Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  In 1934, as head of the United States Olympic Committee (then called the American Olympic Committee, or AOC), Brundage became the leading advocate for Hitler’s Berlin to host the 1936 Games. When he met resistance to rewarding a country that seemed to be a brewing cauldron of bad news, he curtly rejected what he called “the politicization of sport,” arguing, “The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.”9 (He said this despite a lifelong belief that apartheid countries such as South Africa and Rhodesia should be allowed to field all-white Olympic teams.) Yet a boycott movement was growing, insisting that the Olympics refuse to lend Hitler the cloak of their legitimacy. The uproar would not subside, so Brundage went to Germany himself to settle the question about whether Hitler and his Nazi party were as toxic as the boycotters said. He was given a very public and sublimely choreographed tour of Berlin, shared smiles and handshakes with Hitler for the cameras, and returned to the States with tales of a new Germany that treated Jews and other national minorities with exceptional care. When asked about the anti-Hitler rumblings, he dismissed them as the work of a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.” The boycott push failed narrowly, despite support from Walter White of the NAACP and the IOC’s American representative, Ernest Lee Jahncke, after Brundage pleaded in an AOC pamphlet for sports to stay out of the “Jew-Nazi altercation.” Most infamously, Brundage absolved himself of all moral responsibility when he said that organized amateur athletics “cannot, with good grace or propriety, interfere in the internal, political, religious or racial affairs of any country or group.”10 Of course, by bestowing the grace of the Games on the Third Reich, he was doing just that. He claimed to believe that the “Olympic movement” should stay apart from politics, but this false neutrality benefited a certain kind of politics. It also helped Brundage negotiate the internal politics of the IOC: his steadfast support of Hitler earned him the respect of its members. They brought him into their exclusive club—after voting to expel the antifascist Jahncke, the first expulsion in IOC history.

  The Nazi regime did not share Brundage’s belief in the apolitical virtues of the Olympic movement—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the two shared a belief about what politics the Olympics should and should not glorify. Indeed, Brundage’s canard that politics and sport resided in separate worlds was betrayed by the Nazis’ own publications. “Athletes and sport are the preparatory school of the political will in the service of the state,” Kurt Munch wrote in a Nazi-sanctioned book titled Knowledge about Germany. “Non-political, so-called neutral sportsmen are unthinkable in Hitler’s state.”11 The Nazi party had nationalism honed to a razor’s edge, so the change to host the Olympics fit its political outlook like a jackboot. Hitler’s propaganda department added many of the trappings—the opening ceremonies, the marching athletes—that today are icons of the Games.

  The first Olympic torch run was actually the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem, Germany’s chief organizer for the 1936 Games. He convinced Hitler’s media chief, Joseph Goebbels, that 3,422 young Aryan runners should carry burning torches along the 3,422-kilometer route from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the stadium in Berlin.12 The event would be captured by the regime’s filmmaking prodigy, Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler’s words were broadcast to the world live over radio before the inaugural torch lighting: “Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore, may the Olympic flame never expire.”13 Not so different from the plea of former Olympic chief Jacques Rogge, who retired in 2013, that the torch be a symbol of “peace, harmony and global unity.” The running of the torch, as Chris Bowlby wrote for BBC News, “was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence.”14 Diem, in organizing its first journey, made sure the Olympic torch was carried exclusively through areas of Europe where the Third Reich wanted to extend its reach. When the flame made its way through Vienna, it was accompanied by mammoth pro-Nazi demonstrations. Two years later, the Nazis annexed Austria to Germany.

  The Games themselves at first seemed to justify critics’ fears that the Olympics would provide legitimacy to the Nazi regime. To Hitler, the Berlin games were “a fascist fantasy come true.”15 Every ceremony was calculated to shower further glory on the Third Reich. The legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, covering the Games, described a chilling scene:

  Just twenty-two years ago this day the world went to war. On the twenty-second anniversary of the outbreak of that great conflict I passed through more than 700,000 uniforms on my way to the Olympic Stadium—brown shirts, black guards, gray-green waves of regular army men and marines—seven massed military miles rivaling the mobilization of August 1, 1914. The opening ceremonies of the eleventh Olympiad, with mile upon mile, wave upon wave of a uniformed pageant, looked more like two world wars than the Olympic Games.16

  The Nazi pomp and circumstance so decried today served in fact as a launching pad for the kind of over-the-top nationalism now associated with the Olympics.

  The Nazi Olympics also expanded the stark repression that was beginning to be associated with hosting the Olympics, particularly the idea of “cleansing” cities for an international audience. On July 16, 1936, Berlin police rounded up eight hundred Roma people living in the Berlin streets and put them in an internment camp. Many other political dissidents disappeared, herded onto some of the first trains to the so-called work camps. After the undesirables were out of sight, Berlin was scrubbed down. Richard Walther Darré, the German minister of food and agriculture, issued a decree to local authorities throughout Germany:

  All anti-Semitic posters must be suppressed during the period of question. The fundamental attitude of the Government does not change, but Jews will be treated as correctly as Aryans at this time. . . . Houses on the main roads must be whitened, and even repainted if possible. Street lighting must be improved. Streets and squares must be cleaned. Agricultural workers in the fields must not take their meals near the roads, nor pass near the roads.17

  When you see the shiny signage and slogans throughout Rio and consider the twenty thousand homes that have, as of this writing, already been cleared out, you can see more continuity than change from the Games of 1936.

  There were no Olympics in 1940 or 1944 because of World War II, and by 1948 Germany was no longer Hitler’s. Yet when the Olympics relaunched, the IOC decided to keep—and normalize—the nationalist trappings of the Berlin Games. The Games kept the ceremony, but now, instead of fascist spectacle, it became Cold War athletic pornography. Sports, instead of becoming a force for unity, stood in for global thermonuclear war. It was this dynamic that prompted George Orwell to write his essay “The Sporting Spirit,” in which he lacerated this sort of thinking:

  I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. . . . As soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.18

  Brundage was the unquestioned leader of this “orgy of hatred,” emerging from World War II as the unquestioned leader of the IOC. Although as late as 1941 he had been publicly praising the Reich, including at an “America First” rally in Madison Square Garden, this did nothing to slow his rise. He remained chief of the IOC until 1972.

  Under Brundage, mass evictions and police crackdowns were the norm. He had nothing to say when thousands were displaced for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. His silence was deafening when Mexican security forces slaughtered hundreds of stud
ents and workers protesting in the streets in advance of the 1968 Games in Mexico City. Anything was permissible as long as the Games ran on time. He became a symbol of establishment reaction so profound that when African Americans attempted to organize their own boycott of the Olympics in 1968, due primarily to Brundage’s desire to readmit apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, removing Brundage from the IOC’s leadership was one of their primary demands. As 1968 Olympic bronze medalist and protestor John Carlos explained:

  Avery Brundage was standing to the right of all things right-wing. He came off like someone with money and power who couldn’t or wouldn’t hear what we were trying to say. I also felt like he was a puppet for others. He might’ve been the face of the IOC, but I think there were a lot more mechanisms behind him to turn the wheel, so to speak. In other words, he had a lot of support behind the things that he was saying. He was just a figurehead, but he was doing so much harm. He was the voice for apartheid South Africa and what was then known as Rhodesia. He wasn’t an honest broker for the darker nations of the world. He had to go.19

  Brundage didn’t go just yet, but Carlos and his fellow medalist Tommie Smith created an iconic Olympic image of a different sort on the medal stand, when they raised their fists high in a salute to symbolize their commitment to human rights inside and outside the sports world.

  Brundage is perhaps most notorious for his decisions surrounding the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. On September 5, a Palestinian group called Black September took eleven Israeli athletes hostage. Brundage insisted the Olympics continue while negotiations were taking place for their release. After all of the athletes were killed during a botched rescue attempt, Brundage announced that the Games would proceed as planned. Only a massive amount of pressure convinced the IOC to halt competition for a single day, instead holding a memorial service for eighty thousand spectators and three thousand athletes in the Olympic Stadium. When Brundage spoke, he shocked observers by pointedly making no reference at all to the slain athletes, instead praising the strength of the Olympic movement and stating that “the Games must go on.” This position was also endorsed by the Israeli government, but not everyone agreed; several countries left in protest. As one Dutch athlete put it, “You give a party and someone is killed at the party, you don’t continue the party, you go home. That’s what I’m doing.”20

  In a subsequent speech, Brundage spoke of his steadfast belief that Rhodesia, despite its apartheid policies, should never be excluded from the Games. He then stated that the massacre of the Israeli athletes and the exclusion of the Rhodesian team were crimes of equal weight. Clearly, after standing astride the Olympics for most of the century, Brundage was becoming a liability. But when the IOC finally put him out to pasture, it settled on a replacement who differed from “Slavery Avery” only on the question of his all-time favorite fascist.

  Don Juan Antonio

  In 1980, the IOC named its new head: Spain’s Don Juan Antonio Samaranch, a proud fascist of many years’ standing. Born in 1920 in Barcelona, the son of a wealthy factory owner, Samaranch knew with an early clarity what side he was on. In 1936, when General Francisco Franco’s fascists fought the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, the teenage Juan Antonio was already a proud, active fascist street fighter and strikebreaker. Up until the dictator’s death in 1975, Samaranch was still proclaiming himself “one hundred percent Francoist.”21

  Samaranch was also a sportsman who believed in the Brundage ideal of the Olympics as celebration of nationalism, amateurism, and power. He wrote letters to Brundage, “eulogizing in one of them the American’s ‘intelligence, laboriousness and love for [the] Olympic idea’ and in another promising, ‘I will entirely devote myself to go with your personality and prominent work.’”22 Journalist Andrew Jennings notes that

  three decades of devotion to fascism had taught Samaranch a peculiar language. All the institutions in Spain—the monarchy, politics, the church, industry and its workers—were forced into slavish obedience; the dictator and his mouthpieces called it “sacred unity.” This has been one of Samaranch’s contributions to Olympic jargon. He calls frequently for the “unity” of the Olympic movement and hails the “sacred unity” of the committee, the international sports barons and the national Olympic committees around the world; all of course under his leadership.23

  Samaranch’s commitment to the Victorian ideal of amateurism, however, only went so far, especially when it got in the way of corporate sponsorships. It was he who ushered in the modern era, allowing athletes to accept endorsements, play professionally when not representing their countries, and at least somewhat benefit from their talents. In other words, if Brundage had lived to see the day, he would have known that it was his protégé Samaranch who killed Santa Claus. Far from destroying the Olympics, however, this made the Games swifter, higher, stronger, and more collectively profitable than ever: the spectacle of NBA players and other professionals competing in the Olympics was ratings gold. Samaranch also brought in corporate underwriters to fund the Games, making them a lucrative proposition for potential host countries hoping to “brand” themselves as well as for corporations hoping to burnish their images. The main sponsors the IOC has brought on board include the likes of Dow Chemical, British Petroleum, and McDonald’s: the companies most in need of an Olympic absolution.

  The IOC’s love for Samaranch is why, in a stunner, Spain finished ahead of Chicago and second to only Brazil in the competition to host the 2016 Games. This was intended precisely as a tribute to Don Juan Antonio, who had fallen ill (he passed away in 2010). Samaranch was the midwife of “celebration capitalism” and a conjurer of shock doctrines. His fingerprints, even more than Brundage’s, are on everything I have witnessed over the last ten years.

  The way Samaranch reshaped the Olympics served a blueprint for the World Cup to transform from a sleepy rule-making body to a Cold War nationalist frenzy to nationalism as commercial branding. In the United States during the 1996 Atlanta Games, this last came complete with red, white, and blue commemorative mousepads—made, of course, in China.

  FIFA and the World Cup

  FIFA was founded with far more humble aspirations than Coubertin’s IOC. On May 21, 1904, in Paris, the growth of international athletic competitions compelled representatives from different European countries to create a governing body that agreed to play by a set of uniform regulations. It was initially conceived as simply a rule-making body. Because it was founded in Paris, the organization took its acronym, FIFA, from the French: Fédération Internationale de Football Association. What began as an effort to make sure that tackling and the use of hands would not be seen as legitimate parts of the sport morphed over time into one of the most corrupt, scandal-plagued pits of infamy in the history of sports.24

  Though FIFA called itself a “global governing body,” it initially only oversaw countries in Western Europe. The first non-European country to join was South Africa in 1909, followed by the most European of South American countries, Argentina and Chile. The United States did not join until 1912. Brazil, a nation whose love and innovation with the soccer ball was already becoming folklore, was not asked to join until 1930.

  Unlike the IOC, FIFA is not only in charge of its famed tournament but also of the international workings of soccer in between tournaments. Its influence is as profound as its wealth. The exact numbers are unknown, but its former president, the highly corrupt João Havelange, did brag in 1993 that FIFA’s bottom line was larger than that of the world’s biggest company at the time, General Motors. The roots of this wealth are not only in soccer’s popularity. It comes as a result of selling every stitch of clothing on a player’s body for ads and of mercilessly breaking any players who dare speak about organizing a union. In Forbes’s 2012 list of the highest-paid athletes, only four of the top forty played soccer—even though it is the most lucrative sport on earth.25

  FIFA has always seen its profits as being linked to its ability to own the product, and it
sees its “product” as not only the game but the players themselves. FIFA’s leaders have never worshipped a political ideology as fervently as their desire for money and for control over the beautiful game. In 1956, FIFA suspended Hungarian players who formed a rogue team after the USSR overran their country with tanks.26 In 1958, as Algeria fought for independence, Algerian players formed their own team, including some who left cushy professional playing jobs in France to be part of the effort. Not only did FIFA blacklist those players and ban the team, it also suspended Morocco for having the temerity to play them in a match.27

  It was in 1958, during all of this political tumult, that the World Cup was first televised to a global audience. It was—not coincidentally—also in the 1950s that FIFA first started selling entire sections of its uniforms to international corporations to advertise their brands. Players did not joyously accept their new role as walking advertisements for FIFA’s corporate partners. Obdulio Varela, captain of the Uruguayan national team that won the 1950 World Cup, refused, saying, “They used to drag us blacks around by rings in our noses. Those days are gone.”28

  In 1974, when Havelange ascended to the leadership of FIFA, this corporate domination took full root. “I have come to sell a product called football,” he said upon assuming control.29 Havelange was a Brazilian plutocrat who made his fortune in financial speculation, with a sideline in weapons sales. He made a point of telling one member of the media that the part of soccer he loved most was not the beauty, the grace, or even the winning. It was, he said, “the discipline.” He loved the discipline and loved those who shared his fetish for order and corporate rule. In 1980, he convinced Adidas to underwrite the campaign of one of his dear friends to head the IOC. Adidas was skittish because of this person’s controversial past, but did so on Havelange’s encouragement. That was Don Juan Antonio Samaranch.30 Havelange also picked his own successor, Sepp Blatter, who has maintained the Havelange way through corruption scandal after corruption scandal, rank sexism, and, above all else, a desire for “order” over justice. As an international uproar brewed after Israel jailed and even killed Palestinian soccer players in 2012, Blatter made sure that the under-twenty-one European tournament would be played as planned in Israel. This attraction to authoritarian rule and order at all costs can be seen in recent revelations that several World Cup tournaments were in fact fixed to aid fascist and military dictatorships.31