by Ian Buruma
“We must say we are proud that the miracle-maker of the East, Korea, has done it again,” said a columnist called Rhee Chong-ik in the same newspaper, commenting on the games.
Power, miracle, power, power! One cannot escape it: these are the expressions of a country that is either superbly confident or racked by anxiety. Whenever one assumes it to be the former, evidence of the latter tends to break through. When a Greco-Roman wrestler called Kim Young-nam won Korea’s first gold medal, the Korea Times was in ecstasy: “He did it. He turned the entire nation wild with enthusiasm, quenching their thirst for the gold.” But whenever I felt the inclination to sneer at this thirst, I was held back by my own anxiety: How will countries that lack the thirst, that scoff at notions of national vigor, that take the good life for granted, be able to compete with people who are so hungry for achievement and recognition, for power and gold medals?
Many times during my stay in Seoul I was reminded of an athlete who was the antithesis of all this power and glory: Eddie the Eagle, the bumbling British amateur ski jumper, who had earlier endeared himself at Calgary by his clownish performances in the Winter Olympics. Part of his charm was his complete indifference to finishing last. He exemplified Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic ideal (which, incidentally, was far from the ideal of the highly competitive ancient Greeks): just to take part was enough; winning was irrelevant. Apparently, Eddie got on the nerves of his more pugnacious rivals—particularly, I believe, the East Germans. The Koreans would not have understood Eddie either. To them he would have seemed typical of Western decadence. And perhaps they would have been right. Is there not something flabby and complacent about the British indifference (some might even say attraction) to failure? Or is it a sign of higher civilization? Or perhaps both?
British athletes did not do very well at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Germany did best, and both Italy and Japan did better than Britain. Duff Hart-Davis’s book Hitler’s Games quotes a letter to The Daily Telegraph, written by one Revd F. Brompton Harvey, who observed that “the failure of Englishmen in the Olympic Games should give a jolt to our national complacency.… What are the reasons for this decline in athletic prowess—in skill and will to win?” The answer, in the reverend’s opinion, was democracy, which encourages mediocrity and does away with virility. “And we need not wonder if this failure in manly sports on the world stage is interpreted by our rivals as another proof that England has ‘gone soft.’ ”
Sports of one kind or another have a long history of being used to fend off decadence. Richard D. Mandell, in The First Modern Olympics, a study of the games held in Athens in 1896, writes that sport “was an integral part of many educational schemes advanced by Greek philosophers to improve or reform their society.” The Romans, with the exception of a few philhellenes, found sports bad for the character—particularly when indulged in without clothes on. But gory gladiatorial spectacles, which were sports of a kind, were approved of. According to Mandell, some Roman moralists recommended this type of blood sport as a way of accustoming effete youths to the sight of carnage.
Medieval knights were kept out of mischief by staging jousting tournaments. And through the ages the common people found their pleasure in games of various kinds. But sports as an exercise in national character-building, the philosophical foundation of the modern Olympics, came much later. That belongs to the nineteenth century, when national consciousness was, to use a twentieth-century expression, raised all over Europe.
There were two distinct European sporting traditions: sports, specifically athletics and team games, as a way to test individual skills and character; and sports as a mass spectacle, to forge unity and promote a cultish kind of beauty, often involving pagan rites—torchlight parades and so on. As one might have guessed, the former was Anglo-Saxon in origin, the latter German. The British were cricketers and athletes; the Germans preferred gymnastics, or, as they called the art of body contortions, Turnen. Turnen was an expression of Germanness (Deutschtum). The word Turnen was coined by the so-called Turnvater, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852).
The Turnvater was a patriot spurred into action by Napoleon’s occupation of Germany. His Turnbewegung was part of an effort to unify the German nation. Clubs were formed, and eventually great festivals were held on special Turndays, when turners demonstrated their loyalty to the Second Reich in the form of mass calisthenics. Turners were contemptuous of the kind of sports enjoyed by decadent Anglo-Saxons. The turners, writes Mandell, “claimed that sport was an alien infection that might damage the integral structure of robust German culture.” Jahn, apart from being responsible for the physical torture of generations of continental children (my father’s back never quite recovered from his childhood contortions), has left his mark on sports to this day: he was the inventor of the rings, the pommel horse and the parallel bars.
Turnen was closely linked to a wider movement in Germany, a neoclassical cult of physical beauty called Nordische Freikörperkultur (NFKK), which reached its apotheosis around the time of Hitler’s Olympics in 1936. Body culture involved much healthy nudity and well-oiled heroic posturing. Leni Riefenstahl’s films, of the Berlin Olympics especially, but also Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg rally, are the perfect documents of this sort of thing. Riefenstahl, inspired by generations of German romantics, was big on harmony with nature, in woods or on lonely mountaintops, preferably at dusk. When the young men in her films are not harmonizing with nature, they march, perform great physical feats or indulge in healthy horseplay, yodeling with pleasure as they beat one another with twigs in the sauna bath. Riefenstahl’s employers liked these young men to be blond, but the filmmaker herself was as much drawn to the physical perfection of Jesse Owens as to “healthy SA men” of the Third Reich.
The groundwork for Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Sukarno’s, Mussolini’s, Kim Il Sung’s and, yes, South Korean monuments, in stone or in the flesh (the difference is not always easy to detect), was laid by eighteenth-century neoclassicists, such as the artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). This propagandist for the French Revolution reacted against the effete rococo style of the ancien régime. Riefenstahl’s marching men in their high boots (or athletic singlets), and their expressions of steely determination, are the heroic neoclassical images come to life. The aesthetic, then, was not uniquely German in origin. But the link with mass sports events was certainly German. And the perculiarly Teutonic link with the Olympic idea is suggested by the title of a book first published in 1924 but reissued in an expanded version in 1936: Mensch und Sonne, Arischolympische Geist (“Man and Sun, the Aryan Olympic Spirit”). It was written by one Hans Süren, the inventor of a special rubber penis-holder. Süren liked to be photographed in the nude, slapping punch-bags or engaging in other such manly gestures. His inspiration, he wrote, was Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
The British concept of sport during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was less absurd than Germany’s nudism and synchronic calisthenics, but no less patriotic. English games go back to two sources, often linked: village festivals and upper-class schools. Cricket was played by village boys in the sixteenth century and was later taken up as a gentrified adult game. The special national ethos of cricket was, however, like the Olympics, a nineteenth-century phenomenon. “Mark me,” wrote a hearty headmaster of Uppingham School, quoted in John J. MacAloon’s study of Coubertin, This Great Symbol, “cricket is the greatest bond of the English speaking race, and is no mere game.” Sports, at exclusive schools as well as in workingmen’s clubs, were an expression of “muscular Christianity.” Sport built character—specifically, the character of empire builders.
The British empire was built on the belief in racial superiority. Just as the Germans did later, British sports enthusiasts often identified themselves as the true heirs of the ancient Greeks. And, just as the Greeks confined their Olympics to athletes of pure Greek blood, Englishmen in the 1890s talked of holding an “Anglo-Saxon Olympiad.” This scheme, wrote the main promoter, J. Astley Coo
per, “ought to act as an antidote to the debilitating effects of luxury, wealth and civilisation, for, should it be carried out in its full conception, the honours which it affords should be those for which the flower of the Race would chiefly strive.”
The seminal work on Victorian English sports was Tom Brown’s School Days. The book begins with a description of Tom’s native village in Berkshire. In an aside, Thomas Hughes laments the loss of native village loyalties: “We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys,” he writes, addressing his young readers,
and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it’s all right, I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish backsword play hadn’t gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that confounded Great Western hadn’t carried away Alfred’s Hill to make an embankment.
Here we have a quintessentially nineteenth-century sentiment. Railways, Empire, cosmopolitanism, large views and glorious humanity—I dare say it’s all right, but … what about native values? What about moral discipline? How about community spirit? This is where sports came in, to restore such morals and values. When Tom first goes to Rugby, alma mater of many a moralist, from Hughes himself to Salman Rushdie, he helps to win a football match for his house against “the School.” The hero is a sixth-form boy known as Old Brooke. On the day of victory Brooke gets up to give a speech to the boys of the house. His theme is why the much smaller house beat the school:
It’s because we’ve more reliance on one another, more of a house feeling, more fellowship than the school can have.… We’ve union, they’ve division—there’s the secret—(cheers). But how’s this to be kept up? How’s it to be improved? That’s the question. For I take it, we’re all in earnest about beating the school, whatever else we care about. I know I’d sooner win two School-house matches running than get the Balliol scholarship any day—(frantic cheers).
Union versus division: this was the overriding obsession of nineteenth-century pedagogues—and authoritarian leaders. The Germans turned to turning, the British to the public school spirit, and the French …? They were of two minds. Some admired the German spirit. But after the bitter defeat by the Prussian armies in 1871 this became a rather indefensible position, and so a large number of Frenchmen, including Pierre de Coubertin, turned to England—in the baron’s case, specifically to Tom Brown’s school.
Coubertin, a restless aristocrat in search of good deeds, was deeply shaken by the French debacle in 1871 and sought to put some backbone into the French, or, as he put it, to “rebronze” them. Following the ideas of Hippolyte Taine, another Anglophile, Coubertin believed in Progress, the kind of progress celebrated in world’s fairs, the ethos of which is akin to that of the Olympics. The conditions for Progress were Harmony and Patriotism. These values, so essential to rebronzing the demoralized and enervated French, were to be found in British public schools, particularly at Rugby, where Coubertin literally worshiped at Dr. Arnold’s tomb. Coubertin, himself a product of a strict Jesuit college, where sports would have been the last thing on the curriculum, admired the likes of Old Brooke, who would rather win a football match than get a Balliol scholarship. Thus the sporting baron began his crusade for la pédagogie sportive. And thus the Olympic idea was born.
In fact, Dr. Arnold’s muscular Christianity stressed Christianity more than muscles. Coubertin’s patriotism was more secular. Olympia, he said, was “consecrated to a task strictly human and material in form, but purified and elevated by the idea of patriotism.” Like many nineteenth-century men, he loved ceremonies and hated politics. Olympia, to him, was a “cult centre.” Men who dream of perfect harmony always hate politics (but they are usually deeply moved by pagan rites and torchlight parades). Ever the true aristocrat, Coubertin believed in patronage, dispensed by a noble elite that chose its own members not for their politics or the interests they might represent, but for their devotion to the “idea” of Peace, Harmony and Progress. Voting, interests, ideology—these divide men. Religious or pseudoreligious ceremonies, service to common ideals, and great rallies—not to mention great leaders—bind men together. What Coubertin hoped to achieve with his Olympic idea was to emulate the union of Old Brooke’s house on a massive scale, first in France and then throughout the world.
It is of course a deeply antidemocratic idea. And there are few less democratic institutions than the International Olympic Committee, which appears to operate a bit like a Freemasons’ lodge—there is the same addiction to ritual, the same secretiveness and pomposity. This is not to say that Coubertin himself was a protofascist. But antidemocratic ideas, however well-intentioned, are ripe for the plucking by more cynical manipulators. Coubertin believed that pseudoreligious incantations about Peace and the Brotherhood of Man could solve political conflicts. He took his own slogans about sports transcending politics seriously. He really thought that by holding vast jamborees, we would all learn to understand and respect one another, and that this would lead to world peace.
Coubertin was an internationalist under attack from French nativists, who were equally interested in staging jamborees but who favored pageants involving French games, French ceremonies and French traditions such as revived medieval French student festivals. Coubertin’s enemy was Charles Maurras, the reactionary royalist who loathed Dreyfus, democracy and all foreigners, though not necessarily in that order. While Coubertin saw no contradiction between promoting patriotism through the competition of nations and the ideal of international brotherhood, Maurras saw the contradiction all too well. But he was all for it. Let the races mix at international competitions, he thought, and they will learn to hate one another. True Frenchmen, when confronted by the barbarian Americans and other unspeakable peoples, would recognize the superiority of France.
So while Coubertin was an enemy of the Action Française, Brown Shirts and analogous fascist movements, his political naïveté contributed to their cause. The removal of politics can be the first step toward totalitarianism. Those that seek to solve political problems by turning to cults or romantic ideals of harmony are the first to end up as victims of tyranny. There is an interesting link between Coubertin and Marxism-Leninism. Communist countries are the most successful Olympic contenders and the true heirs of Coubertin’s ideals of Patriotism, Peace and International Brotherhood. In this, as in so many other ways, communists are the last Victorians.
The baron’s saddest defeat was perhaps perceived by himself as a victory. He was too ill to attend the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But he had praised Germany’s efforts in staging the grandiose games, and the Nazi organizers praised the old baron in return.* After the German team had entered the stadium for the opening ceremony and 100,000 arms were raised in the Hitler salute, after the last words of “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Song” had been sung, silence was requested, and the frail voice of the baron spoke his recorded message: “The most important thing at the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not to conquer, but to struggle well.” Hitler in his uniform, Goering in a flamboyant white outfit, Speer in an impeccable suit and Goebbels, with a wide grin, applauded these noble sentiments with glee.
In Seoul I visited a man who had won glory at Hitler’s games, a bluff Korean called Sohn Kee Chung, gold medalist in the marathon. Sohn remembers Hitler as seeming “hard as a rock.” His handshake “was like an iron fist and his eyes were very clear. He seemed to stare though me and seemed very powerful and strong.” Those being the days of Japanese empire, Sohn ran as a subject of the Japanese emperor. When he received his gold medal, the Japanese national anthem was played. Sohn bowed his head. In respect? Or, as he now claims, in shame? Sohn, said a young Korean interpreter at the Seoul games, is not a sincere patriot. Perhaps that is why he was allowed to enter the Seoul stadium carrying the Olympic flame, but not to complete the final lap: Sohn may be a great Korean, but he had run for the Japanese.
Sohn struck me as a sad figure, perhaps the perfect example of a pure athlete manipulated by political forces beyond his control. And yet, in his apartment, cluttered with trophies, this hero of the Berlin Olympics still insisted, more than once, each time more vehemently, that without the Olympics we would have wars. But what about Hitler and World War II, I asked. “That,” he answered, “was the fault of politicians.”
The greatest promoter of Japanese marathon running before the war was an odd professor called Hibino Yutaka. In his photograph he looks like a stern moralist, dressed in a kimono, Japanese fan in the right hand, Homburg hat in the left. Like Coubertin, Hibino believed in sports as a national tonic. After the Olympic games in Paris in 1924, he traveled all over Europe demonstrating his own new concept of the marathon. Hibino also wrote a book, Nippon Shindo Ron (The National Ideals of the Japanese People), published in English in 1928, just as he was attending the Amsterdam Olympics. It is one long hysterical paean to the Japanese emperor, whose power is unique in the world, divine and always benevolent; only absolute obedience to his sacred power will lead to perfect harmony and peace. Hibino, as did many men in his time (and as do many Japanese and Koreans still today), saw the family of nations in terms of a permanent Darwinist struggle:
National success in this contest waits upon unity of purpose in the hearts of the people. If unity of purpose in the hearts of the people is strong and vigorous the nation may face a myriad of foes without anxiety. The subjects of our Empire have never been lacking in this respect. May this immemorial jewel of our national glory be ever exalted in unparalleled effulgence, a lasting wonder to the startled gaze of foreign peoples.
It would be interesting to know whether Coubertin ever met his fellow amateur from Japan, and what he would have made of his ideas. More to the point, however, is the similarity in tone between Hibino’s writings and some of the sentiments expressed in South Korea today—particularly the bit about the startled gaze of the foreign peoples, but also the yearning for unity and national glory. This can be explained through Korea’s painful past, always at the mercy of stronger powers, who are blamed to this day for dividing the country in two. But bitter feelings are often inflamed for political ends, by the government and by the opposition.
