Sports, Politics, and the Olympics

Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medalist in the 1936 Berlin Games.
Owens won four gold medals, even in the face of adversity (America!)

Mass media and the Olympics seems like a given in society today, but it wasn't always so. In fact, mass media was such a novel platform for spreading ideas that when the German Olympic Committee decided to install closed-circuit television systems in the track and field stadiums, gymnasiums, and other Olympic venues built specifically for the purpose of the 1936 games, Adolf Hitler saw the games as the perfect opportunity to promote his fascist government and the ideas of a superior aryan race; he even went so far as to publish in his party's newspaper that Jews and persons of color shouldn't be allowed to compete. Although Hitler "cleaned up" the games after many nations threatened to boycott the games, removing the anti-semitic propaganda he had condoned throughout Berlin, there was still considerable debate among many nations about whether or not the Nazi Games were a "safe" competition. Turkish athletes refused to be formally introduced to Hitler, the Spanish government opted instead to host its own Olympiad (which was a failure), and even the United States considered requesting a boycott. However, it was determined that "the Olympic Games should not reflect political views, but rather should be a contest of the greatest athletes." Meanwhile, many African-American communities supported participation in the games, and for good reason: in the event of African-American victories, athletes would be undermining aryan supremacy. 

In the case of the Nazi Games, sports were being used as a vehicle for propaganda, one of Sage and Eitzen's 5 political uses of sport. One one hand, Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany were using the games to promote their political views on a global spectrum. But not all propaganda is negative: countries that didn't boycott the games, such as the United States, aired the Olympics on national television so that everyone could watch US citizens "defeat" the proverbial bad guys. In contrast to Hitler's shameless self-promotion, the US used propaganda to create a sense of national unity.

Asserting that sports are devoid of all political interference is a ballsy claim, and one that holds very little ground when the history of sports are brought into consideration. As evidenced by the 1936 Olympic Games, sometimes sports are the most effective method to spread a message of power-- if that's not political, I don't know what is.