It’s not every day that one of America’s most distinguished sports historians visits HLS, and it’s even rarer that a former professor of one our own distinguished faculty members returns almost fifty years after his first visit. Professor Bill Alford took great pride in introducing his Amherst College professor Allen Guttman, who compared himself to the last academic Harvard had waited almost half a century to invite back: Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a discussion sponsored by the East Asian Legal Studies program, Professor Guttman described the continuing development of the modern Olympic Games as the International Olympic Committee prepares to pass the torch to China for the games of 2008.
“I begin by saying emphatically that the Olympic games have always been politicized,” Guttman posited. “The view of 19th century liberalism was that the Games and politics should be kept separate… it was the Marxist view that interpreted sports as a form of politics.” The modern Olympic games were the brainchild of Pierre de Coubertin, a French historian and patriot committed to restoring his country’s morale and image in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Driven by the goal of securing international political peace, de Coubertin galvanized support for reinstating the Olympic games. “It really was a social and political movement,” Guttman described.
De Coubertin’s image of the Olympic games incorporated athletes of the international community with no national distinction. As Guttman pointed out, this notion became starkly unrealistic with the emergence of Nazi Germany and a Stalinized Soviet Union. The stadium Germany constructed for the 1936 Games in Berlin even had a passageway to commemorate German soldiers who had fallen during World War I. “Opening ceremonies have become extremely nationalistic over time around the world…the 1984 Games in Los Angeles were Hollywood pageantry. Each Olympics has had a national display and a commemoration of the host city.”
But what about the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing? According to Guttman, the International Olympic Committee must resolve the Two-China problem. Historically, the competitions of the teams representing the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China have been disparate in order to avoid acrimony. “Will the 2008 Games be political? Of course, they can’t be anything else!” Guttman concluded. Interestingly, the planners, who are not communist functionaries or bureaucrats, have stressed that the Beijing Games will be humanistic in nature. “In other words, humans are neither dominant nor subordinate to nature, but equals… in a spirit much closer to de Coubertin’s visions than any other Games.”
