatic college admission due to her sports achievements.
Table 5:Comparison of China's Medals in Seoul vs. Athens: Events Existing in 1988

Event Archery Artistic Gymnastics Athletics Boxing Canoe Diving Fencing Shooting Swimming Rowing Table Tennis Volleyball Weightlifting total

gold 1

Seoul 1988 silver bronze total 0 1 2 1 1 0 0 3 1 6 0 1 1 2 3 1 4 1 1 2 1 2 6 1 1 1 4 5 10 13 29

gold 1 1 1 3 3 1 2 1 2 15

Athens 2004 Athens silver bronze total improvement 1 1 1 1 2 0 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 6 0 2 2 2 1 1 5 3 1 -3 0 -2 2 1 5 -1 1 0 2 4 -1 10 6 31 2

In 2008, the difference between Chinas state-supported and the U.S.s college-based free market sport system was evident in that China won golds in more sports (17 vs. 15); its women were comparatively stronger (women won 53% of its golds vs. 43% for the U.S.); and it won 13 golds in new sports added to the Olympics in the last two decades, while the U.S. won 2. With respect to the production of Olympic gold medals, the U.S. sport system is a conservative system that has been slow to respond to the changes in Olympic sport as it has included women and sports that are popular in Asia. To a social scientist it is clear where the U.S. Olympic Committee needs to put its money if it wants to win more gold medals than China in 2012 but that will be a hard sell to its corporate sponsors and private donors. For an anthropologist trained to analyze these social patterns and their cultural underpinnings, it is clear that the Western medias fascination with Project 119 as Chinas secret Olympic weapon was not accurate. In the U.S., as in China, the sports system is not a rationalized medal-producing machine, but is enmeshed in fundamental notions of gender and nation that make change difficult.

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The problem of child athletes has received increasing attention worldwide over the last thirty years, sparked in 1976 when Nadia Comaneci won Olympic gold in gymnastics at the age of 14. Sports such as gymnastics and figure skating slowly instituted minimum age limits for world and Olympic competitions. This is a world-wide problem, not just a Chinese problem. In some of my publications, I have criticized the China bashing in sports journalism. One example was the lead-in for the documentary, The Ultimate Athlete, in which John Hoberman, perhaps the most vocal critic of Olympic sports in academia, accompanies a video of young Chinese gymnasts: What are the human costs? How much suffering is too much? Later, his voice is heard while shots of young, female Chinese gymnasts are shown:174 Theres no question in my mind that some of the stresses and schedules to which small children are subject in the gymnastics business, for example, do constitute child abuse. How much suffering is too much? Which sorts of procedures are more than civilized people should tolerate? At what age should children be sucked into a high performance factory under the tutelage of adult coaches whose one purpose really is to produce that perfect little machine? However, much journalistic coverage implies that the exploitation of Chinese athletes is a distinctly Chinese problem; perhaps they find it particularly offensive in China because they think that Chinese children are being exploited in the name of the state and this is somehow less acceptable than when they are exploited by their own families. I was on the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Skating Club from 2001 to 2007, and its president from 2004-2006. In the period that I was on the Board, there were eight skaters who appeared to have enough talent to aspire to be top national competitors. Of those eight, only two remained at home with their families in St. Louis to train without disrupting their family lives, and only one of them stayed in the regular school system, while the other was home-schooled. The remaining six relocated to cities regarding as centers for skating: three of them left their families to live with host families (the youngest was 13), and were home-schooled or attended a special school for children in the performing arts; in two cases the entire family uprooted and moved, and the children were home-schooled; and in one case the mother moved with her child. In many sports this scenario is repeated by countless families across the US who remove their children from the regular school system and sometimes send them away to live in other cities in order to provide them the best opportunity to fulfil their potential. At the top levels of US sport, the vast majority of athletes will have moved from their hometowns to another location, although generally after the age of 18. Although they begin training at the same young ages that Chinese athletes do, they generally do not leave home until later. This is because the grassroots infrastructure in US sports is sound enough to allow child athletes to develop their potential in their home environment for a longer period until they must seek out better coaches and conditions to continue to improve. China lacks this grassroots infrastructure. The willingness of Americans to disrupt family life for a child athlete is widespread even though US family values do not condone this practice as much as Chinese family values do. In China, there is a saying that parents hope their children become dragons (wang zi cheng long), referring to the

174

Brownell, Beijings Games, pp. 149-76.

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high hopes that parents place upon children. For this reason it is quite common for parents to send a child to be raised by a grandparent or relative in another city where there might be more opportunities for the child. It is also done if both parents work and feel unable to take care of the child. The residence permit system increases this tendency, because it restricts access to the desirable cities in China and makes it more difficult for whole families to move. Since children who are selected for training at provincial team training centers gain residence permits in the major city where the center is located, parents are often eager for children to join the teams and gain this lifetime benefit. Parents and children usually talk about how much they miss each other, but families do not seem to define themselves by whether they live together, and so the practice does not weaken the notion that they are still a family on the contrary, making this kind of sacrifice for the good of the family is believed to demonstrate the highest commitment to the family by giving the family face. Yet reporting on Chinese child athletes seems to assume that they are complete ly different from us. I was interviewed for a segment on childrearing in National Geographic Televisions Taboo Series. The segment on Chinese child athletes who live in sports boarding schools appeared along with a segment about children from the Mentowai tribe raised in the tropical forest of Indonesia with little supervision by their own parents, and children raised in prisons in India so that they could be with their imprisoned mothers. The advertisement for the DVDs describes the show with the sensationalistic words, Witness stunning stories from the first two seasons about rituals and traditions so shocking that you can't help but be attracted to them.175 The show was introduced with the lines: Throughout the world some people raise children in ways others might find extreme. Would you let your child run wild in the forest and smoke cigarettes at age six? Do you think toddlers should be raised in prison? Would you give up your only child and send them off to endurethis? [shot of a young boy doing a Russian split with his ankles propped up on a block of foam and a small teammate pressing down on his back] This piece was rather typical in that it featured an image of a gymnast doing flexibility training. Flexibility training is often selected to illustrate the brutality of Chinese training methods with an attention-getting image of a body twisted into seemingly unnatural positions. Extreme flexibility training is limited to only a few Olympic sports (gymnastics, diving, figure skating) and is hardly representative of training methods in China or elsewhere. It is by nature painful, because in order to increase flexibility the body must be pushed past its normal range of motion until a physiological response is induced by the pain that causes the muscles to relax further. Since gymnasts from other countries are as flexible as Chinese gymnasts, it is likely that their training is no less painful than the Chinese training. During the 2004 Figure Skating World Championships, NBC aired a fluff piece about the pair skaters Xue Shen and Zhao Hongbo. Skating expert Peter Carruthers introduced it by noting that they were two skaters who grew up in conditions few of us could imagine. Jim McKays narration elaborates that these conditions included Zhaos moving to a sports boarding school at the age of six, while for

175

Taboo: Childrearing. National Geographic store website, (shop.nationalgeographic.com/product/238/1757/128.html#, accessed June 2007). Aired January 6, 2004, and repeatedly thereafter; it was still being aired in 2007.

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Shen, living in the crumbling ancient slums of the city of Harbin, sport represents her familys best hope for escaping dire poverty, and her mother went eight years without buying any new clothes because their money went for skates. They trained outdoors in the cold and wind, Shen competed with an injury that required cortisone shots, and it was a long journey of ten years before they won Chinas first-ever world pair skating title. McKay observes, Shen and Zhao could endure hardship. As the Chinese say, they could eat bitterness. Training could be brutal. He concludes, It may be hard for a Westerner to comprehend how much the Chinese endured to become great. This is an exaggeration. The lives of Shen and Zhao as portrayed in the segment could have been those of many American figure skaters except that the overall standard of living in the US is higher than in China, American skaters generally stopped having to train outdoors sometime in the 1970s (even Peggy Fleming, gold medallist at the 1968 Olympics, sometimes skated figures in the cold at night), and an American would probably be living with a host family rather than in a dormitory. But many American skating mothers go without new clothes to pay for skates, and American training is just as brutal. American athletes can also eat bitterness, but the media have a tendency to downplay it, particularly in figure skating, which is cast as a glamorous sport. The tendency to emphasize the ability of Chinese people to suffer may make for a good story, but the subtext seems to be that they will threaten American pre-eminence in sports because Americans cannot. This not only does not do justice to the difficult lives that many American athletes are living, but also it dupes American parents and children into thinking that a sports career is an easy path to a pot of gold. American journalists have been more willing to pass harsh judgments on the training of Chinese child athletes than on American. Moreover, the problem of the over-involved parent is the major problem for youth sports in the US today: it is often questionable whether the parents have the best interests of the child at heart, and the psychological or even physical abuse of children by adults, whether their own parents or those of a rival, is relatively common. When I was president of the St. Louis Skating Club there was an over-involved mother who was involved in incidents at different ice skating rinks in the area that resulted in calling the police or taking out a court restraining order to prevent her from coming to the rink. Our club banned her from attending practices until she had produced proof that she had undergone counselling, which she eventually did. There was a famous case several years ago in which a father at an ice hockey game attacked and killed a boy on the team playing against his son. Naturally, parents play a positive or at least a neutral role in the majority of cases. However, the minority causes enough problems that I think it is safe to say that the parents are the main problem in youth sport. So why do we assume that a system that removes the children from potentially over-involved parents and places them under the tutelage of trained administrators and coaches is a less humane system? In China, it is true, the physical abuse of athletes by coaches is common, but then again, corporal punishment was just eliminated from Beijings schools around 2005, and it is still common in the rest of the country and in the home. In 2008, when I gave a visiting lecture at the Beijing municipal team to the table tennis players, I discovered that they were a very clever and curious group. One of them asked me directly, Do coaches hit athletes in the U.S. as they do here in China? Smart Chinese athletes like this teenaged boy know that in other countries this is considered child abuse, and they are starting to challenge their coaches sometimes. However, most Chinese people laugh at the idea that sports training constitutes child abuse, because they believe that these children are being

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given a precious chance for social mobility and a life that will be much better than the one they came from, so how could this be abuse? Chinas system of early recruitment into a boarding school system actually works only for certain sports. Soccer, track and field, and swimming are all sports in which it is very hard to identify future stars at a young age. Athletes do not tend to emerge as stars until age 15 or later in track and field and soccer, and perhaps 13 in swimming. Of course, we have some soccer and tennis factories in Europe and North America, and they have produced some stars such as Andrea Agassi who came out of Nick Bolletieris tennis camp in Florida. But if you look at the success rate of such camps it is not very high. The Chinese mens soccer team has not been able to improve its world standing in the past two decades for the same reason that its swimming and track and field have not (in the 2008 Olympics, Chinese swimmers earned six medals, including the first-ever mens medal; two women won track and field medals). The Chinese state-supported system works well for sports in which children begin highly-specialized training at a very young age, and it produces success in womens sports because it gives equal support to men and women while most other countries do not. It loses its comparative advantage in mens sports that have good financial backing in other countries, and it does not work well for sports in which stars emerge slowly from a wide participation base, with their talent becoming apparent only as they physically mature.

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The Olympic Games and Human Rights: Moving forward from Beijing 2008
The question of human rights and the Olympic Games is not a simple one, not only because it is a highly politicized topic, but also because there is not even a universal consensus on what human rights are. In todays lecture, I will first outline the United Nations concept of human rights, then I will discuss how Western organizations like Amnesty International used this concept to criticize China and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. Then I will discuss how the Chinese attempted to respond to this criticism through the culture and education programs associated with the Beijing Olympics, which was completely ignored by the China critics. Finally, I will discuss the IOCs concept of human rights, and its attempt to consolidate its own distinctive position on human rights in the wake of the Beijing Olympics. This has entailed an argument that the Olympic ethical system is an alternative ethical system to that of the UN/human rights movement. In this presentation, I am not going to discuss the actual situation of human rights in China. From the perspective of both the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee, human rights are a communications problem. This is because in the first place, the Chinese government does not fully accept the Western definition of human rights, and so it does not try to directly address the problems that human rights organizations want it to address. The governments main goal, therefore, is to try to communicate its view of human rights to the world. In the case of the IOC, it does not consider that it has any control or jurisdiction over human rights, and so its main challenge is to avoid being criticized by other organizations for not doing anything about a problem that is not its affair. So is main job is to communicate its own ethical system, which is the rationale for organizing Olympic Games.

Human Rights and Sport in the U.N.

In the United Nations, human rights are typically divided up into two types. First generation rights are the individual political and civil rights that protect the individual from the government, while second generation rights are economic and social rights such as the right to employment, housing, healthcare, and social security. The foundational document for human rights is the U.N.s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which includes both kinds. The Republic of China was a signatory to the UDHR in 1948 before the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949; the PRC was not admitted to the U.N. until 1971, and did not sign the Declaration until 1998. It is clear that human rights are a Western concept if you look at Chinas legal codes prior to the last third of the 19th century. Although China had a centuries-long legal code that in many ways was more advanced than Western law until the 19th century, the concept of rights was not found in China, until quanli (lit. power and benefit) was used to translate the concept in Western legal texts. Human rights are not only a Western concept, they are also a concept that was challenged by socialist nations during the Cold War. The original intent in the U.N. was to follow the Universal Declaration with a binding treaty, or covenant, that would require parties to actually implement the

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provisions. However, in the meantime human rights had become politicized by Cold War politics and a split appeared. As the Cold War progressed, the capitalist West used first generation civil and political rights to criticize socialist nations for political repression, while the socialist nations used second generation economic and social rights to criticize the capitalist West for the unequal distribution of wealth. Thus, two different covenants were put forward in the 1960s and 70s. The U.S. signed but never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, while China ratified it in 2001. The U.S. ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992, while China signed it but never ratified it. That condition persists today and it was an important backdrop to the debates about human rights in the Beijing Olympics, but this was rarely mentioned in the media. The point is that China has never fully recognized the concept of civil and political rights. During the height of the Cold War, China even refused to recognize the concept of human rights at all. The phrase itself was considered a bourgeois capitalist expression and was essentially banned from use. This policy did not loosen until the 1990s when it became possible to use the word in public discourse inside China, but it was not used freely in discussions with non-Chinese. The phrase human rights was not used openly in discussions between the IOC and the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) until about 2007; before that, the phrase political issues was used. This Cold War history of human rights has been largely forgotten today, not only by Westerners who are smug about having won the Cold War, but even by Chinese people. But it is helpful to remember that this was a battle about certain fundamental principles that should not be forgotten. Sport also played a role in this battle, because Marxist sport theory considered sport as a tool used in class conflict, as evidenced by the ways in which elite sports clubs excluded workers and other oppressed people. Communist sport was to be available to everyone, and out of this idea came the notion of the right to participate in sport. In 1978 the developing countries mounted an effort in the United Nations to, as they put it, release the death grip of the West over international sport, and they formed the Intergovernmental Committee for Physical Education and Sport in an attempt to take control of world sport away from the IOC. The Charter of Physical Education and Sport listed the right to participate in sport as a human right. The IOC did not add sport as a human right to its Olympic Charter until 1992. The book More than Just a Game, co-written by my colleague Charles Korr, describes the soccer league formed by the men of color who were imprisoned in South Africas Robbins Island prison for opposing apartheid in the 1960s and 70s. This story has also been told in a moving documentary movie of the same title. When the men petitioned to hold soccer games, they always specifically said, We request the right to play soccer. For them, asserting their right to play soccer was a way of demanding respect for their human dignity. It is also notable that Chairman Maos Little Red Book was one of the few books they were allowed to read, and that, according to an email communication I had with one of them, Richard Solomon, at that time Chinas state-supported sport system was a positive model for them because it provided sport for free, and without exclusions based on race or class. And so while Chinas state-supported sport system has come under a lot of criticism in recent years, we should not forget that its original intention was to provide a different model from classbased Western sports clubs.

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Human Rights in Chinas Bid for the Olympics

Western criticism of Chinas human rights
Many Chinese people, including Chinas IOC member He Zhenliang, believe that human rights are a hypocritical excuse used by Western nations to prevent China from taking its rightful place in the world. Chinese intellectuals with whom I have discussed the issue seem to feel that it is good that China should be criticized by the West because it will push China toward progress, but at the same time they consider the criticisms to be a lot of grandstanding. Human rights are not an issue that most Chinese express strong sentiments about. Government corruption, on the other hand, is an issue that concerns almost everyone. Because of the huge construction projects involved in Olympic Games, their organization is particularly open to corruption. The man who was the mayor of Beijing in 1993 during the bid for the 2000 Olympics has been under house arrest for many years now, after having been exposed for corruption in part associated with the bid. The Beijing Olympics involved the largest-ever attempt by the central government to control corruption, and it was fairly successful, but it got no attention or credit from the Western media. When Beijing was bidding for the Olympic Games in 2001, it recognized that criticism of its human rights record was one reason that it had lost its first bid to Sydney, Australia. However, at this time the official policy was still to consider human rights a Western concept that China did not support. As a result, representatives of the government could not freely discuss human rights in interactions with foreigners because the concept itself was not considered valid. Beijing did not make any promises related to human rights in its Candidature File. There was a heated internal debate within the Beijing bid committee over including even a mention of human rights in Chinas bid presentation to the IOC Moscow Session in July 2001. Finally, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, although he refused to state it himself, agreed that it could be mentioned in one sentence that was made in Chinas bid presentation by Beijing Mayor Liu Qi: I want to say that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will have the following special features: They will help promote our economic and social progress and will also benefit the further development of our human rights cause. They will promote an exchange of rich Chinese culture with other cultures. They will mark a major step forward in the spreading of the Olympic Ideals.176 This sentence, and several like it made by a few other Chinese bid officials to the media, were later used by Amnesty International to assert that China had promised to improve its human rights if awarded the Olympic Games, and they argued that it was failing to live up to its promise as the Games approached. The media pressure on the IOC to publicly criticize China and demand action was extremely intense, but the IOC and Jacques Rogge largely held to the position that it was not their place to make political demands over things beyond their control. The Chairman of the IOCs Coordination Commission, Hein Verbruggen, became so frustrated that he engaged in a heated exchange with Amnesty International in the Dutch media. In de Volkskrant

176

BOCOG Official Website, Mr. Liu Qis speech, (http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/candidacy/presentation/n214051410.shtml, accessed May 19, 2011).

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newspaper (September 1, 2007), the headline was, Amnesty licht publiek vals voor over China (Amnesty is deliberately misinforming the public about China) The subheader said, IOC-lid Verbruggen valt mensenrechtenorganisatie aan. (IOC member Verbruggen attacks human rights organization). He expressed his personal opinion that Amnesty was taking its campaign against the Olympics too far, distorting reality and using the Games as a platform to advertise its own albeit just cause. He stated that China had kept every promise made to the IOC and that while Amnesty had the right to express its opinions on the insufficiency of progress in China, it should not say things that were untrue. Amnesty continued to maintain its position. Eduard Nazarski, the director of Amnesty International Netherlands said, Amnesty regrets the opinions voiced by Verbruggen and calls them wrong. According to Amnesty the IOC, through President Rogge, did actually promise to oversee the improvement of the human rights situation in China. Amnesty says the opinions of Verbruggen send the wrong signal to the Chinese leaders and are a slap in the face of the Chinese defenders of human rights, who face ever more pressure in the lead up to the Games.177 Verbruggens argument was that what the Chinese had expressed were convictions or beliefs, not commitments. Because this argument was conducted in Dutch, he said that between a belofte and a gelofte, theres only one little letter difference, but its a very major one. There were no clauses regarding human rights in the Host City Contract, and while statements made in the bid presentation were also legally binding, the IOC could hardly have gone to court over the vague statement made in the bid presentation. On its side, Amnesty International was not so concerned about the technicalities of the legal agreements, but felt that public statements had been made and that was sufficient to argue that China had failed to fulfil its promises.178

Chinas response to the Western critics

Actually, in its bid in 2001, China did make one promise which no one cared to examine, and that was its promise to host a peoples Olympics. This theme was originally intended as a response to the Wests criticism of Chinas human rights, but this was never made explicit and the function was never carried out. There were three main themes for the Olympic Games: the High-tech Olympics, the Green Olympics, and the renwen ( ) Olympics. Renwen is difficult to translate. It is formed of the characters for ren, human, and wen, literature, culture. Normally it is the translation for the academic humanities, and thus it is was sometimes translated as the humanistic Olympics. After some debate, the preferred official translation was the Peoples Olympics. Its original goal was to present an image of a people-oriented China that had its own tradition of humanism, just as legitimate as the Western tradition of humanism with its roots in ancient Greece and embodied in the ancient Olympic Games.

177

Eduard Nazarski, Amnesty wijst China op beloften *Amnesty points out China promises+, de Volkskrant, 1 September 2007. 178 Susan Brownell, Human Rights and the Beijing Olympics: Imagined Global Community and the Transnational Public Sphere, British Journal of Sociology 63(2)(2012), 306-27.

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Chinas prominent sport scholar Lu Yuanzhen described the significance of the Peoples Olympics to me, saying: Before, we were not allowed to talk about individual people. We were a society without people. People were the means and not the end. The Peoples Olympics were a big philosophical breakthrough. No one knows what it is. This proves that when it was proposed it was empty. It was proposed because of the Wests criticism [of human rights], to respond to the Wests doubts. But after it was proposed it magnified. Its value surpassed the Olympic Games themselves. A people-orientation was new. It says that Chinese peoples values have undergone a great change.179 One of the central elements in this conception was the phrase yi ren wei ben , take people as the root, or people-orientation. This phrase had appeared in political rhetoric when Hu Jintao named it in his address to the Third Plenum of the 16th Party Congress in 2003. This was followed by the inclusion of a passage on human rights in the revision to the Constitution in 2004, the first time that human rights were mentioned in the Chinese constitution. But, interestingly, as early as 2001, yi ren wei ben had already been written into the guiding thought for the Beijing Olympic Games. A Xinhua sports editor told me that when the phrase yi ren wei ben was introduced, No one knew what the words meant. But then people picked them up, liked them, and started using them. It is probable that the pressure surrounding the Olympic Games resulted in the concept of human rights getting more attention, and finally being accepted, much faster than it would have without the Games. It is even possible that the mention of human rights in the 2004 revision to the constitution was a result of the Olympic Games. This is my conclusion based on my discussions with people inside China; no China critics have ever given the Olympic Games credit for this. The guiding thought of the Peoples Olympics was largely diverted into a debate over culture and education. Under the label of the Peoples Olympics, Olympic Education was conducted on a scale never seen before. There were academic and professional conferences, textbooks and courses for public schools and universities, public lectures by university professors, educational television and radio shows, magazine and newspaper essays, and internet training. A tremendous amount of thought was put into the question of how to manage the combination of Eastern and Western cultures that the Games were supposed to facilitate, how to promote Chinese culture to the world and within China, how to use the enthusiasm for the games to raise the general quality and civility of the Chinese people. In my conversations with intellectuals, they explained that human rights begin with a society in which people treat each other with respect and selflessness, and that this was one of the main goals of the Olympic education programs and the training of Olympic volunteers. These discussions and debates formed the intellectual context for Zhang Yimous opening and closing ceremonies, the Olympic education programs in the schools that reached as many as 400 million Chinese schoolchildren, the training programs for the 70,000 Olympic volunteers, and the cultural performances in the Cultural Olympiad.

179

Lu Yuanzhen interview, Beijing, 21 January 2007.

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So the first point that I want to make here is that the Peoples Olympics was Chinas response to the human rights accusations the response was delivered in the realm of symbols, not direct verbal discourse, what was called the look and image of the Games and the branding of China: the dancing seal logo, the Fuwa mascots, the Auspicious clouds torch, the display of Chinese traditional culture in the opening ceremony, and so on. The second issue I want to address why was the response delivered in this manner? The answer goes back to the 1990 Asian Games. These had taken place one year after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 in which the government had sent in tanks to clear student and worker demonstrators out of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It had been a disaster for Chinas international relations and a severe setback for its plans to reach out to the world through the Asian Games. When they were seeking to create opening and closing ceremonies that would appeal to the audiences, the choreographers recognized that ethnic cultural symbols were more attractive to the outside world and could help distract attention from political issues. By the time the planning for the Beijing ceremonies had begun, this strategy for drawing in international audiences was known as the cultural China strategy. It had also been used by Korea to promote its own image in the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. In fact, the international promotion of culture began with Japan even earlier, and is a strategy shared by all three governments in the East Asia region for advancing their soft power in the world. For the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a key policy recommendation concluded, On this basis, we cautiously propose that in the construction of Chinas national image, we should hold the line on cultural China, and the concept of cultural China should not only be the core theme in the dialogue between China and the international community in Olympic discourse, but also it should be added into the long-term strategic plan for the national image afterwards.180 If the Peoples Olympics were to be BOCOGs response to Western criticism of Chinas human rights record, then it probably needed to directly address the issue of human rights, but it never did so explicitly. However, how to deal with the human rights issue in a way that promotes Chinas image to the outside world was not the job of the artists and intellectuals who designed the education and cultural programs. This job belongs to the State Council Information Office, which is also the Office of Foreign Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This organs function is to act as the media conduit between China and the outside world, and one of its official responsibilities is communication about human rights. If one went to its China Human Rights webpage during the Olympics, one would find that the English version of this webpage had a link for Olympics, but the Chinese version did not. But all that you would find there was two articles in which former IOC president Samaranch praised the Olympic Games and Chinas rapid progress, and another article listing all of the heads of state who attended the Olympics, with US President Bush at the top.

180

Peoples University . 2008

[Research Report on the Construction of the Humanistic Concept, Social Value and National Image of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games], November 28, 2008.

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This discussion may be getting a little confusing at this point, because it should start to be clear that the U.N. concept of human rights and the viewpoints of Amnesty International and other advocacy groups were a world away from what was being done with the concept of human rights in China. Their views were so different that Western China critics and journalists did not even recognize that in fact China was engaging with the human rights concept and trying to do something about it. Since these efforts were not what the China critics wanted and looked for, their general conclusion afterwards was that the Beijing Olympics had no positive effect on human rights in China and perhaps made them worse. And it is true that since the Olympics, the crackdown on minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and on political dissidents, and the control of the internet, have all become stricter. And these probably were partly a result of the Beijing Olympic Games, because the new degree of contact with the outside world provoked a backlash among those who are afraid that China is Westernizing and losing its Chinese identity. However, for the Chinese government these are primarily issues of protecting national sovereignty. It is a stretch to say that the Olympic Games made human rights worse in Xinjiang and Tibet, when the primary thing that made them worse was the unrest partly provoked by groups outside China attempting to use the Olympic Games as a platform for their causes. Caught in the middle between China and its critics was the IOC. I will now turn to the IOCs concept of human rights, and what it has done about it since the Beijing Olympics.

The Olympic Ethical System

The only human right recognized in the Olympic Charter is found in Fundamental Principle #4, which states, The practice of sport is a human right. However, the right to participate in sport has not been upheld as a human right either in international law or even in the United States. Fundamental Principle #1 state, Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. What are the universal fundamental ethical principles that this article refers to? Do they include human rights? The Olympic Charter does not clearly state to which principles it refers. Olympic scholars have debated them for years and there is no consensus. Every countrys Olympic education programs interpret them differently. China emphasizes the volunteer spirit, and swifter, higher, stronger; Germany emphasizes fair play, the U.S. emphasizes personal leadership through focus, vision, commitment, discipline, persistence. But the vagueness of Fundamental Principle #1 may have advantages. I find it very interesting that to my knowledge, no nation has ever directly challenged the vague idea found in Fundamental Principle #1. Apparently there is a widespread global consensus on this point - a wider consensus than on the universality of human rights. For example: From 1950 to 1979, the China problem between China and Taiwan was one of the main political problems bedevilling the IOC, which finally resulted in Chinas withdrawal from the IOC from 1958 to 1979. But despite the hostility in the height of the Cold War, China never attacked the Olympic ideals.

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Even when the Chinese member withdrew from the IOC in 1958, his letter to President Avery Brundage stated, I feel painful [sic], however, that the IOC is today controlled by such an imperialist like you and consequently the Olympic spirit has been grossly trampled upon. To uphold the Olympic spirit and tradition, I hereby declare that I will no longer cooperate with you or have any connections with the IOC while it is under your domination. (emphasis added) Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called upon the IOC to list human rights as the Fourth Pillar of the Olympic Movement. In this they have been imitating what happened with environmental issues. The IOC began to recognize the environment as a communications problem in the 1990s when environmental groups started to become more vocal in opposing Olympic bids and the construction of venues. In 1995, it developed Agenda 21 for Sport and the Environment, and the environment was named the third pillar of Olympism after sport, and culture and education. However, to date the IOC has refused to consider adding human rights as a fourth pillar. Furthermore, there is little support for it among its 115 members, many of whom come from nations with severe human rights problems even worse than Chinas. After the Beijing Olympics, several people, myself included, engaged in thinking about the relationship between the guiding thoughts of the Olympic Movement and those of the Human Rights movement. The Dutch philosopher Joost van der Burgt examined the Olympic Charter and argued that the Olympic Movement has put forward its own interpretation of human dignity, parallel to or opposite to the agenda of the human rights movement. The big difference is that, in Olympism, the ideal of human dignity is not based on the (European) idea of certain rights that a person is entitled to naturally (as it is in the human rights movement), but on the ideal of classical Greek virtues. Instead of the primarily Western idea of man as a moral, autonomous entity, Olympism is based on the ideal of a healthy spirit in a healthy body. In the Olympic ethical system, the greatest good is development of (human) character. It is not, as it is in the human rights ethical system, the freedom of the individual versus the damage to individual freedom by the government.181 In short, if you analyse the Olympic Charter, the thought of Pierre de Coubertin, and the thinking about the philosophy of Olympism that has been put forward over the years, you find that the Olympic ethical system can be viewed as an alternative and complementary system that seeks to maintain independence from any national government or bloc of governments. This is unlike the human rights movement, which is statist in orientation, i.e., it tasks national governments with protecting human rights.

181

See Joost van der Burgt, China doet het beter dan wij denken, Trouw, 8 May 2008 (http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/nieuws/article/detail/1295562/2008/05/08/China-doet-het-beter-dan-wijdenken.dhtml, accessed June 20, 2012).

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Olympic Values as Virtue Ethics

Sport philosopher Heather Reid contributed another perspective to this debate.182 She observed that from the Western point of view, the key phrase in Fundamental Principle #1 is universal fundamental ethical principles. Modern Western ethics has traditionally focused either upon rules and principles (as in Kants deontological ethics), or upon concrete consequences (as in Utilitarianism). The discovery and articulation of such principles was the focus of modern European ethical philosophy. Immanuel Kant expressed the categorical imperative as a rule. In principle, it was an attempt to raise individuals above personal feelings and particular concerns that could not be justified in a universal (and hence ethical) way. In practice, however, unbiased application of any rule is difficult. The typically Western belief that there are such things as universal fundamental ethical principles encourages people to make and enforce rules derived from sources like a definition of human rights which calls itself universal, even though (as I already demonstrated in my discussion of Chinas lack of a human rights concept) it represents the view of a particular group. The alternative to rules offered by both ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy is virtue ethics. Reid suggests that the focus on virtue rather than rules in ethics may better serve Olympic ideals, not least because it focuses on personal perfection rather than the correction and control of others. And in this respect, the Eastern tradition is very similar to the version of classical Greek ethics that are one of the inspirations for the Olympic Movement, and perhaps indicates a common ground on which East and West can move forward. Reid goes on to argue that virtue ethics focus on the character or excellence of the person doing the action rather than rules or results. The ancient Greek concept of virtue (aret) is already familiar to Olympic ideology. The ancient Chinese concept of virtue (de ) is not so different from aret as one might expect. Both aret and de are understood as a kind of power in the soul; what the Greeks called dynamis and sinologist Arthur Waley translated as moral force. Heather Reid further argues that the Olympic Movements ability to legislate and enforce its own values through punishment and exclusion has enjoyed little success, though this did not stop China critics from calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. A renewed focus on inspiration through virtueboth the leaders own and that of the athletesmight be more appropriate for the Olympic Movement. This was the model in ancient Greece, where a healthy skepticism about the reliability of nomos (law or convention) was combined with a deep respect for physisnature in the sense of ultimate reality, which is very similar to the Chinese Tao () or Way. An emphasis in the Olympic Movement on virtues rather than rules that are assumed to be universal emerges as an appropriate effort toward promoting a peaceful society; one that reflects both Eastern philosophy and Hellenic philosophy that is the foundation of the Olympic ideals. A virtue ethical approach not only accommodates both Eastern and Western ideas, it promotes the principles of Olympism without reducing them to a formula or enforcing them as rules. Heather Reid concludes, The common ethical denominator in virtue ethics, like athletics, is simply our humanity.

182

Heather Reid, East to Olympia: Recentering Olympic Philosophy between East and West, Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies XIX (2010): 59-80.

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Moving Forward from Beijing

So one of the results of the human rights debates surrounding the Beijing Olympics was that it strengthened the IOCs argument that it has its own philosophy of Olympism. It has its own position on human dignity, and the Olympic ethical system is separate from the ethics of the human rights movements. The Olympics and the IOC possess an ethical system that means that what they are striving for is not based upon rights that people have according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but based upon classical virtues that have to do with tolerance, solidarity, respect for others, fair play, non-discrimination, inclusiveness, friendship, character building, courage, dedication, altruism, empathy, endurance, loyalty, dedication to the team, moral power, and so on. It is through these virtues that the IOC is striving to realize its agenda and promote human dignity within the framework of Olympism. It tries to make the world better by promoting Olympic virtues via the Olympic Games and also through the dissemination of Olympism in other ways, such as education programs for children. The IOCs agenda according to the Olympic Charter is stated in the Fundamental Principles: The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. Amnesty International defends human dignity by abolishing the death penalty, by defending press freedom, and so on thats their agenda. The IOC defends human dignity with sport, fair play, friendship, and so on. Amnesty International took the IOCs concept of dignity out of context and filled it in with their definition of human dignity, and then they said, And now you should defend that. After being caught in the debates with Amnesty International and others, Hein Verbruggen concluded after the Beijing Olympics that the IOC should have expressed that to the world in a much better way than it had done before. Its response to human rights groups should have been to tell them in a very clear way that their agenda was not the same as the IOCs agenda. The IOCs agenda is to work through the power of sport. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the development of mankind. Just as Amnesty International would not go to the Red Cross and request that they should pressure a country to improve its human rights record, Amnesty should not pressure the IOC to get into other realms than the particular work that they do in the world.183 Having been through a trial by fire in the Beijing Olympic Games, the IOC knows that it needs a stronger response to human rights critics because the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, are coming. It appeared that the IOC is working on its message, because there is an exhibition in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne that, in my opinion, pulls together a more coherent response than the IOC was able to give before the Beijing Olympics. The exhibition is called Hope: When Sport can Change the World. The advertisement shows Pierre de Coubertin quoting the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King in saying, I had a dream. The exhibition focuses on the three Olympic values of striving for excellence, demonstrating respect, and celebrating friendship. It features
183

Hein Verbruggen, The Olympic Games: legacy for education, development and peace, keynote address at the First International Forum on Sport, Peace, and Development, organized by the IOC International Cooperation and Development Department at the Olympic Museum, Lausanne, 8 May 2009.

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some of the heroes and events that have overcome important barriers, such as Mohammad Ali for African Americans, Cathy Freeman for Australian aboriginals, Billie Jean King for women, Jesse Owens and Luz Long for overcoming Nazi racism; ping pong diplomacy in restoring US-China relations, and the Unified Team in the Olympics after the split up of the Soviet Union. It discusses uses of sport to improve life in refugee camps, or to combat poverty in Rio de Janeiro. Summing up the IOCs assessment of its role in todays world, the introduction to the exhibition states, One of the aims of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humanity. As a humanist philosophy of life based on universal values of peace, dignity and friendship, Olympism is a purveyor of hope. However, sport is not a panacea for all the ills of our society. The IOC and the sports community as a whole cannot alone resolve the socioeconomic problems which constantly threaten peace in the world. I think the IOC is right to remind us that the Olympic Games are a Hope Factory. People need hope or they will not have the desire and willpower to keep trying to move forward. This is the constant danger that Amnesty International and other such NGOs run into: people become so tired of hearing about negative things in the world that they give up trying to change them. Frankly, Amnesty Internationals messages are very depressing. These organizations know this, and so they are very careful about changing the topics of their campaigns so that their members and the media do not get too tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. This is precisely why the Beijing Olympic Games were such a good platform for them: the Olympic Games offered an optimistic feeling of hope that change could happen, and they needed to hook their depressing messages to it in order to overcome the hopelessness that people in the West often feel about problems in the developing world. If the Olympic Games can contribute a little bit of inspiration and utopian dreaming about a peaceful and better world, that is every bit as crucial as the work that is done by U.N., Amnesty International, and other NGOs, and of course by the citizens and activists inside a country, too, because solving global issues will require inspiration and a lot of hard work.

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Multiculturalism in International Sport: Shift of Power from West to East?

Multiculturalism a Brief History184
The intellectual roots of multiculturalism can be traced back to an important theoretical development that occurred in American anthropology in the early twentieth century. Led by Franz Boas (1858-1942), the founding father of American anthropology, a paradigm shift took place in the discipline at that time which centred on a new understanding of culture. This involved a subtle refinement of E.B. Tylors classic definition: Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.185 Tylor used culture and civilization interchangeably, and used both words in the singular. Otherwise, it has served the discipline quite well up to the present day. Franz Boass contribution was to separate culture from civilization, and to discard the latter. The concept of civilization was not useful to him because of its traditional use to establish the superiority of civilized peo ples over uncivilized peoples. He shifted the focus to culture and was the first person to use the word cultures in the plural; it became regular among his students around 1910. This was a new conception of culture because it was founded on the assumption that cultures are relative, all humans are equally cultured, and culture does not undergo a progressive evolutionary development. This was a reaction against evolutionary theory, which assumed that civilized people (i.e., the West) had more culture than other people. Boas believed that there is more than one culture in this world, and different peoples have different cultures. It is this understanding of culture that made possible the emergence of the concept of multiculturalism more than half a century later. The word multiculturalism began to be used officially in 1971 in Canada, when an official policy was announced in response to the conflict between English- and French-speaking Canada. Also a factor was the disadvantaged situation of indigenous peoples. In the United States and Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, educators debated about expanding the core curricula in universities and schools to include not just works by white European males, but also the works and histories of marginalized ethnic and racial groups and women. In the 1980s marginalized minority groups criticized the liberal humanist focus on the protection of individual rights, and argued that rights should also be guaranteed to groups that share a cultural identity. Multiculturalism became a label for a kind of identity politics in which minority groups demanded separate and equal representation in

184

The discussion of multiculturalism, up to the section on traditional East Asian Body Culture, was drawn from Susan Brownell, Multiculturalism, in Hai REN, Lamartine DaCosta, Ana Miragaya (eds.), Olympic Studies Reader (Beijing: Beijing Sport University Press, 2010), pp. 67-79. 185 E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871), p. 1.

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educational curricula and cultural programs.186 One of the major theorists of multiculturalism was the political philosopher Charles Taylor, who summarized this history as follows: Formerly, a great many minorities accepted the conformity formula for democratic states. This was the idea that the public and political culture of the state - i.e., what it meant to be a citizen - was laid down once and for all by the hegemonic majority or the founding generation. The job of subsequent generations, cultural minorities, or more recent immigrants was to conform to this definition without trying to change it. In the last 30 years, however, the rules of citizenship are being progressively rewritten. Not just cultural minorities in the traditional sense, but also groups who feel that the reigning formula does not reflect them, like women and gays, have demanded some adjustments.187 It is important to point out that multiculturalism is a label for a kind of identity politics, which is not always supported by the academic anthropological understanding of culture, because multiculturalists often use culture as a catchword for social groups that are actually defined by characteristics other than culture - such as ethnicity, class, or gender. From a social-scientific viewpoint, the use of culture by multiculturalists is sometimes inaccurate because it misrecognizes social and political divisions as cultural differences and worse, it obscures the real roots of the differences, which are political and economic.188 Multiculturalism in the Olympic Movement is motivated by questions of citizenship similar to those in multicultural politics in general. Membership in the Olympic Movement entails certain rights and privileges, and in that sense it is a kind of athletic citizenship. But does citizenship entail conformity to a hegemonic majority, or do the rules of citizenship accommodate the entrance of minorities who feel that the reigning formula does not reflect them? How has the Olympic Movement already evolved, or how might it evolve in the future to accommodate the cultures of the numerous new nations that have joined it since the original rules were laid down by what Taylor might call the hegemonic majority or the founding generation? Multiculturalism essentially reflects a vision in which different culture maintain their distinctiveness but interact within a common framework that pressures them toward conformity. It differs from pluriculturalism, which describes a situation of the co-existence of different cultures; interculturalism, which describes the interaction of different cultures; and transculturalism, which describes the pursuit of means of interaction that can transcend cultural differences. The last three words are not associated with a clear political agenda as multiculturalism has been, and thus can be used as relatively neutral descriptive terms. However, an examination of the on-the-ground realities that they describe will reveal the same tensions between conformity and difference, and in that sense these terms cannot escape the political problems associated with the term multiculturalism. In recent years in Europe, multiculturalism has been applied to the assimilation problems of immigrants. Actually, Marc Maes used the word multiculturalism in this sense. So I need to clarify

186

Terence Turner, Anthropology and multiculturalism: What is anthropology that multiculturalists should be mindful of it?, Cultural Anthropology, 8(4)(1993): 411. 187 Charles Taylor, Review of Multicultural Citizenship by Will Kymlicka, in The American Political Science Review, 90(2)(June 1996): 408. 188 Turner, Anthropology and multiculturalism, pp. 411-12, 417.

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that the North American understanding is not exactly the same as the European understanding. In Europe, scholars have investigated whether sports act as a vehicle for the integration of immigrants into mainstream society, and they have been concerned with issues of inclusion and exclusion.189 The assumption is that sport is one of the individual rights of citizenship that should be guaranteed to immigrants. To the degree that the European Union considers sport a means of assimilating immigrants based on extending this individual right of citizenship to them, this approach is actually almost the opposite of the original North American approach, which was a reaction against the traditional melting-pot approach to assimilation. Furthermore, in the North American approach, multiculturalism does not directly include womens issues. Womens problems are not based on their cultural difference, but on discrimination based on their sex. Women who share the dominant culture with men are still discriminated against. So this presentation does not address the question of women in sport.

The Socialist Approach to Sports for Ethnic Minorities

It should be mentioned that the sports of ethnic minorities had received special attention in socialist nations; this was part of their attempt to reject the exclusive and elitist nature of sports in a capitalist economy and develop a different model. The Tashkent Games of 1920, also called the First Central Asian Games, were organized by the Soviet Union for the mainly Turkic peoples of what were then independent republics. They may have been the first large-scale games for ethnic minorities. China followed the Soviet model and gave minority nationality sports an even more prominent place: in 1953 the First Chinese National Minority Games were held in Tianjin, and in 1982 they began to be held every four years. The fact that more government attention was given to minority and traditional sports under state socialism was also related to the different structure of citizenship. State socialism gave less attention to individual rights and more to attention to collective group membership. Therefore these events did not arise out of the same multicultural movement that produced indigenous games in Europe and North America where, as described, multiculturalism was motivated by a pursuit of collective rights in political systems that emphasized individual rights. Indeed, the National Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities of the Peoples Republic of China, which had been one of the showpieces of the P.R.C.s ethnic policy since their initiation in 1953, suffered from a lack of attention due to the focus on the Olympics when the eighth instalment was held in Guangzhou in December 2007. I attended them and discovered that most of the opening ceremonies performers were Han (the ethnic majority that constitutes 90% of the Chinese population) students dressed as minorities. When I asked the graduate student from the Guangzhou Sport Institute who escorted me to the opening ceremony why the ethnic minorities could not perform their own dances, she thought it was because the minorities level is not high enough for national television. In

189

For example, Chris Kennett, Sport, immigration and multiculturality *online article] (Barcelona: Centre dEstudis Olmpics UAB, 2005) (http://olympicstudies.uab.es/pdf/wp103_eng.pdf, accessed 15 January 2008); Ian Henry, Maureen Taylor, Mahfoud Amara, Andy Preece, Helen Delany, Dawn Aquilina, Charlotte Calvey, and Gillian Leake, Studies on Education and Sport: Sport and Multiculturalism . Final Report for the DG Education and Culture, European Commission, by PMP in partnership with the Institute of Sport and Leisure Policy, Loughborough University, 2004 (http://ec.europa.eu/sport/documents/lot3.pdf, accessed 15 January 2008).

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the sports, many of the athletes were Han students at sport institutes recently recruited to learn sports that were labelled traditional ethnic sports. Most of these sports were a sportized version of something that ethnic minorities had once done. The one sport that seemed to be a living sport, still connected with the ethnic group that identifies with it, was Mongolian wrestling.

Spread of Multiculturalism into Sports in the West

So multiculturalism, as I am discussing it, is a problem of the Western capitalist system. It is becoming a problem in China as its sport system is incorporated into the global capitalist system. But let me return to the history of multiculturalism in Western sports, which was the specific product of the movement started in the 1970s. Multiculturalists tended to focus on cultural institutions such as schools and museums, and cultural performances such as ethnic song, dance, dress, as sites where cultural diversity could be preserved and displayed. In the 1980s and 1990s this linked with a growing international concern that a singular global culture, which was largely white and European, was rapidly wiping out local diversity around the world. As an important genre of cultural performance, sports could have been an important realm for the multicultural debate, but the elimination of traditional, minority, and indigenous sports by the spread of global sport did not receive a great deal of attention from academics, politicians, or the media. However, indigenous sports did receive government attention in Canada. The Canada Games were started in 1967 to provide a national development competition to reach the maximum number of Canadians. When it was realized that the sport system was not reaching native peoples, the Arctic Winter Games were established in 1970 to give natives in northern Canada their own national competition. Alaska (U.S.) also sent some athletes. The first North American Indigenous Games (NAIG) were organized in 1990, involving some U.S. participants.190 The NAIG included traditional aboriginal sports such as archery, canoe, and lacrosse, as well as global sports such as track and field, basketball, volleyball, boxing, and others. Thus, within this important multicultural intervention in sports, both global and indigenous sports symbolized ethnic identity. In addition, in the 1980s the end of state-supported socialist sport in Europe and the rapid globalization of sports produced a backlash. There was a multiplication of international competitions and sports festivals celebrating alternative local and ethnic identities, such as the First Games of the Small Countries of Europe, the First Inter-Island Games, the First Eurolympics of Minority Peoples, and so on.191 The International World Games Association was founded in 1981, and began organizing an international meeting of non-Olympic sports in the year following the Olympic Games. The Trim and Fitness International Sport For All Association (TAFISA), was founded in 1991, and has organized several installations of the World Festival of Traditional Sports.

190 191

Thanks to Christine Obonsawin for providing me with some basic information on Canada. Henning Eichberg, Racing forward and backward: Olympic Anthropology Days 1904 and the Progress of Exclusion, in Susan Brownell, ed. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (Omaha, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

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Geographical Universalism does not equal Cultural Diversity

Multiculturalism as a political movement made little headway into the Olympic movement itself. Membership in the IOC entailed conforming to the existing rules with little or no possibility for its members to add their unique traditional sports to the Olympic program. This stance was strengthened after Jacques Rogges election as the President of the IOC. The Olympic Programme Commission was formed in 2002, as part of a policy of controlling the increase in the number of sports on the Olympic program. The system for adding and deleting sports that was developed by the Commission only considered the geographical universalism of a sport and not its cultural character. One result was that Chinese wushu (martial arts) was eliminated from consideration as an official Olympic sport for the Beijing Olympic Games, which will be discussed further below. The resistance within the IOC to multiculturalism is illustrated by a story. After the establishment of the Olympic Museum at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1993, He Zhenliang (IOC member in China and chair of the Commission on Culture and Olympic Education) proposed that it should introduce the sport cultures of different civilizations. However, some members of the Executive Board disagreed, stating that it should display things relevant to Olympism. He argued against them, Times have changed; the participants in the ancient Olympic Games were limited to the various city-states in the area of Greece, in the later periods it expanded to various places along the Mediterranean sea. Even in the modern Olympic Games, the first participants were limited to a dozen European and North American countries. However, participants in todays Olympic Games come from every corner of the world. They represent different cultures and what they have introduced into the Olympic Games is completely different from the past, and needless to say the meaning of the modern Olympic Games is completely different from the ancient Olympic Games, too. Can we only transmit Greek sports culture to the nations of the world and should we not at the same time introduce the sport cultures from different sources? 192 In 1999, he did finally win this argument, and an exhibition of ancient Chinese sport art was held at the museum, and a beautiful illustrated volume was also published by the IOC, 5000 Years of Sport Art in China, which one can buy at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. After that, other exhibitions included Australian aboriginal art, Aztec art, and African art.

192

Liang Lijuan. He Zhenliang and Chinas Olympic Dream, translated by Susan Brownell (Beijing: Beijing Foreign Languages Press, 2007), p. 383.

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In a speech to the IOC 2000 Reform Commission he stated, The IOC was born in Europe and when it was first established only part of the European countries and very few American countries participated. We are indebted to their creator, Coubertin, and the other pioneers. However, todays world is not the same as in those years. We have local Olympic Committees in 200 countries and territories, reaching into every corner of the world. The significance of the universality of the Olympic Movement is not like that of 100 years ago. Our ideas ought to adapt to this historical transformation, so that universality achieves expression in every aspect of the IOC. It is a pity that this point is frequently ignored, either because of unintentional oversight or habit. Our goal should be to work hard to make universality take shape and express itself with all the brilliant glory of the five Olympic circles.193 The Olympic Movement is spreading across the face of the globe. The Beijing Olympics marked the third time that the summer Games had been held outside the West and its former colonies (Mexico), and the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics will be the first held in South America. The Beijing Olympics also marked an important moment when virtually every part of the planet earth was covered by a National Olympic Committee, and there was almost no territory left to which an NOC could be added. There should have been 205 NOCs marching in the opening ceremony, but Brunei was prevented from entering the field at the last moment because it had not sent any athletes. However, geographical universalism does not equal cultural diversity. He Zhenliang has observed, a movements geographical universality does not automatically mean, in the minds of its leaders, that the cultural plurality of this movement is real and that there is compatibility between different cultures. In fact, universality requires there to be cultural plurality, something which can be achieved only when all cultures receive the same respect.194

Multiculturalism and Globalization

Is the globalization of sports a process of homogenization or diversification? Three well-known Olympic sport scholars come to conclusions that are rather similar in their optimism. They all feel that cultural difference is being created at the same time that homogenization is taking place. Perhaps it is the fact that they are based in powerful Western countries that allows them this optimism. Allen Guttmann, at the end of his survey of the global diffusion of sports through colonialism, argues against those who claim that the diffusion of sports is an imperialist destruction of authentic native cultural forms. He does, however, admit that the standardized universality of modern sports

193

He Zhenliang, Universal Olympic Values in a Multicultural World. Olympic Review (October-November 2001), p. 11. 194 He Zhenliang, Universal Olympic Values, p. 11. www.la84foundation.org/OlympicInformationCenter/OlympicReview/2001/OREXXVII41/OREXXVII41m.pdf (accessed 18 January 2008).

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represents a loss of diversity. However, he says that indigenous groups are active participants in the borrowing and they change the sports in the process.195 John MacAloon puts forth the theory of sport as an empty form. He states that sports of Western origin have, over time, been emptied of their original cultural content and refilled with diverse local meanings by the people who practice them. Sports constitute intercultural spaces for cultural interaction, and cultural differences are created during the process of integration.196 Joe Maguire argues that globalization should be understood as a balance between diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties. Global sport fosters a cosmopolitan consciousness, but at the same time it strengthens feelings of ethnic identity. He notes that it is not inevitable that globalization will result in the continued rise of the West; the co-mingling of cultures through globalization could result in the decentring of the West.197 Three well-known Olympic scholars who are not based in powerful Western nations are less optimistic. Lamartine DaCosta says that the current emphasis on the universalistic traditions of Olympism needs to be balanced with a new pluralist humanism, and criticizes Olympic leaders and sport scholars for failing to put pluricultural Olympism into action.198 Kostas Georgiadis, the honorary dean of the International Olympic Academy in Olympia, Greece which in the past forty years has provided more educational seminars in Olympism to young people and educators from around the globe than any other single institutionalso complains that multicultural education is underdeveloped within Olympic education. He states that good methods for teaching multiculturalism through sports have not been developed, that teaching materials are inadequate, and that teachers need to be aided in developing multicultural sensitivity.199

195

Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 196 John MacAloon, Humanism as Political Necessity: Reflections on the Pathos of Anthropological Science in Pluricultural Contexts, in James Fernandez and Milton Singer (eds.), The Conditions of Reciprocal Understanding (Chicago: Center for International Studies, University of Chicago, 1995). 197 Joseph Maguire, Global Sport: Identities, Societies, Civilizations (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999). 198 Lamartine P. DaCosta, Questioning Olympism: Pluralism, multiculturalism, or what else? In Lamartine P. DaCosta, ed., Olympic Studies: Current intellectual crossroads (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Gama Filho, 2002), pp. 39-58.
199

Kostas Georgiadis, International Olympic Academy: International understanding thr ough Olympic education, The Journal of the International Council for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, Sport, and Dance, 27(2)(2001).

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Farthest from the Western centres of power, Lu Yuanzhen, Chinas most prominent radical critic of sports, is much more forceful: Modern world sports are a cultural phenomenon that emerged against the background of the industrial revolution and cultural Renaissance in the West. However, the sport cultures of other nations and peoples - whether they are traditional or modern, whether they are mature or budding, whether they are ethnically homogeneous or transnational and multinational - have all been relegated to the status of second-class sport cultures or quasi-sport cultures. Today, every nation and people is striving to join the trend of the dominant world sport culture, even considering it their pride and joy. In this dominant sport culture, the Olympic Movement is a leading force. Olympism - as a culture of the powerful, a culture of power, an overpowering culture - has produced strong effects of impulsion, assimilation, integration, accommodation, and absorption on the diverse ethnic cultures, and is now expanding, penetrating, and flooding into every corner of the globe, establishing a system of coordinates for the development of world sport. *+ Historically, Western sport culture hitched a ride on the colonial railcar and crowded aside the indigenous sport cultures of the different Eastern countries until they almost disappeared into oblivion. In the current process of economic globalization, Western sport culture has again, like a lawnmower, mowed down the cultural diversity of world sport into neat and tidy rows. In accordance with the rule that the strong feed on the weak, the diverse sport cultures, as the weak cultures, have become pale and feeble. An absolutely asymmetrical cultural relationship has been formed between the diverse sport cultures and Olympism.200 So, is the globalization of sports a process of homogenization or diversification? This question awaits further research, and in that process Western scholars probably need to make greater efforts to include the opinions and experiences of colleagues in developing and non-Western countries, who are, after all, in a better position to judge the answer.

200

Lu Yuanzhen, Zhongguo tiyu wenhua zongheng tan [Survey of Chinese sport culture] (Beijing: Beijing Sport University Press, 2005), pp. 2-3.

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Traditional East Asian body culture201

In the lead up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a common expression in China was that the Games would be a combination of East and West (dongxi jiehe, , expressing an optimistic view that the huge international platform offered by the games would propel Chinese culture onto the world stage, at the same time that China welcomed the West and its culture to a degree never seen before in history. But the case of wushu shows that probably we should not be too optimistic. Wushu is the word for the Chinese martial arts that were standardized in the 1950s after the founding of the Peoples Republic and included in its state-supported system. Today the official version includes two kinds of disciplines: taolu (, forms) judged on a 10-point scale as gymnastics once was; and sanshou (, sparring) scored by a panel of judges like boxing. The rules currently in effect for international competition promulgated by the International wushu Federation202 recognize twelve taolu events: long-range boxing; southern-style boxing; taijiquan; swordplay; broadswordplay; spearplay; cudgelplay; taiji swordplay; southern-style broadswordplay; and southern-style cudgelplay; dual events with or without weapons, and with bare hands against weapons; and group events. The performances are judged by ten judges, divided into three panels of three and one head judge: Panel A evaluates the quality of movements; Panel B evaluates the overall performance; and the head judge and Panel C evaluate the degree of difficulty. Agreement between two of the three judges is required. The maximum score is ten points, with bonus points added for innovative movements. The scoring system is very complex, requiring 1,400 words of explanation in the English version. The rules for sanshou 203 recognize eleven weight categories. Bouts consist of three two-minute rounds with victory awarded to the winner of two out of three; tournaments consist of a round-robin elimination system. Competitors wear boxing gloves, headgear, chest protectors, mouth protectors, and protective cups under their trunks. Three to five sideline judges award points for legal blows to the head, trunk, and thighs, or for falls of the opponent. I have utilized the concept of body culture to label the cultural context that shapes what people do with their bodies, including sports. I define body culture as the entire repertoire of things that people do to and with their bodies, and the elements of culture that give meaning to their actions. Body culture can include daily practices of health, hygiene, fitness, beauty, dress and decoration; postures, gestures, manners, ways of speaking and eating; ritual, dance, sports, and other kinds of bodily performance. It includes the methods for training these practices into the body, the way the body is publicly displayed, and the meanings that are expressed in that display. Body culture is embodied culture.204

201

The following section on traditional East Asian body culture is drawn from Susan Brownell, Wushu and the Olympic Games: Combination of East and West or Clash of Body Cultures? in Vivienne Lo (ed.), Perfect Bodies, Sports, Medicine and Immortality (London: British Museum, 2012), pp. 61-72. 202 International Wushu Federation Official Website, 2010 (www.iwuf.org/wushu, accessed 7 November 2010). 203 International Wushu Federation Official Website, 2010. 204 See Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the Peoples Republic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 8-21. This concept is drawn from the work of Henning Eichberg, who uses the notion of Krperkultur to look at the body primarily as cultural, emphasizing the multiple roles of the body in social process and historical change. See Henning Eichberg, Body Culture as Paradigm: The Danish

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Today, concepts of the body throughout East Asia are still largely shaped by the classical Chinese medical tradition. This tradition involves a very different body practice from that of Western biomedical science.205 The concept of qi, vital energy, occupies a central place in this practice. The Taoist and Buddhist meditation traditions involve learning to control the bodys flow of qi so that it can be utilized to achieve enlightenment and immortality (note the mind-body synthesis here). Martial arts masters perform astounding feats by developing the ability to concentrate qi in specific body parts to make them hard and impervious to injury. By redirecting an enemys qi against him, the master is able to repel attack. The soft or internal arts cultivate qi toward good health. The Mawangdui silk scroll dating to 168 BCE, depicting robed figures doing daoyin exercises, is often considered one of the earliest pieces of evidence for this tradition; qigong and wushu masters believe they are continuing it. Qi is central in wushu training in China, and in this respect wushu is different from Olympic sports. Although probably all Chinese athletes like most East Asians - walk around every day imagining that qi is circulating throughout their bodies, athletes in other sports only engage in a small amount of qigong training. For example, because the yin hours before the yang of daylight starts to gain its strength are believed to be the most beneficial hours for absorbing qi, it is common that all athletes in Chinas sports training centers do early-morning exercises at about 6:30am. They also frequently use meditational breathing as a cool-down after working out. Wushu athletes, however, have stronger feelings about this, so they may schedule their main training session (as opposed to warm-up exercises) in the early morning. They may also follow more strictly the health regime dictated by traditional Chinese medicine and Daoism. This includes eating foods with medicinal or hot and cold effects, acupuncture and acupressure massage, or sexual abstinence (which is more of a challenge for married men than unmarried) with the goal of preserving seminal essence, jing (a source of strength for male athletes), and so on. In contrast to the mind-body synthesis inherent in qi, one of the central tenets of Western sports is mind-body dualism: mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. It is enshrined in the IOCs Olympic Charter, which begins with a definition in Fundamental Principle #1 that states, Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind.206 Certainly Chinese versus Western body culture have larger implications in the kinds of medical treatment people seek and the kinds of physical exercise that they engage in. However, on an individual level, I have always found it interesting that uninformed Westerners can develop close relationships with Chinese people without ever realizing that their Chinese friends possess a body image that is quite different from the Western one. With the exception of wushu circles where a shared body culture with non-Chinese practitioners is presumed, Chinese people tend to be

Sociology of Sport, in John Bale and Chris Philo (eds.), Body Cultures: Essays on sport, space and identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 111-27. 205 Judith Farquhar, Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1994); Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2002); Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York, Zone Books, 1999); Yasuo Yuasa, The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993); Yang Xubin, Rujiade Shentiguan [The Confucian Concept of the Body] (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1996). 206 International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter (Lausanne, Switzerland: International Olympic Committee, 2007), 11.

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somewhat shy about expressing these beliefs to foreigners. In a lecture on multiculturalism (or its lack) in the Olympic Movement at the Beijing Sport University, I was once greeted by applause from the student audience when I said, I believe in qi. In the end, is this difference between traditional Chinese concepts of the body and Western neoclassical sport philosophy important? The difference becomes important where wushu intersects with the global system of international sports organizations. It is at this point that the normally invisible foundation of body culture is made visible by virtue of the frictions that are generated between a Chinese cultural form and the Westerndominated world system.

Judo as a traditional East Asian sport?

The historical reality is that most of the sports on the Olympic program were spread throughout the world through Western colonialist and imperialist expansion, and they emerged out of the historical conditions that produced them. There are only two sports of clearly non-Western origin on the Olympic Games program judo (Japan) and taekwondo (South Korea). In addition, kayak might be considered to have some roots in indigenous American Indian cultures. Judo was a demonstration sport at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, was not contested at following Olympics, and was included in the official program starting with the Munich 1972 Olympics (women in 1992). Taekwondo was a demonstration sport at the Seoul 1988 Olympics and Barcelona 1992 Olympics, but did not became an official sport until 2000. Both judo and taekwondo are sportized mutations of indigenous physical skills. Judo was an intentional creation by East Asias first member in the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Japanese Kan Jigoro (co-opted into the IOC in 1909), who understood that in his times the European-dominated IOC would never accept a sport that deviated too far from the Western model. Judo is frequently said to be the first traditional East Asian sport to enter the Olympic Games, but actually it was not intended to be traditional at the time it was invented and promoted.207 When judo applied to enter the Olympic program there were two international judo federations, one headed by Kan and another controlled by Europeans; the latter actually wrote the IOC to oppose the first federation on the grounds that they were using judo to spread Buddhism. In fact, the socalled first non-Western sport to be included in the Olympic Games had already been nearly completely emptied of traditional East Asian culture before it could be accepted onto the program.

207

Andreas D. Niehaus, If You Want to Cry, Cry on the Green Mats of Kdkan: Expressions of Japanese Cultural and National Identity in the Movement to Include Judo into the Olympic Programme, The International Journal of the History of Sport 23(7) (November 2006): 1173-92.

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Wushus exclusion from the 2008 Olympic program

In 1982, shortly after the beginning of the era of reform, the State Sports Commission established the policy of promoting wushu internationally with the eventual goal of seeing it included in the Olympic Games. An international invitational competition was organized in 1985 followed by the establishment of a preparatory committee for the establishment of the International Wushu Federation. The International Wushu Federation was formally established in 1990, the same year that wushu was first included in the Asian Games program when China hosted its first Asian Games in Beijing. It was recognized by SportAccord in 1994 and the IOC in 1999. In 2010 it had affiliated national associations in 135 countries.208 Internationally, it grew rapidly along with the numbers of practitioners who emigrated from China and started their own schools. In the U.S., for example, wushu schools are now found in every major city and many smaller cities. Increasing numbers of schools in China have also opened their doors to foreigners, and folk masters have developed their own clientele of foreigners. Jacques Rogge was elected president at the same IOC Session in 2001 at which Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games. One of his campaign promises was to control gigantism in the Olympic Games with the goal, among other things, of broadening the number of potential host cities, hopefully to include more cities outside Europe and North America. He established the Olympic Programme Commission to study the sports on the program with the goal of reducing their number. The Commission established 33 criteria for inclusion in the Olympic program, which emphasized the participation base of the sport and its spectator appeal. Based on these criteria, in 2004 they decided to consider five sports in addition to the 28 sports already on the program: roller sports, squash, golf, karate and rugby. The Japanese sport of karate was preferred over the Chinese sport of wushu because the World Karate Federation was established in 1970 and had 173 affiliated national federations, while the International Wushu Federation was established in 1990 and had 119.209 The five sports were presented to the IOC membership for a vote, but all five were rejected.210 The 2008 Olympic program was finalized in April 2006. When the process was repeated in 2009, neither sport was considered further, but the Session voted rugby and golf onto the program for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. The globalization of wushu was thus stopped at the doorstep of the Olympics. Compared to judo, taekwondo, and karate, wushu deviates most from the Western model of sport. This returns us to my question: Does it matter that most East Asians have a fundamentally different philosophy of the body than Westerners? Aficionados argue that it is not possible to fully appreciate wushu if one does not understand qi. Some IOC members did not feel wushu was enough sport. From the IOCs perspective, a major problem with wushu is that it is a sport that is subjectively judged, and the IOC is distrustful of those sports because of their proven potential for corrupt judging. The judging in boxing was once so corrupt that the IOC threatened to expel it from the Olympic program; the figure skating judging scandal at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Games was the culmination of decades of bloc judging in which everyone knew the winners had been predetermined; taekwondo has also been accused of fixed judging over the years.

208 209

International Wushu Federation Official Website, 2010. Karate, wushu, official website of the International Olympic Committee, 2007. 210 Report on the Singapore Session, official website of the International Olympic Committee, 2007.

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These scandals had plagued Rogges predecessor, and the IOC was reluctant to risk adding another subjective sport. Even inside China, the management of wushu was considered to be in a development phase and not yet up to the highest international standards; this was in part due to the fact that it was one of the few International Federations not headquartered in Switzerland. On the face of it, this makes logical sense; but on closer examination, it is evident that this is precisely the point of this essay: quantification by objective standards is one of the defining characteristics of Western sport, which de facto eliminates many non-Western sports from consideration. And they may be difficult to quantify precisely because they are non-Western - that is, they reflect a body culture organized by a different logic from the modern obsession with standardization, quantification, and performance. The IOC rejection of wushu initially sparked resistance in China. Chinese sports people had always assumed that China would be able to add its sport to the Olympic program when it hosted the Games, as had happened when Japan added judo in 1964, Korea added taekwondo in 1988, and the U.S. added softball and baseball in 1996 in Atlanta. Leading up to the Beijing Olympics, it was a sensitive topic both inside the IOC and in China. At the IOCs Fifth World Forum on Sport, Culture, and Education in 2006, I gave a presentation on multiculturalism in the Olympic Movement in which I mentioned wushu, and was later thanked by some Chinese delegates for speaking on their behalf when they did not feel that they could bring it up. In 2008, when I asked to interview an official in Chinas Wushu Management Centre, I was told that certain sensitive questions would be off limits, and the question of wushus inclusion in the Olympic program was one of them. In China wushus exclusion was received with a great deal of popular discontent. China fought a hard battle inside the IOC. The IOC suggested that wushu could be contested as part of the cultural program. On the face of it, this seems like a good idea. It could be a framework not only for wushu, but also for other local and ethnic sports that would like to gain some publicity through the Olympic Games. Two other sports that have aspirations to be on the Olympic program are Indias Kabbadi and Thailands Sepak Takraw. I personally think that this is an idea that should be pursued, because the cultural program surrounding the Olympics usually gives almost no attention to sports and fitness, but is almost entirely composed of conventional elite cultural forms like music, dance, visual arts, haute cuisine, and even haute couture. This doesnt do anything to promote sports and recreation, which should be a major goal of the Olympic Games. However, China rejected this proposal because it felt that being part of the cultural program was not prestigious enough, and did not imply international recognition of wushu as a sport equal to other Western sports as they wanted. If it got slotted into the category of cultural sport, it might never be able to get out again. They felt that inclusion on the cultural program was a kind of ghettoization to keep wushu out of the official sports world. After much negotiation, the IOC agreed that wushu could be contested under the auspices of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) during the Beijing Olympic Games as a local organizing committee sport, but would not be an official sport. While in some previous Olympic Games there had been a category of exhibition sport, the IOC had eliminated this category. Inside China, the IOCs failure to vote wushu onto the Olympic program led to a debate in the sports world as to the reasons. They asked, Is the West incapable of accepting Chinese culture?

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Wushu as traditional Chinese culture?

In Chinese sports circles the debate about wushus exclusion eventually seemed to lead not only to a certain resignation, but also to a sentiment that inclusion in the Olympics might actually do harm to wushu. Traditionalists felt that its cultural background is richer and more complicated than the other Olympic sports, and inclusion in the Olympic Games would accelerate the loss of its authentic Chinese character. They complained that proper wushu training requires years of the cultivation of qi, which cannot be scored by judges, and international Wushu had become too similar to gymnastics. Some radical thinkers considered the Olympic Games themselves to be a form of Western cultural domination and for them wushu is a symbol of an alternative non-Western sports tradition which must be preserved against the onslaught of the West. One example is Chinas most radical critic, the scholar Lu Yuanzhen, who wrote that the addition of judo and taekwondo to the Olympic program was just like slapping two Eastern Band-Aids onto the Olympic Games. *+ *T+he Olympic Movement, with its standardized system and compulsory procedures, had already formed a series of strong barriers, making it difficult for any heterogeneous culture whatsoever to enter into it. The difficulty of Chinese wushu in entering the Olympic Games has proven this point. Even at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Eastern sport culture will only be a show that, at most, will be temporarily acknowledged by the West. The time is not yet ripe for the Olympic Movement to realize the integration, coexistence, and equality of Eastern and Western culture, or perhaps this is even impossible. One might even say that to attempt to transform the Olympic Movement into a place for the coexistence of Eastern and Western sport culture is a fantasy out of The Arabian Nights.211 A plethora of books and articles dealt with the topic of wushus future. One representative book on Traditional Ethnic Sport and Cultural Self-Respect observed, The development of wushu in the direction of singular, unilineal development will ultimately cause wushu to completely melt away and be replaced by Western sport culture in the course of its internationalization Chinese wushu, with its broad, rich, and profound cultural meaning, will be replaced by the westernized sport wushu (competitive wushu) that adheres to the principle of swifter, higher, stronger. *+ [T]he existence of the wushu whose cultural meaning concerns us, in turn, forms an exact opposition between abstract Chinese culture and simplistic, naked Western culture.212 Let me, therefore, zoom out once again to the level of transnational sport, where the balance of power lies in the West. The majority of the history and symbolism of the modern Olympics is linked to Western civilization. The great majority of International Federations have their headquarters in the West.

211

Lu Yuanzhen, Hope Lies in the Revival of Eastern Sport Culture, Hai Ren, L. DaCosta, A. Miragaya, Niu J. (eds.), Olympic Studies Reader, p. 84.
212

Wang Gang, Minzu chuantong tiyu yu wenhua zizun [Traditional Ethnic Sport and Cultural Self-Respect] (Beijing: Beijing Sport University Press, 2007), p. 155.

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As I discussed in my lecture on The Olympic Games in the World System (page 95), of the 35 winter and summer federations recognized by the IOC, twelve have headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, to which they have been drawn because that is the IOC headquarters. The IOC is Europeandominated: in 2008, 44% of its 110 members and 60% of its 15 Executive Board members were Europeans. Half of its members were culturally Western (Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand). Thirteen percent (14) were Asian.
Table 6: Representation in IOC Structures by Region of the World, 2008

Region Europe Western Eastern Asia Africa Middle East South/Central America North America Oceania total

IOC Members 48 44% 37 34% 11 10% 14 13% 18 16% 6 5% 14 13% 5 5% 5 5% 110 100%

IOC Executive Board 9 60% 8 53% 1 7% 3 20% 1 7% 0 0% 2 13% 0 0% 0 0% 15 100%

IF Headquarters 30 86% 28 80% 2 6% 3 9% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 2 6% 0 0% 35 100%

The NOC of Israel is a member of the continental association for Europe (European Olympic Committees, EOC) and is classified as European by the IOC, therefore its NOC and IOC member are counted there. Figures current as of January 2008, taken from the official IOC website, www.olympic.org.

It is my opinion that if Asians numerically dominated the IOC and the leadership of the International Federations, wushu would already be an Olympic sport regardless of its cultural content. If you control the standards, you can force other people to play by your rules regardless of whether they accept your culture or not. Thus the real challenge for China is to increase its leadership presence in international sports. However, as I discussed in my previous lecture, there are cultural and social obstacles. For the time being, leadership in the IOC and other international sport federations largely lies in the hands of Westerners. The balance of power in leadership will not change quickly, but as the financial balance shifts, the leadership balance may follow. The World Martial Arts and Combat Sports Games were held in Beijing in October 2010. They included wushu among 13 combat sports, of which 11 originated in East Asia, with the only sports of Western origin being boxing and wrestling. The only Olympic sports were boxing, wrestling, judo, and taekwondo. 213 They were organized by SportAccord, the umbrella association for all of the International Sport Federations, whose chairman is Hein Verbruggen - the man who was the IOCs liaison with Beijing during the process of organizing the Beijing Olympics, and who supported Chinas desire to host the international wushu tournament during the Olympics. If the Combat Games grow into a mega-event, they could herald a power shift in the global sport system led by China and Russia as discussed above. I think of these games as the revenge of wushu for its exclusion from the Olympic program.

213

The 11 sports of Eastern origin are aikido, judo, ju-jitsu, karate, kendo, kickboxing, muaythai, sambo, sumo, taekwondo, and wushu.

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Re-Thinking Multiculturalism in the Olympic Games

The Olympic movement depends on the ideas that give it its significance and meaning. The future success and worldwide acceptance of the Olympic movement will depend on whether the IOC, in collaboration with scholars, is successful in re-thinking and re-working Olympism for the twenty-first century, not simply in marketing terms, but based on solid research drawing from the humanities and social sciences. As scholars, we have a responsibility. Scholars and event organizers should consider whether there are better ways to showcase cultural diversity through sport and to celebrate cultural diversity within the Olympic Games - with an attitude of respect. As He Zhenliang has argued, Mutual respect must constantly be developed because peaceful coexistence and world peace will exist only on a basis of mutual respect among nations.214 Intellectuals have a responsibility to generate new ideas for new times. The issue of multiculturalism in the Olympic Movement demands more attention and creativity. It is my personal opinion that we need to re-examine the cultural program surrounding the Olympic Games the Cultural Olympiad, and the opening and closing ceremonies. They could focus more attention on traditional and ethnic sports. At present, the cultural programs that surround the Olympic Games tend to focus on music, dance, and art, which, depending on the performance, may or may not showcase cultural diversity - but certainly do nothing to preserve cultural diversity in the sports of the world. Host countries could be encouraged to display their local sports to the world so that the global audience sees the cultural diversity of sports in the world and not just the monoculture of Olympic sports.

214

He Zhenliang, Universal Olympic Values, p. 13.

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Sport, Politics, and World Peace: Lessons from the Beijing Olympics215
The IOC is a particularly unique institution, and because it is so unusual it is not especially wellunderstood, but this is precisely what makes it so significant: it offers an alternative to the usual modes and channels of international politics. There is a widespread mythology that sports should be separate from politics, and that the IOCs official policy is to keep politics out of sport. Based on this mistaken belief, in the intensely political atmosphere surrounding the Beijing Olympic Games the question was often raised: Why have sports suddenly become so political? China was frequently blamed for politicizing the Olympics. Actually, national politics had been a part of the Olympic Games at least since the 1906 Intermediate Olympic Games216 in Athens, only the fourth modern Olympics. It was the first Olympic Games at which athletes marched behind national flags in groups organized by national Olympic Committees, and three national flags were hoisted for the medal winners. Peter OConnor, the silver medallist in the triple jump, climbed the flagpole to wave the Irish flag in protest over the British Union Jack that had been raised for the ceremony, since the British Olympic Council had monopolized the Irish entries and he had been unable to register as an Irish athlete.217 The presidents of the IOC during the Cold War Sigfrid Edstrm, Avery Brundage, and Lord Michael Killanin began using the admonition dont mix politics with sport as a way of preserving the Olympic Games amidst the irresolvable political oppositions of the time, but there has never been an official policy explicitly forbidding members to engage in politics. The closest thing to an official policy has been the Fundamental Principle in the Olympic Charter, first added in 1949, stating that there shall be no discrimination on the grounds of colour, religion, or politics.218 When Beijing was bidding for the 2008 Games in 2001, that article in the Charter had been watered down and the word politics erased to read: sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.219 This was modified in the 2004 Charter, the one in effect now, to name politics again. Fundamental Principle #5 states, Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic

215

The first half of this lecture, up to the discussion of Juan Antonio Samaranch, was drawn from Susan Brownell, Chapter Five, Mixing Sport and Politics: China and the International Olympic Committee, in Brownell, Beijings Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); and Susan Brownell, Sport and Politics Dont Mix: Chinas relationship with the IOC during the Cold War, in Stephen Wagg and David Andrews (eds.), East Plays West: Essays on Sport and the Cold War (Routledge, 2007), pp. 261-78. 216 Due to the success of the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, Greece wanted to be a permanent host, but the IOC did not agree. Instead it agreed that Greece could host an intercalary Olympic Games every two years after the official Olympic Games. The 1906 Games were the most successful to that date, but afterwards Greece went into a political and economic crisis and they were discontinued. Today the IOC refuses to recognize the 1906 games as official games, although the IOC did recognize them at the time. 217 Mark Quinn, The King of Spring - The Life and Times of Peter O'Connor (Dublin, Ireland: Liffey Press, 2004). 218 Karl Lennartz, The Presidency of Sigfrid Edstrm (1942 -1952). The International Olympic Committee: One Hundred Years, The Idea The Presidents The Achievements (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 1995), 40. 219 Olympic Charter 2001 (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee), 9.

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Movement.220 In short, the separation of sport and politics has never been an official philosophy of the IOC. However, it has been a practical strategy.

Athletic Geography: Coubertins Enduring Legacy

Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), who led the establishment of the IOC in 1894, felt strongly that the IOC should be independent from any government. In Allen Guttmanns analysis, Coubertins aristocratic conception was that IOC members should be a circle of like-minded gentlemen who shared a liberal consensus based on the nineteenth-century Western distinction between private and governmental spheres. Guttmann argues that the liberal consensus made it possible for IOC members to believe that they were not engaging in politics even while the Olympic stadium was ringed with a hundred flags.221 The unique characteristic of the IOC is that it elects its own members in a process called cooptation, considering them to be trustees of Olympism and ambassadors of the Olympic Movement to their respective countries. Near the end of his life, Coubertin maintained, I continue to believe that the constitution of the IOC is excellent, based as it is on the principle that I will call reverse delegation. This means that the mandate comes from the idea, which then attracts followers.222 In 1923, in the wake of World War I, the IOC added another layer between itself and territoriallybased national politics by making the issuing of the invitations the duty of the national authorities organizing the Games.223 Coubertin also seemed to feel that the relationship between governments and the Olympic Games would generally be good for Olympism, noting, Wherever they take place, governments will be asked to give them their full official support.224 Only one national Olympic committee could represent a country, and only citizens of a country could represent it in the Olympic Games. National Olympic committees were conceived in like fashion to the IOC: they must be politically independent of national governments, but unlike the IOC, they were representatives of territorial units over whose sports they had jurisdiction. From Coubertins time to today, the political units with which the IOC constructs its relationships have been called countries in English (pays in French, the official legal language of the IOC). In practice, most of these territorial units were sovereign nations, but many of them were not, since their numbers included colonies, dependent territories, countries of contested independence, and various other anomalies. Country (or nation) assumes a homogeneous ideal that does not exist in the real world. The meaning of country or nation was frequently discussed in the IOC debates

220 221

Olympic Charter 2004 (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee), 9. Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 170-71, 134-35, 138. 222 Coubertin 2000: 743. See John MacAloons discussions of the IOCs principle of cooptation (1981: 160, 172, 181) and of Coubertins awareness of the irony of this process in a democratic organization (p. 180), in John MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 223 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings (Lausanne: IOC, 2000), p. 495. 224 Coubertin, Olympism, p. 661.

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about the German, Korean, and Chinese problems during the Cold War, and their meaning was first clarified in a footnote in the Olympic Charter in 1960. Country was not formally defined in the Olympic Charter until 1997, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the on-going conflict between China and Taiwan (Olympic Charter, Rule 31.1). Almost from its inception the IOC began to arbitrate its own decisions about what constituted a country. Coubertin distinguished political geography from athletic or sports geography, and wrote, The fundamental rule of the modern Olympiads is summarized in these terms: All games, all nations. It is not even within the power of the International Olympic Committee, the highest authority in this matter, to change this. I must add that a nation is not an independent State. There is an athletic geography that may differ at times from political geography.225 It is important to keep in mind that Coubertin (1863-1937) was in many ways a product of his aristocratic French birth and of the events of the late nineteenth century. For him the main threat to social stability was not political, but was social by which he meant the demise of the old aristocratic order and the rise of the working class and what he called democratic internationalism. Of course, another indicator of his time-bound sensibilities was the fact that he opposed the participation of women in the Olympic Games for his entire life. He did not have great faith in elections, and felt that strength of the IOCs structure was that it provided independence and stability in a world that was turning increasingly toward the electoral process, which he considered unstable. In 1908 he even complained, Increasingly the public is used to seeing the principle of elections expand, gradually placing all institutions under its yoke, and he expressed delight that the IOC was not in the least concerned about it.226 Otto Schantz227 observes that Coubertin was asked to present himself for the national election as a deputy, but ultimately did not do it. In his memoirs he wrote that he was not interested in national, but in international politics, and that he found that engaging in international politics with instruments exterior to politics was much more effective. Probably due to his experience of French history (instability, frequently changing regimes, etc.), he had little confidence in the nation-state as a political power. He believed in private initiatives, and in the political role of cities. He personally started many initiatives to promote and reform education and to preserve social peace. Coubertin considered sport a value-free tool. According to him, sport can be used for different aims. It can be instrumentalized to prepare for war or to promote peace. He used sport as a political tool, to promote education and international peace (Olympic Games) and to preserve social peace (his plans for the revival of the ancient gymnasium), and as an instrument of civilization. Although Coubertin used sport as a political tool, he tried to avoid the influence of nation-states. The IOC and its members should be free to make decisions without being dependent on paymasters or governments. The demand that Olympic Games should be organized by cities and not by states, as well as his conception of a sporting geography, underline this will toward political independence and political power. However, he did not go as far as Brundage and claim that politics and sport

225 226

Coubertin, Olympism, p. 590, see also p. 266. Coubertin, Olympism, p. 587. 227 Otto Schantz, e-mail communication, March 4, 2009. See also Schantz, Pierre de Coubertins Concepts of Race, Nation, and Civilization, in Susan Brownell (ed.), The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 156-88.

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should not mix. He clearly recognized the political interferences in sport, and considered sports and the Olympic Games as political tools. At least after 1918 he considered the Olympic Movement as a means to overcome national conflicts by promoting an internationalism which respects and celebrates national identities. In sum, Coubertin was a highly political person but he acted outside of the usual political machinery (parties, governmental structures, etc.). In 1924, at the first Olympic Games held after the two cancelled Games of World War I, he observed that one felt that the wheel of history had turned and that a sort of unstable egalitarianism had taken the place of the quiet social certainties of a period that had gone forever.228 Like him, the elites who made up the IOC and the global sports world also conceived the major threat to the survival of the Olympic Movement as class-based, embodied in the perceived threat of professionalism and worker sport toward the amateur ideal. It was not until the Cold War that nationalist politics were seen as a threat to the Olympic Movement. Ultimately, Coubertin did not understand the phenomenon of modern nationalism that was taking shape on the world scene. In a New Years address made in the context of the tremendous political pressures surrounding the Nazi Olympics in 1936, Coubertin made a statement that comes closest to the formulation that sport and politics dont mix, but even under the tremendous political pressures of the time, it is clear that he did not formulate the problem in the simplistic way that became typical of his successors. Today, politics is making its way into the heart of every issue. How can we expect athletics, the culture of the muscles, and Olympism itself to be immune? 229 It is interesting that in the preceding paragraph he seems to indicate that by politics he actually means electoral interests, thus revealing that to him politics did not have the same meaning to him that it has to us today. But he continues to say that the ravages that this phenomenon can cause were only superficial, only exist in appearance; Olympism was the soul of the institution of the Olympic Movement, and would not change according to the whims of fashion, but would evolve slowly and healthily, in conformity with the laws of humanity itself. 230 Coubertin was simply not overly concerned about the influence of politics on Olympism because he had ultimate faith that Olympism was permanent while politics were ephemeral. In my opinion, the future of civilization does not rest now on political or economic foundations. It depends solely on the educational orientation that will be put in place.231 He died in 1937.

Avery Brundage
In the early stages of the Cold War, at the Helsinki Session in 1952, Avery Brundage was elected president of the IOC. Brundage had earned his spot on the IOC by opposing a US boycott of the Berlin Games. In Allen Guttmanns portrayal, the heated debates leading up to the Berlin Games solidified Brundages belief that sport should be kept separate from politics. 232 Guttmann argues that Brundage shared Coubertins vision of the Olympic Games as non-political and was never able to

228 229

Coubertin, Olympism, p. 501. Coubertin, Olympism, p. 584. 230 Coubertin, Olympism, p. 584. 231 Coubertin, Olympism, p. 558. 232 Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, 68-81

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understand that calling for freedom from government interference was ipso facto a political position. Brundage inherited the tradition begun by Coubertin and continued by Edstrm, of trying to prevent politicians from meddling in what he considered to be his realm, the realm of sport. He was IOC President during most of the Cold War (1952-1972). Brundage frequently used the ban against mixing politics and sport or talking politics to silence opposition, even threatening to expel IOC members if they continued to bring up political matters. Probably the main forum in which this aphorism was employed was in the rhetoric surrounding the China question, which was on the agenda of almost every Executive Board meeting and IOC Session from 1952 to the 1980s, and which bedevilled four IOC presidencies Sigfrid Edstrm (1942-1952), Avery Brundage (1952-1972), Lord Killanin (1972-1980), and Juan Antonio Samaranch (1980-2002). The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) was established on October 1, 1949. The defeated Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) headed by General Chiang Kai-Shek fled to the island of Taiwan, also known in the West as Formosa, taking with them the name of their defeated regime, the Republic of China (ROC). The two governments each claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China and remained in a state of mutual hostility. Direct contacts were forbidden. From the point of view of the mainlanders who had taken part in the revolution, the island was being used as a renegade outpost from which to challenge the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, which had won a brutal civil war. In their view, it was an illegitimate and corrupt regime that only survived because it was propped up by the US and Western powers. Its continued existence was and is a challenge to Chinese national territorial sovereignty. At first most nations retained diplomatic relations with the regime on Taiwan, which held a seat in the United Nations until the PRCs admission in 1971. In both the PRC and the ROC, the policy was guided by the one China principle, which tolerated no expression of ethnic Taiwanese separatism and held the goal of reunifying China under one regime. In the PRC, with respect to membership in international organizations such as the IOC, the guiding principle was that an international organization must first expel the Chiang Kai-Shek clique before China would apply for admission. Today, reading the exchanges of letters between Brundage and the Chinese IOC member Dong Shouyi is almost amusing because of their arguments about talking politics. In December of 1957 Dong wrote a letter to Brundage contesting the representation of their exchange in the minutes of the Melbourne Session, stating, I cannot agree when people with certain intentions call these remarks of a political character. In Melbourne Session [sic], I simply explained that we should recognize only one Olympic Committee in China and that should be the All-China Athletic Federation233 Brundage replied on January 8, 1958, We cannot approve that your contention and remarks at Melbourne and at Sofia were not political. one of the fundamental principles *of the Olympic code+ is that there shall be no politics in sport. Thats why we are not pleased to have representatives of your country continually introducing political questions into our meetings.234

233 234

Letter from Dong to Brundage, December 20, 1957, IOC Archives. Letter from Brundage to Tung, January 8, 1958, IOC Archives.

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As Dong later recounted it, this letter outraged him. He not only completely denied our protests of these many years, but he offered a typical bad example of not talking politics while obviously engaging in politics.235 Brundages claim about the Fundamental Principles of the Olympic Charter was actually false; as I mentioned, it did not state that there shall be no politics in sport. But Brundage was such a bully that apparently many IOC members believed that they could be expelled for talking politics. This admonition was mainly used to silence the IOC members from the Soviet Union and the divided countries of Germany, Korea, and China. The Soviet member Andrianov even admonished the Chinese in 1955 not to bring up political issues at an IOC meeting, and physically restrained one of them with a hand on his thigh when he tried to rise and speak. Of course, Andrianov was probably not well-versed in the nuances of parliamentary procedure in the second year after the death of Stalin. Brundage was not a keen political thinker, but he was clever and domineering enough to ram his desired results through the Session by utilizing tactics that had the appearance of being legitimate, but were probably violations of the Charter and by-laws. In 1958, after yet another letter from Brundage that stated, The I.O.C. has nothing to do with politics. It does not recognize nor deal with governments,236 China withdrew from the IOC when it was clear that the IOC would refuse to even listen to its request to expel Taiwan. In 1963, President Sukarno of Indonesia announced the creation of an alternative Olympic Games for the non-Western developing countries, the Games of the New Emerging Forces, with the declaration, Let us declare frankly that sport has something to do with politics. And Indonesia now proposes to mix sport with politics.237 While Western observers might not have understood the bitterness expressed in this remark, Sukarno was directly attacking the IOC ideology that had effectively silenced Asias voice in the world of international sport. A coup detat in Indonesia and the Cultural Revolution in China put an end to GANEFO, but they had sent shockwaves through international sport.

Lord Killanin
Chinas return to the IOC was negotiated in 1979 under the condition that Taiwan could only compete under the name of Chinese Taipei. The audiotapes from the IOC Executive Board meetings at which this was discussed show that sometimes the IOC members themselves become tied up by their own logic. Lance Cross, the sports announcer from New Zealand, was particularly vocal on this point, stating, I believe that we have it in our power to lead the world in showing that were the only nonpolitical, international, independent, non-governmental organization in the world.238

235

Tan Hua and Dong Erzhi, SuyuanDong Shouyi Zhuan [Long-Cherished WishThe story of Dong Shouyi] (Beijing: Peoples Sports Publishing House, 1993), p. 173. 236 Letter from Brundage to Tung, June 1, 1958, IOC Archives. 237 Richard Espy, The Politics of the Olympic Games (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1979), p. 81. 238 Audiotapes of IOC Executive Board Meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, March 10, 1979.

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Cross stubbornly held the position that both Olympic committees must be treated equitably meaning that both must be asked to change their names, flags, and anthems, not just the Taiwan side. He explained, There seems to me, Mr. Chairman, a very definite desire to create a superior and an inferior group, and the moment we do that were playing politics. In the years Ive been on the Olympic Committee, I have fought very had to free the IOC and its decisions from any political connotations whatsoever and Ill go on fighting to have the IOC establish itself in the eyes of the sporting world as an organization thats led the way in divorcing politics from sport. Killanin: I think on that basis we should decide to recognize neither. Cross: Youre already got one, you cant do that239 In sum, the position on the separation of sport and politics that we have inherited today mainly arose out of the disputes between nations during the Cold War, particularly the three divided nations of Germany, Korea, and China, and the newly-independent former colonies who were striving to for recognition through sports. It was a protective mechanism that Edstrm, Brundage, and Killanin employed to try to prevent the Olympic Games from being destroyed by the Cold War conflicts that the IOC itself could not possibly resolve; so they simply tried to hold the politics far enough away to allow some space for the organization of Olympic Games. Lance Cross reflected a general IOC attitude when he said, Let the political people make those decisions. But it is also important to understand that from the perspective of the Third World countries that were told not to talk politics when they tried to make demands for political recognition, the claim about the separation of sport and politics was a strategy to help the Western members of the IOC maintain their death grip over international sport.240

Juan Antonio Samaranch

Juan Antonio Samaranch succeeded Killanin in 1980. He was a career diplomat and by nature was a political animal. He came to power following two Olympics that had suffered severe boycotts the Montreal and Moscow Olympics and he presided over the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics that were boycotted by the Soviet bloc. He travelled around the world talking to politicians, and telling them to stay out of the Olympics. Almost ironically, he was out there talking to them, but his message was, Stay away. Partly because of this and partly because of the end of the Cold War, he was able to end the boycotts that had threatened the continued existence of the Olympic Games. The Albertville 1992 Winter Games were the first Olympics in history considered to have 100% participation, with no boycotts or IOC-dictated exclusions. The Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics lacked Yugoslavia, which had been barred by the IOC; both there and at the preceding Albertville Games, the former Soviet Union was represented by the Unified Team. From the Barcelona Olympics onward the political issues that dominated public opinion were domestic or regional.

239 240

Audiotapes of the Executive Board Meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, April 7, 1979. Liang Lijuan, He Zhenliang, wu huan zhi lu [He Zhenliang and the Road of the Olympic Rings](Beijing: World Knowledge Publishing Hous, 2005), pp. 55-6.

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Jacques Rogge
The first summer Olympic Games presided over by Jacques Rogge were the Beijing Olympic Games. The political animosity surrounding Beijing 2008 was especially highlighted by contrast with the comparatively tranquil background of the four preceding Olympics. It was easy to be misled by the heat of the media coverage into believing that profound political conflicts were occurring. However, closer examination reveals that there was no serious momentum toward national boycotts of the Games, and more national Olympic committees (204) and national representatives (over 100 national dignitaries, of which about 80 were heads of state) took part in the opening ceremony than in any previous Games. It was the first opening ceremony attended by an American president outside of the U.S.

Rise of NGOs
What had changed was that the political debates were not coming directly from individual countries, but from international NGOs and the media. The IOC had learned from the government-led boycotts that the IOC should stay out of politics. But the kind of politics it encountered in Beijing was something entirely new. The political debates were not led by governments; they were led by nongovernmental interest groups that took advantage of the huge media platform. At the one-year countdown to the opening ceremony, the IOC had identified 28 NGOs that had announced plans to use the Beijing Olympics to highlight political issues during the next year, the most active being Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, Students for a Free Tibet, Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falungong, Support the Monks, and Save Darfur Coalition. On the one hand, these international NGOs and the international media are dominated by Western nations, so these issues are still about national politics. These political influences do originate from certain individual countries where governments fund human rights initiatives and NGOs receive support. Nations have become more clever and subtle about promoting their agendas compared with the days when they invaded each other and threatened Olympic boycotts. On the other hand, the Beijing Olympics also manifested a different world order that has been emerging in recent years as a result of the increasing influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the world scene.

Intergovernmental Organizations
The IOC has many official partnerships with organizations within the United Nations, though not with NGOs. This is a relatively new development. Since the 1990s the IOC has been working together with environmental and health organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Both of those partnerships reached a new level in Beijing. UNEP and the IOC have been working together since 1994, when they signed an agreement to cooperate on environmental issues in Olympic Games. The IOC subsequently established the Sport and Environment Commission on which UNEP has representation. In 1999, UNEP collaborated with the IOC in developing Agenda 21 for Sport and the Environment. Starting in 2005, UNEP helped

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BOCOG to implement its environmental plans and projects.241 In collaboration with WHO, the IOC has established a tradition of tobacco-free Olympics starting with the Calgary Winter Games in 1988. The Beijing Olympics were the first summer Olympics since the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) came into force in 2005. This is the first international public health treaty promulgated by WHO. It commits member nations to make all indoor workplaces and public places smoke-free.242

The IOC as a Non-Political Organization

However, the IOC does not have relationships with human rights NGOs, and it had never before come under the level of attack from them that it did in the years before the Beijing Olympics. Many critics said that the Beijing Olympics were similar to the Berlin 1936 Hitler Olympics, but the heated politics and discussion of boycott that surrounded those Olympics were coming from governments and national sport organizations. In 2008, the IOCs preparation for political issues was geared toward potential crises. But there was no crisis with North Korea, there was no crisis with the Uighurs in Chinas northwest Xinjiang province, there was no crisis in China-Taiwan relations, there was no crisis in China-U.S. relations all this didnt happen. What happened was that there was a discussion of the fact that you, the IOC, have to go there and tell the Chinese what is wrong with them. The IOC was really not ready for that. It turned out that the message that was needed was about the IOC itself. It would have been prepared to deal with government-led boycotts because it had had years of bitter experience with them; but it was not ready for the debates raised by the interest groups who studied the Olympic Charter and argued that the clauses about human dignity and human development obligated the IOC to take a stance on human rights. It was caught by surprise by the argument that, You, IOC, should take a political stance. It had never thought about it from that angle. The only defense it had was to say, Were not a political organization. Its critics would respond, What do you mean, youre not a political organization? Youre always meeting with politicians. The critics felt it was a blatant lie. The IOC often states to the media that it is a sporting organization and not a political one, and will not get involved in political issues. I have already described the history of that position. What do they mean by politics? Whats a political issue? For many IOC members, it is a matter of ones job. Politics is what politicians do; only a few IOC members are career politicians, since the majority of them have moved up through the world of sports. The IOC members whom I know generally speak derisively about politicians, and they consider their own involvement in sport to be of an altogether different nature.

241

On UNEPs involvement in the Beijing Olympic Games, Paolo Revellini, Beijing 2008 Olympic Games: An Environmental Review (United Nations Environment Programme, 2007) (www.unep.org/downloads/BeijingReport.pdf, accessed April 18, 2010). 242 On the World Health Organizations Involvement in the Beijing Olympic Game s, see Jin Dapeng, Arne Ljungqvist, Hans Troedsson, The Health Legacy of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games: Successes and Recommendations (World Health Organization, 2010) (http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Commissions_PDFfiles/Medical_commission/The_Health_Legacy_of_the _2008_Beijing_Olympic_Games.pdf, accessed June 20, 2012).

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So, what is the difference between an IOC member and a politician? There are political elements in discussions such as expropriation procedures, press freedom, visas, and so on, which are issues in organizing the Games. But the reason that the IOC members meet with and work together with politicians is not for political objectives. Among the issues in which the IOC is directly engaged, media freedom is the main issue that could be regarded as directly political. Media freedom occupies a special position because the IOC wants the media to be free to report on the Games. In the case of China, the IOC required a guarantee of freedom for the media to report during the two weeks of the Games, and this was provided by Beijing in its candidature file. Later the Chinese government went much further than that. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs enacted a temporary law guaranteeing media freedom to foreign journalists researching the Olympic Games and related matters from January 1, 2007 to October 17, 2008, and then extended it indefinitely just as it was about to expire (this did not apply to domestic journalists). It appeared that the Chinese government either reversed a verbal promise about providing total internet access to journalists, or else never fully communicated to the IOC its intention to block some non-sports websites. However, internet freedom was not included in the candidature file. In 2001, the internet was considered an advertising tool, but no one in the IOC anticipated that seven years later it would become a highly politicized vehicle for freedom of speech. The IOC is in a difficult position because once it has allocated the Games to a city or country, it cant easily go back on it. They are in a weak negotiating position in which they have to organize the Games and at the same time make requests of the host country. The period four or five years before the Games perhaps even before that is really past the point of no return. Sometimes critics argue that the IOC should threaten to revoke the Games from a host, but this is not realistic because the size of the Games makes it impossible to shift them to another location without several years of preparation. Actually, I have been told that there is only one city in the world that would be able to host the Olympic Games on very short notice, and that is Los Angeles. So there is a very fine balance. The IOC has to work with the host government. And in this respect, Beijing probably adhered more closely to the Host City contract than any previous host city. As Chairman of the Coordination Commission for the Beijing Olympics, Hein Verbruggens message to the press was very clear: The IOC cannot be involved in politics. Madrid was a candidate for 2012. If the IOC goes to Spain do they have to have an opinion about the Basque, or an opinion about the fact that Scotland should be free from England, and so on? Amnesty International issued reports on 150 countries in 2008, and all of them were judged to have some human rights violations. If it entered into this realm, the IOC would have to accept some violations of human rights but not others. The IOC is very sensitive to the danger of what I will call endless claims, borrowing a phrase used by an IOC staff member. If you do something for a dissident in China, you have to do this for people in Guantanamo. Everybody will use the Games to draw attention to his own problems. The IOC is facing Sochi in 2014, with Georgia and Osatia and Azerbaijan next door, and the Chechens not too far away. By refusing to take sides in these debates, the IOC attempts to avoid the distraction of endless claims and the war of words and, as the Nike ad would have it, Just do It. In other words, stop talking, and just go ahead and bring together hundreds of people from around the world to organize the Games, thousands of athletes from around the world to take part in the Games, millions of spectators from

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around the world to watch the Games, and billions of people to view the Games on television. Just do it, and then see what happens, what comes out of the relationships that are formed and the ideas that are stimulated. This really brings us to the core of the discussion. Whether it wants to engage in politics or not, other people will drag the IOC into issues.

Involvement of Governments in Sport

How involved governments should be in sport is a very interesting discussion. If you look at the sentiments of IOC leadership, then you find a contradiction. The Olympic Games are an organization that cannot do without government support. This is not just because of issues such as security, but also because of the construction that has to take place in the frame of the Games in order to make it possible: if you need a new airport terminal, highway, train, or metro, you have to work with the government. Many national Olympic Committees and national associations are funded by the government. It would be nave to ask that governments should not be involved in sports at all. However, at the same time that the IOC needs government funding, it wants to guarantee its autonomy but you cannot have both. Ultimately, sport and government leaders together have to determine what kind of scrutiny sport should accept from governments. So when we talk about the autonomy of sport, it means that the IOC wants recognition of the special character of sports. For instance, it wants recognition that pure economic laws do not automatically apply in sports, such as the anti-trust laws in the European Common Market that produced the Bosman ruling, in which the EU said that football clubs could not demand transfer fees for a player who goes to another club, even though his home club had invested the money in him that made him a star player. This meant that at the end of contract, he could go wherever he wanted, following the normal economic law that in normal life you cannot block somebody who has a contract with a company when it is finished. In sport this has a very negative effect. The result of it is that football clubs didnt invest in players, they just bought and sold them. The European Treaty recognized culture as a special branch but not sport. Not all normal rules apply to culture; for instance, governments can give subsidies to culture but they cannot give subsidies to industry because that falsifies competition. Sport needs to have its own rules. In the U.S., major league baseball has its famous exemption from anti-trust laws against monopolies. So, sport is hybrid in that the IOC wants autonomy and dislikes negative government involvement like the Olympic boycotts or the Bosman ruling, but it still needs government involvement. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was formed in 1999 because the doping problem became so complex that the sports authorities could not handle it by themselves anymore. In recent years it has been revealed that in doping there is a whole global criminal network of organized crime that is involved. So WADA is fifty percent funded by governments and fifty percent by sport organizations. The U.S. government is heavily involved in WADA. Whether they like it or not the Republicans who oppose any involvement in sports by the U.S. government are still involved in sport. The IOC is now starting to take up the issue of gambling in sport, which is a similar example of a practice that cannot

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be dealt with by any single country because the networks are global, especially now that there is more and more online betting. The IOC very often encounters interference from governments in the administration of the national Olympic Committees and the national governing bodies, even in Western countries. It will not interfere in the national Olympic Committee if a democratic election takes place in which basic principles of good governance are respected, but it sometimes happens that when the national Olympic Committee elects its officers at its annual general assembly, someone is elected whom the Minister of Sport doesnt like, and he will oppose his election to appoint his own people. The IOC will receive a complaint and will intervene. In 2006, the IOC was requested to act as observers at the election of the President of the Hellenic Olympic Committee, to ensure that the election process was proper. This kind of government intervention is becoming more and more frequent. Why? Perhaps it is because sport is increasing in visibility and importance around the world and politicians want to use that influence as a political tool. Or, the answer may be much more basic: the amounts of the Olympic revenues from the IOC global sponsorship program and television broadcast fees have been increasing, so the distributions to the national Olympic committees have been increasing. They have more money, and politicians want to control it. In some of the poorest developing countries, the Olympic revenue distribution to the national Olympic committee may be larger than the budget for the ministry of sport. Government investment in sport worldwide is increasing. Motivated by the rise of China, the Japanese government established a National Training Centre in 2000 and a system of subsidies for top athletes in 2003, leading to a fifth-place finish in the gold medal count at the 2004 Athens Olympics. When Germany found its sixth-place finish behind Japan unacceptable, it initiated the revival of several of the former East German sports schools. In addition to Germany and Japan, a number of other sport superpowers were shamed by their performance in Athens, and their governments increased funding for sport, including Russia, Australia, and Great Britain; the British Olympic Associations budget has increased 80% since 2004. In Beijing, Great Britain redeemed its national honour with an unexpected fourth place, and it is currently pressing for greater funding on the premise that it should make a good showing at its own Olympic Games in 2012.243

243

Susan Brownell, The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? Chinas First Olympics in East Asian Perspective, in William Kelly and Susan Brownell (ed.), The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Localism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism (New Haven: Yale Council on East Asian Studies Monograph Series, 2011), p. 200.

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Potential of the Olympics to Contribute to a Better World

Everybody is using the Games for their own purpose but that means that the IOC can do it, too. It can use them as leverage to attain its goals. But how to improve its ability to do that, and to avoid being used by others? In interviews with me, Hein Verbruggen proposed that every once in a while the IOC should sit around the table together with great thinkers - politicians, philosophers, futurologists, anthropologists, among others - and say, We want you to tell us how this world is going to develop, and taking into account our potential, what role we should play in 2020 and 2030? You could invite Al Gore and Carol Bellamy (the former head of UNICEF) (Kissinger is in already, as an Honorary IOC member), and Nelson Mandela and people like that together around the table, and ask them Hey guys, hows this world going to look in ten years, what do you expect, and what role could the Olympic Games play? The Olympic Movement is important enough to do this; there is a huge potential, more than what we get out of it now. The IOC has not attempted any such grand gathering since the reform process in the year 2000 brought together a large number of prominent people inside and outside the sports world to deal with the crisis that followed the exposure of vote-buying in the bid process. The 2009 Olympic Congress in Copenhagen was mostly limited to members of the sports world. But to what extent could the IOC develop a clearer strategy for how to utilize the Olympic Games to really make a contribution to world peace? Is this too big to even attempt? But if the IOC does not attempt it, is it fulfilling its mission as described in its own Charter? The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. I have noticed that IOC members are not good about sincerely communicating their core belief that sport in and of itself possesses the power to do good. Yet in conversations with them, I have seen that many of them do seem to sincerely believe this. But of course, in these times it is not enough just to dream; an organization of the importance of the IOC should also be held accountable. Whether or not Olympic Games have contributed to a peaceful and better world is an empirical not a philosophical question. Academics are also responsible. We need more social science assessments to start to provide some answers. Only with the explosion of better academic works in the past decade have we begun to accumulate enough scholarship to judge. There are better models and more attention to assessing the impact of the Games on the local economy, on global public opinion, and on the environment. These are all being tracked fairly carefully now. But I believe that the most important impact of the Olympic Games is on the ideas in peoples heads, and this is impossible to measure. I believe that if you could measure the impact of the Games on global culture and society, you would find that the Olympic Games are a complex phenomenon with positive and negative effects. You would find general agreement that incorporation of countries into the international community has aided world peace, but you would find debate about whether all Olympic Games have helped to achieve that (with Germany in 1936 as a case in point). Perhaps more importantly, you would find that the Games contribute to a vision of the future of the global village that is shared by all humankind.

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Human beings need to have hope, and people want to believe that the Olympic Games can change the world for the better. Cynics would argue that the people are deceived. However, it takes a huge amount of work to organize an Olympic Games; if there were no widespread consensus in favor of it, it would start to fall apart over time. The fact that this is not occurring with the Olympic Games in fact, quite the opposite, the number of participants is increasing shows that there is a widespread consensus supporting the Games. The Games are a symbol that marks world trends. When 204 nations sent athletes to Beijing, this marked a level of global unity never seen before. Naturally the IOC cannot deliver the product of world peace. However, at a minimum it can claim to celebrate the fact that world peace is nearer than before. At a maximum it can claim that it contributed to the process. So why shouldnt we be able to sit around the table and just dream about what the Olympic Games might be able to accomplish? Do the Olympic Games have to be funded by the host country anymore? The IOC could keep all the revenues from one Games and use them to fund the next Olympic Games. And this would open up a whole world of possibilities. Could you take the Games to the Middle East as part of the peace process? Could an Olympic Games be held in Africa? Of course, we should always be aware of the actual effects of the Olympic Games in the real world. But at the same time, why cant we also dream a little bit?

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Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She was a nationally-ranked track and field athlete (heptathlon) in the U.S. before she first went to China in 1985, when she ended up winning a gold medal in the Chinese National College Games. Her experience was the basis for Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the Peoples Republic (1995). She was a member of the IOCs Postgraduate Grant selection committee from 2000-2008. She spent 20072008 in Beijing while on a U.S. Fulbright Research Award, when she was the only non-Chinese member of the academic experts team working with BOCOG and the municipal government on Olympic education programs. In 2010 she was the only non-Chinese member of the academic experts team working with the organizing bureau of the Shanghai World Expo. She is the author of Beijings Games: What the Olympics Mean to China; editor of The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism; co-editor (with William Kelly) of The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Localism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism (2011); and translator of the biography of Chinas first IOC member, He Zhenliang and Chinas Olympic Dream (2007).

Jim Parry is former Head of the Department of Philosophy and of the School, of Humanities, University of Leeds, and former Assistant Director of the national Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied, based at Leeds. He is now Visiting Professor at the Faculty of PE and Sport, Charles University in Prague. His main academic interests are in applied ethics (especially sports ethics) and social and political philosophy. He is a qualified and experienced teacher of Physical Education, and coach of several sports. At football, he represented Britain at university level, as well as being for many years a professional. He is co-author of The Olympic Games Explained (2005) and Sport and Spirituality (2007) and co-editor of Ethics and Sport (1999), Theology, Ethics and Transcendence in Sport (2010), Phenomenological Approaches to the Study of Sport (2012) and Olympic Ethics and Philosophy (2012) - all with Routledge, London. He is chair of the British Philosophy of Sport Association, former Chair of the British Universities Physical Education Association, and Founding Director of the British Olympic Academy. He received the International Association for Philosophy of Sport Distinguished Scholar Award for 2011, and has been Visiting Professor of Olympic Studies at The Autonomous University of Barcelona (2003), the University of Ghent/Universit Catholique de Louvain (2009) and Gresham College, London (2012).

The Olympic Chair Henri de Baillet Latour Jacques Rogge is the fifth Olympic Chair in the World and has as its purpose the academic study of the diverse aspects of the management of sports organisations with an emphasis on the Olympic values, to stimulate the sporting ethos and deontology of athletes and to enhance cooperation between the two parts of the country. At the moment, at both UGent and UCL, a scholarship researcher is financed with the resources of the Chair to do research in the domain of sport management and the Olympic values. Also, research seminars and guest lectures are frequently organised at both universities. The choice of the Universities of Ghent and Louvain, like the name of this unique cooperation, wasnt without reason. Count Henri de Baillet Latour studied once himself at Louvain and Count Jacques Rogge was a student of Ghent University, from which he received a honorary PhD in 2001. Both were the only two Belgian chairmen of the International Olympic Committee. Count de Baillet Latour was Chair from 1926 until 1942, while Count Rogge has been the present Chairman since 2001.