The Bourgeois Olympics and the Workers’ Olympics
In the interwar years the International Workers’ Olympiads were an important part of the labor movement.
"A great irony is that the modern Olympics, first envisioned as an alternative to war, have themselves become a form of low-intensity warfare." — Mike Davis
In the interwar years, the International Workers’ Olympiads were an important part of the labor movement. Thanks to the restrictive definition of amateurism enforced by the IOC, many workers were simply ineligible for the Games. But workers’ sports clubs—some with roots stretching back to the 1890s—provided laborers and their families an outlet for physical engagement in numerous countries from Czechoslovakia to Canada. In contrast to the ingrained elitism of the IOC, these sports clubs championed the democratization of sport, encouraging all to take part regardless of skill level or class background. In 1920, trade unionists founded the Socialist Worker Sports International (SWSI), also called the Lucerne Worker Sports International, or LSI, because the congress took place in Lucerne, Switzerland. The SWSI assumed a prime leadership role in organizing the Workers’ Olympiads.
The first Workers’ Olympiad was staged at Frankfurt in 1925. The four-day affair featured 150,000 participants from nineteen countries. Unlike the “bourgeois Olympics” in Antwerp (1920) and Paris (1924), where the defeated nations from World War I (Germany and Austria) were not invited, the Workers’ Games welcomed all comers. And if one wanted to compete in a sport, participating in the cultural festival was mandatory. So participants played their sports, but they also sang and acted. The opening ceremony featured a 1,200- person choir. Later, 60,000 people staged a performance called “Worker Struggle for the Earth.” The opening and awards ceremonies replaced national flags with red flags and national anthems with “The Internationale.” The motto for these Games was “no more war.”
The Olympiad was largely considered a success, although it suffered from the sectarianism that plagued wider relations on the left; disagreements between the SWSI and the communist Red Sport International (RSI) led to the exclusion of the latter. Worker sport organizations were forced to choose one side or the other. As William Murray notes, “Both bodies ran their own sports meetings, often dedicated, like their stadiums, to heroes from the socialist past, but they neither competed with nor against each other.” The second Workers’ Olympiad took place at Vienna in 1931. Approximately 80,000 worker-athletes from twenty three nations participated. To boost attendance, organizers dovetailed the Games with the Socialist and Labour International’s fourth congress. The Games featured a separate festival of sport for kids, as well as art shows and running and swimming events for the masses. Some 65,000 people attended the final match of the soccer tournament, while 12,000 went to the cycling finals and 3,000 went to the water polo title match. On the final day of the Games, a crowd estimated at 250,000 watched a “festive march” consisting of approximately 100,000 athletes.
The socialist government in Vienna built a new stadium for the Olympiad, complete with an athletic field, bike track, and swimming pool, at a cost of $1 million. Locker rooms were constructed to accommodate the thousands of athletes who took part. According to Robert Wheeler, the Vienna Olympiad “was in many ways the high point of the workers’ sports movement,” and “compared favorably or better with the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid and Los Angeles.”
In 1936 the Republican government in Spain planned a People’s Olympiad as a counterpoint to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or “Nazi Games.” The Comitè Català Pro-Esport Popular led the planning with the intention of creating a hybrid Games for worker athletes as well as IOC-sanctioned athletes who wished to boycott the Berlin Games for political reasons. The organizers set up a three-tier system for participants: elite athletes, almost-elite athletes, and recreational athletes from worker sport clubs. Funding came from the Spanish central government, the Catalan autonomous government, Barcelona City Hall, and the Popular Front government in France. Numerous art exhibitions were scheduled. The Catalan writer Josep Maria de Sagarra supplied the lyrics for the Olimpíada Popular hymn, and the German musician Hans Eisler wrote the orchestration. Unlike the IOC, People’s Olympiad organizers allowed for the participation of athletes from Algeria and Morocco, despite their colonial status, and afforded nation status to Catalonia, Euskadi (Basque country), and Galicia. A contingent of Canadians planned to attend, as did Palestinian athletes and worker-athletes from the US. But all these plans were scuttled.
On July 19, 1936, the day of the opening ceremony, Fascist forces led by Francisco Franco carried out a coup that foiled the Olimpíada Popular. Some athletes fought fascists in the streets. Others fled to safer havens. Although the People’s Olympiad was canceled, the third International Workers’ Olympiad was successfully staged the following year at Antwerp. Approximately 27,000 worker athletes participated from seventeen countries. Some 50,000 people attended events in the stadium on the final day of the Games, and 200,000 made the final march through the city.
At these Games, RSI athletes were allowed to participate as a united front against the ascendance of fascism in Europe. This labor solidarity—the Popular Front—was notable, and unique in the history of the Workers’ Olympiad. Although the sport festival did not live up to Barcelona’s ambitiously planned grandeur, it remained a significant accomplishment given the challenging period in which it was staged. The next International Workers’ Olympiad was scheduled for 1943 in Helsinki, but World War II prevented it from becoming reality.
Despite their success, the Workers’ Olympiads were largely marginalized by the mainstream media of the time, limiting their reach to the wider public. The fracture between socialists and communists also hampered their effectiveness. Within the Games, there was also a certain amount of tension between the commitment to break athletic records and the commitment to non-competitive mass participation; many worker-athletes who strove for record-breaking achievement were labeled “bourgeois” by their colleagues. James Riordan argues that overt politics may have undercut the political value of the Workers’ Games: “Many worker sport leaders failed to understand that a sport organization might be more politically effective by being less explicitly political.” Like the Women’s Olympiads, the alternative Workers’ Olympiads definitely had an impact on the IOC’s power brokers.
The Avery Brundage archive contains brochures about the 1936 Barcelona People’s Olympiad as well as an invitation to the Amateur Athletic Union to come take part in those Games. Such terminology raised the IOC’s concerns that the organizers of the alternative Games were infringing on the Olympic brand. The IOC Executive Committee minutes from 1925 note: “The miss-use [sic] of the word ‘olympic’ was growing rapidly and among organization[s] using it were the ‘Olympic Games for Women’, ‘The Worker’s Olympic Games’, ‘Student’s Olympic Games’. Members from these organizations were present and told that the word ‘olympic’ was the property of the IOC and could not be used.”
More recently, however, the Olimpíada Popular has been reincorporated into official Olympic history; the Olympic Museum in Barcelona features posters from the alternative competition and a brief description of the organizers’ goals. Meanwhile, the “bourgeois Olympics” pressed on.
— An edited excerpt Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics by Jules Boykoff.
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