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.

Quote of the Day (Seth Meyers, Summing Up the Sochi Olympics)

“I can't personally remember an Olympics with better toilet reporting.”— Now former SNL anchor (and new late-night host) Seth Meyers, definitively encapsulating the essentials from Sochi media coverage, in his February 6, 2014 tweet

(Photo of Seth Meyers taken in May 2010 by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on Putin, Olympic ‘Godfather’)

“[Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s] drop-bys [to this year’s Olympic site of Sochi] are staged affairs, covered by state television networks—that is, by the ones he hasn't yet shut down. Mr. Putin aims his icy blues at managers who have failed to rise to his level of satisfaction. Then, in tones reminiscent of the Godfather, he informs the attending press that he will soon advise those who have disappointed him as to the precise consequences of disappointing him.”— Christopher Buckley, “Essay: Christopher Buckley on Sochi: Don't Mess with Team Putin,” The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2014

Quote of the Day (Charles Barkley, on What Shouldn’t Be an Olympic Sport)

“Curling is not a sport. I called my grandmother and told her she could win a gold medal because they have dusting in the Olympics now. “—Basketball Hall of Famer (and 1992 “Dream Team” member) Charles Barkley, quoted in “Laugh List: Olympic Jokes We Love,” Reader’s Digest, July-August 2012 issue

Quote of the Day (Jerry Seinfeld, on Silver Medals)

“The Olympics is really my favorite sporting event. Although I think I have a problem with that silver medal. Because when you think about it, you win the gold - you feel good; you win the bronze - you think, ‘Well, at least I got something.’ But when you win that silver it's like, ‘Congratulations, you almost won. Of all the losers you came in first of that group. You're the number one loser. No one lost ahead of you!’"—Jerry Seinfeld, from I’m Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

This Day in Sports History (Tonya Harding Wins Tainted Figure-Skating Championship)

January 8, 1994—Two days after rival Nancy Kerrigan had been eliminated from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships through a sudden attack on the kneecap through mysterious assailants, Tonya Harding won the contest.

Now, you would think that the Olympics—which had already seen a massacre by terrorists, a trip-up between two female runners, and such extensive steroid use that one East German female athlete required a sex-change operation afterward—had seen enough violence, cat-fighting and skullduggery to last a lifetime. 

But the Kerrigan-Harding saga proved to be something new, right up there with the Texas mom who tried to rub out a rival for her daughter on the cheerleading squad.

Kerrigan’s assailants had not done their job thoroughly enough. Therefore, even though the swollen knee forced the skater to withdraw from the U.S. competition, she still had six weeks to rehabilitate the injured body part and prepare for the Olympics—and, using an obscure rule, the figure skating association committee decided to place her and Harding among America’s Olympic hopefuls.

A video of the attack led to unsettling questions for Harding on possible associations with the thugs.

The intense speculation—not to mention gathering legal storm—unsettled the Pacific Northwest skater so much that she faltered at the Olympic games in Lillehammer. While Kerrigan came away with a silver medal, Harding finished out of the running in eighth place.

It turned out that Harding had good reason to fear the long arm of the law. It was Harding’s no-good ex-hubby, Jeff Gillooly (with whom she still lived), had hired goons to whack Kerrigan, and eventually she was forced to cop to knowing about the “Battle of Wounded Knee II” and hindering prosecution. She was lucky to escape with three years probation and payment of $160,000 in fines and contributions.

The U.S. Figure Skating Association, however, was in a considerably less forgiving mood than the law.

Harding had initially threatened to go to court after the attack to ensure that she would have the opportunity to go to the Olympics. The aggrieved association, surely remembering this, not only stripped her of her title but banned her for life.

To be sure, there were elements of stereotyping in how the media played up the Kerrigan-Harding rivalry. 

I remember early accounts of Kerrigan comparing her looks to those of a young Katharine Hepburn, bringing to mind a cool patrician elegance that must have seemed odd to this daughter of a middle-class Irish-American welder. 

And, to be sure, all the talk about Harding and her “poor-white-trash” background inspired a countervailing bitter academic critique.

All of this talk about class missed the point. There is nothing wrong with being poor—nor, come to think of it, anything in and of itself that makes it particularly noble.

Harding’s problem in the end was not a poverty-stricken background, but a poverty of values that led her to cut corners to win success—and, in the years afterward, to watch her life continue to careen, without the grace she found, fleetingly, on the ice.