The Paris 2024 Games will be much more than an extraordinary sporting event and a major popular celebration. They will also be a marker of geopolitical tensions at the global level. As at the worst of the Cold War, this competition will be the receptacle of the competition between two political models. Nothing very new in the history of the Olympics, but this time never have the opponents of the Olympic Games been so numerous and economically powerful. Analysis by Olympic historian and professor at the University of Lausanne, Patrick Clastres.
L’Express: While the participation of Russian athletes under a neutral banner is still causing a lot of ink to flow, how are the Olympic Games the barometer of geopolitical tensions?
Patrick Clastres: They have been for a very long time! From 1908, the Olympic Games became the receptacle of imperial rivalries. From this moment on, the athletes who compete do not represent themselves or their club but their country. The world then enters an era of athletic confrontation of nations. The beginnings of this shock were felt as early as 1904 during the Saint-Louis Games with a very strong rivalry between the two great “empires”, the nascent, that is to say the United States, and the aging , the United Kingdom. This rivalry is then maintained by the American press which equates sporting victory with the superiority of the American social and economic regime. Tensions are so strong that the Bishop of Pennsylvania is forced to speak out to calm things down. In fact, over the decades, States have invested in sporting victories as objectives and demonstrations of their political, cultural, sociological, economic superiority, etc.
As if this soft power was also a sort of chemical indicator of the state of international relations…
Yes, we saw this very clearly during the Berlin Games in 1936. Hitler was not very keen to organize these Games. But Goebbels convinced him that the success of the competition could be a symbol of the power of Nazi Germany. A very strong movement then spread in Canada and the United States in favor of a boycott of the Berlin competition. And it was Avery Brundage, a white supremacist, opponent of Roosevelt, close to the Ku Klux Klan and president of the American amateur sports movement, who managed to secure the arrival of the Americans in Berlin. In exchange, he obtained co-optation to join the IOC, of which he became president for 20 years from 1952. Subsequently, boycotts multiplied: the Americans for the Moscow Games in 1980, then, in answer, the Russians in Los Angeles in 1984.
In this battle for sporting soft power, does France still have a place with the Paris Games and then the winter Games in the Alps in 2030?
France clearly wants to regain the place it had in the sports world at the beginning of the last century. Until the 1930s, it had total control. The major sports federations were created in Paris and were almost all chaired by French people before the First World War. As for Pierre de Coubertin, he led the IOC from 1896 to 1925. This French supremacy lasted until the 1950s. Then, a shift took place and the Anglo-American world imposed itself, even if this domination was very contested by the USSR.
It was with Jacques Chirac in the 1990s that France began to wake up. When he was mayor of Paris, he even offered to host the headquarters of the IOC then, when he was president, it was he who relaunched Paris’s candidacy for the organization of the Games. This desire to find a place in the geopolitics of sport has clearly increased over the past ten years with a sort of concerted cooperation between the Quai d’Orsay and the Ministry of Sports to host major competitions like the World Cup. rugby or push French people to the head of international federations.
The organization of the Paris 2024 Games is a historic opportunity for France, which does not necessarily have good press in the world, particularly in Africa, to shine its image. To show that France is not just about the blazing suburbs and the yellow vests. To reveal the country’s economic dynamism and innovation potential. This is also why the success of the opening ceremony is so crucial. Behind the organization of this extraordinary event, there is also a lot of influence work. But we must remain lucid. If France obtained the organization of the future Winter Games in 2030, it is due to the absence of other serious candidates. And then finally – and above all! – by granting the Winter Games a long time in advance to France, then to the United States and finally to Switzerland, the IOC also ensures its survival.
Has the IOC become a fragile institution?
The Olympic institution is in difficulty. It can no longer rely solely on the United States and large American companies which provide 80% of sponsorship revenue to ensure its financing. Even if it is a very conservative institution where the members are co-opted, it has also been able to adapt and open up a little. Following the corruption scandals in Salt Lake City, which affected several dozen members of the IOC, it was reformed: the president is no longer elected for life, an age limit was imposed, and around thirty seats – out of more than a hundred – were offered to presidents of international federations, heads of national Olympic committees or athletes.
Does the fragmentation of the world we observe today threaten the survival of the Olympics? ?
Threatened no, challenged, yes. But this is not the first time in history. Numerous competitions competing with the Olympic Games have existed and still exist: the Socialist Workers’ Olympiads, the Spartacus under the leadership of the USSR in the 1930s, the Maccabiades, organized every 4 years from 1932 by Israel, the GANEFO (Games of New Emerging forces) which bring together the emerging world… But the new fact is that the States which challenge the Olympic Games have never been so numerous or powerful economically and politically.
China is in a strategy of encircling the Western world. And then there is obviously Russia. Putin’s sports minister has traveled numerous times over the past two years to Africa and Latin America to build a sports system of alliances that could replicate what is happening politically in the Shanghai Alliance. Sport is used here as a trial balloon for advances which will be more important in economic and even military matters. Russia is clearly on the offensive: it has announced the holding of the Brics Games, then that of the Friendships Games, (in memory of the Friends Games organized in 1984 to compete with the Los Angeles Olympics) in September 2024.
Can Russia ultimately decide not to participate, or even boycott the Paris Games?
It’s not excluded. Putin has constructed an entire political discourse on the superiority of the Russian man, witness to the superiority of the Russian nation. Except that the very strict criteria retained by the IOC mean that around forty Russian athletes in the best case scenario will participate in the competitions. In terms of the number of medals, the country therefore risks finding itself in 25th or 30th position. Very far from what he could actually claim. What is the interest of Russia and Putin in discrediting themselves like this? The decision could be made not to send Russian athletes to Paris
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