11.08.2004

Ancient, modern, rotten

Phil Kent looks at the history of the Olympic Games

A recent TV series on the ancient Olympic Games defended the modern professional Olympics against the previous insistence on amateurism. The argument was that the new spirit of professionalism was in accordance with the true ancient practice and that the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertain, and his friends used amateurism mainly to save themselves from being defeated by working class professionals.

Now that the truth is out and hypocrisy swept aside, the modern games, like the ancient, are supposedly in harmony with human nature. That is, human nature is fundamentally competitive and athletes have a single reason for participating: to win for glory … and the riches that follow, just like the Greeks.

This admirably suits the ideologues of capitalism - individualism is promoted not only because it produces higher and higher sporting standards and more and more records broken, but, irrespective of individual motivation, this brings credit to the state/nation and enhances the bonds of common identity. Hence the Olympics are meant to express the capitalist ideal of the collective good coming from individual selfish efforts. No wonder Nike, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Vodafone, etc fight to be sponsors.

I am happy to accept that there is an essence to human nature; but manifestly social conditions determine, constantly modify and distort how it finds expression. Hence different social formations and class positions lead to very different modes of thought, behaviour and sport.
Take the ancient Greeks. Theirs was, in terms of population and production, a rural society; but one dominated by highly fragmented and constantly warring city-states. Peasant citizens formed the backbone of the state’s militia system. However, the leading role in virtually every case was played by blue-blooded aristocrats. They had the necessary wealth to fit themselves out as heavy cavalrymen.

This class might sometimes invest in profitable, albeit highly risky, overseas mercantile trade, or sponsor acts of sea-borne piracy. But primarily they reproduced themselves as a class through the extraction of agricultural surpluses - either from peasants, state serfs or slaves. A form of extra-economic exploitation which in the last analysis relied on commanding force. Hence Greek society was militaristic and went to extraordinary lengths to train the male citizen population, especially the high born, for war.

Sport was one such form of training. It served to physically prepare and create a social climate of adulation and hero-worship for the warrior. The Olympics were the highest test and conveyed the highest honour and prestige.

Officially they started in 776 BC and continued until 395 AD. Indeed it could be said the ancient Greeks as a people came into existence with the Olympics and when the games ended they disappeared from history. In a very real sense the games were their constitution. The committee that prepared the period of truce between the city-states that had to be observed throughout the games was a permanent political committee, not just a body with temporary ritual tasks.

Competitors always performed naked (women, who had their own, separate games, always wore clothes). Our modern prejudice might lead us to assume that the Olympics were therefore some form of homosexual love fest. Certainly gay sex played an important role in Greek life - women were generally thought of as inferior and sex with one’s wife was therefore about begetting heirs. Prostitutes satisfied base lusts, but sex with young men was another matter. That was about male bonding, which could last for a lifetime, and certainly carried on into the field of battle. The core of the Corinthian army famously consisted of male lovers.

However, all Greek states had their own laws and customs, so there was a degree of variation. In Sparta - the ultimate military state and a social freak - female citizens, members of a tiny and besieged elite, were expected to be almost as tough as their men and had to, as girls, take part in athletics (they were also allowed to have personal fortunes).

One Spartan princess even became an Olympic champion, albeit solely through wealth. She entered the chariot race with a team of splendid horses and won. She then set up a statue to herself celebrating her achievement (naturally forgetting the actual driver).

Married women were not allowed to be at the games on penalty of death, but virgins could and it appears that prostitutes did.

When the baron was devising his plans for the modern Olympics in the 1880s, women were still legally treated unequally and although, unlike the Greeks, he did not exclude them, they were only to take part in suitable ladylike pursuits - they are, of course, still excluded from boxing, wrestling and weightlifting.

Probably, the ancient Greeks did not know why they competed in the nude. They just did what they had always done. Modern scholarship generally agrees, though, that the practice developed out of religious fertility cults. The entire games were mythologised so as to connect them directly to the gods and heroes like Herakles, thus maximising their religious and therefore their social standing.
Religion is a distorted way of expressing an aspect of reality, and the Zeus cult in Olympia and the games that went with them allowed for the building up of a Greek commonality against outsiders. They might be constantly at war with each other, but they shared broadly the same religion and language and inhabited, or could claim, the same home territory. The Greeks certainly thought of themselves as a distinct, separate, people.

The city-state of Elias was in sole charge of the games and with only a couple of lapses managed to maintain a neutral position in relation to its neighbours for more than 1,000 years. A bit like Switzerland, Elias existed because it suited its powerful neighbours. One games had to be protected by thousands of soldiers against attack by the Spartans, who were banned for a number of years.
Religion had theology but its essence was bound up with ritual. So to please the gods you made sacrifices and if you were lucky or deserving you would be rewarded with good fortune. Traditionally athletes therefore thanked the gods for their successes. But over time the athletics themselves became more important and the religious significance of the games declined - leading Pausanias, a social conservative writing in the 2nd century AD, to express his outrage that participants could be so disrespectful of the gods. Hopeless nostalgia.

Since Phillip of Macedonia and his son Alexander in the 4th century BC, the Greek city-states had been reduced to nothing but empty husks. And, though the Romans liked to ape the Greeks and continued the Olympics, their gods had long since lost any social relevance. People were increasingly thrown back onto themselves and sought salvation from what appeared to be uncontrollable social forces not in parochial and nature gods, but in something higher, something more abstract. Hence the birth of the emperor cult and later the rise of christianity.

If the modern Olympic games are obsessed with record-breaking performances, this was not the case in the ancient games. Their purpose was to produce champions - second and third were worth nothing and in the event of a dead heat no one won. No effort was made to record times or distances - the winner mattered and that was that. To compete in the games you had to train for the previous 11 months, including a month in Olympia, and before the games started everyone had to walk the 58 kilometres to Elias and then walk back. Enough to ensure that the athletes were in no position to produce their best performance. An interesting point was that in the victory ceremony the athlete, his father and his city were announced. Of course, nowadays it is the country that is honoured.

Coubertain’s project began, however, as more of a class than a national one. The baron tried to find a new, leading role for the disintegrating European aristocracy in a capitalist world, where seemingly money was everything and so-called breeding no longer counted. Stung by the defeat of France at the hands of the Prussian army in 1870 and inspired by British public schools and their cult of sport, he married this to a reinvented Olympic ideal and the unity of body and mind (incidentally Coubertain himself won the gold medal in poetry - yes, poetry - in the 1912 Stockholm games).

His goal was a ruling class that was educated, independent, disciplined, vigorous and could because of these moral and physical attributes rule in the best interests of everybody. In the Communist manifesto Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels contemptuously dismissed all such pious notions as feudal socialism and deeply reactionary.

By excluding professionals from competing against amateurs Coubertain protected his own class from humiliation. It is said in his defence that he hoped to unite people regardless of nationality, which is perhaps true. But, once the Olympics were established, nationalism overtook aristocratic snobbery and national triumphalism quickly buried notions of taking part for the sake of the game.
Coubertain, despite his wishes and dreams, succeeded in strengthening nationalism and, especially in recent times, the values of big business. No wonder the young Bolshevik government in Russia would have nothing to do with the modern Olympics.