What do the Olympics mean for the participants? For the athletes it's really an inspiring occasion. It's a festival of performance and exchange. It gives you the chance to be on the same track with everybody else in your event in the world that's at the same level that you're at. As a result of that, invariably the best performances that you've ever come up with are possible.
At the same time, it's a great time for people to get together, swap stories - just go out and socialise together. And despite the age that is represented of rather warlike competition between competitors from different countries, those which are diplomatically at odds, there's a tremendous amount of camaraderie among the athletes In fact, it's not uncommon for athletes two different nations to define themselves collectively in opposition to the politicians, the sports administrators and the media who control the sport for other purposes.
By 'other purposes', are you referring to the way the Olympics have been used to bolster chauvinist sentiments and ideas of 'competition' being 'human nature"?
To some extent they have been used that way. Certainly in every Olympics there have been organisers wno nave seen sport ds a propaganda weapon of one kind or another. Really good sports performances are just so spectacular that large numbers of people are going to be drawn to them.
And if the masses are fed a steady diet of that and the athletes are lionised and romanticised, it certainly is possible for the organisers to manipulate public opinion in such a way that they forget about every. thing else that's going on. I think that's very clear.
What kind of effect does the using of sport have on the athletes themselves? If they do become romanticised, how does it affect them?
It's impossible to generalise about individual athletes.
Certainly there are a lot of athletes who have internalised many of the values of the systems or the organisations which are exploiting them.
For example, in this country, despite the fact that a lot of athletes have had to exist on peanut butter sandwiches and live on orange. crate furniture for years and years, many of them still believe that they will be bums if they accept money so that they can An interview with BRUCE KIDD, a Canadian athlete at the 1964 Olympics who train full time, so that they can compete with athletes from other countries. At the same time there are many athletes who believe it's quite fine for them to perform in the backdrop of a Coca-Cola ad or a General Motors ad.
On the other hand, it seems to me that a lot of athletes are quite aware, at least at a semi-conscious level, that they're being used in this way. And yet what they do is say: "We're in a situation where to be a successful athlete in a capitalist country or in one of the Eastern European states, you have to be kept."
The resources required, facilities, coaching, good physical education programme and so on -freedom from work so that you can devote yourself to training and competition - are such that it has to be a social investment.
Athletes in Canada will say: "My career is very short. This is the only way I'm going to be able to get the opportunity. So if I have to sell my ass, well then I'll sell my ass! Despite that trade-off, I think there's a bitterness about it.
outside sport is so fucked up that it's not worth considering. Athletes in many ways are like the religious fanatics — it's not an exact parallel by any means — people who dismiss the existing world as either an unreal world or an unjust world and survive on the strength of religious feelings and emotions.
A lot of athletes are able to survive the outside world and its pressures because of the strength their participation.
Q on the one hand a spectacle for the consumption of the an intrinsic experience for the athietes themselves?
Black Power salute from US athletes John Carlos and Tommy Smithat 1968 Olympics that Many athletes feel that the world 2,000 wrestlers.
of the feelings that they derive from Then do you characterise the Olympics as being masses, and on the other hand that. encouraged.
I think that's true, and that's one of the contradictions that many of us would like to break down. It seems to me that there's nothing wrong with people watching sport at a high level and getting a great deal of pleasure out of We should encourage people to see all forms of cultural expression at their highest possible levels of performance. It seems to me that that in itself is a very healthy thing.
What is harmful about the Olympies and any kind of mass spectator that it may be the only kind of sporting activity the bourgeois international sports federations, it was possible to plan a workers or counter-Olympics in opposition to Hitler's Olympies of 1936. That's not a possibility today, it seem to me, without the financial and diplomatic support of any state.
So the strategy that I and my friends have been working along is to give conditional support to the ideals of the Olympics and use whatever influence that we can to disassociate what the athletes do from what the bandits have to push towards Olympic reform.
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was involved in discussion of the potential black American boycott of the 1968 Olympics and has since co-authored a book on the commercialisation of hockey