Quote of the Day (Philip Kerr, on Jesse Owens Thwarting an Early Attempt at Olympic Marketing)

“At the gun Jesse Owens was away to a good start, and by the first thirty metres he was powering fluently into a clear lead. In the seat next to me the matron was on her feet again. She had been wrong, I thought, to describe Owens as a gazelle. Watching the tall, graceful negro accelerate down the track, making a mockery of crackpot theories of Aryan superiority, I thought that Owens was nothing so much as a Man, for whom other men were simply a painful embarrassment. To run like that was the meaning of the earth, and if ever there was a master-race, it was certainly not going to exclude someone like Jesse Owens. His victory drew a tremendous cheer from the German crowd, and I found it comforting that the only race they were shouting about was the one they had just seen. Perhaps, I thought, Germany did not want to go to war after all. I looked towards that part of the stadium that was reserved for Hitler and other senior party officials, to see if they were present to witness the depth of popular sentiment being demonstrated on behalf of the black American. But of the leaders of the Third Reich there was no still sign.”—British mystery novelist Philip Kerr (1956-2018), March Violets (1989)

I am not the type of person to sit in front of a TV for a fortnight to watch the Olympics. But there are evidently enough such people to lead host countries to consider it a golden marketing opportunity to showcase their sites to potential tourists worldwide.

You can almost see, for instance, French officials wide-eyed at the possibility of holding the opening ceremonies at this year’s Olympics on the Seine River. 

Who needs a clunky ol’ stadium when you could have the traditional parade of athletes this time on boats sailing on the “lifeblood of Paris”—all surely presaging throngs booking flights with romantic cruises in mind?

The preparation to make this all happen—the necessity to make the high cost of hosting the games pay off without the slightest blemish—is enormous. It’s especially so if you consider the event not just a marketing opportunity but a potential propaganda bonanza, as Nazi Germany did in the summer of 1936.

It started with the construction of a spanking-new stadium and state-of-the-art village for housing the athletes, with Leni Riefenstahl directing (in a production overseen by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry) the documentary Olympia.

But, as Philip Kerr makes clear periodically in his marvelous detective novel set during this period, March Violets, cleaning up Berlin’s omnipresent signs of intolerance extended to taking down display cases for the notoriously anti-Semitic journal Der Stermer.

“It’s for the Olympiad,” a couple of workers tell Kerr’s German stand-in for Philip Marlowe, Bernie Gunther. “We’re ordered to take them all down so as not to shock the foreign visitors who will be coming to Berlin to see the Games.”

Even books normally censored by the regime, Gunther learns later, are allowed to appear in shops for the duration of the Olympics.

The campaign to showcase the Aryan “master race” didn’t work out quite as the Nazis planned.  German athletes came away with the most medals of any country, but that wasn’t enough for Goebbels.  He grumbled in his diary after the second day of competition, about the electrifying performance of African-American runner Jesse Owens:

"We Germans won a gold medal, the Americans three, of which two were Negroes. That is a disgrace. White people should be ashamed of themselves."

Overall, though, the games succeeded in whitewashing Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Most visitors saw no confirmation of the various reports they’d read in newspapers or heard on the radio about mistreatment of Jews.

Increasingly, 21^st-century authoritarian regimes like Russia and China hope that hosting the Olympics will scrub their image clean as thoroughly as the Berlin games. As Victor Matheson and Andrew Zimbalist note in this April 2021 article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, voters in a number of Western democracies, given the choice in referendums, are rebelling at the “spiraling costs and…financial risks that the Olympics place on host cities.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin had no such compunctions about holding the events in Sochi in 2014, nor did China’s Xi Jinping with Beijing two years ago. 

It’s citizens of those countries who have had to swallow in silence the systematic harassment, disappearances, and deportations of anyone daring to question what it takes to make ugly authoritarian look picture-perfect for a world audience.