A different self-image: Not nations fight against each other, but sports comrades from all countries with each other
The 32nd Summer Olympics in Tokyo begin in four days. They should actually have taken place last summer, but the corona pandemic made that impossible, as is well known. Even now, hardly anyone is happy about the event. There are no spectators. But commercial interests prevailed. It’s not new. A hundred years ago, the labor sports movement criticized the International Olympic Committee for transferring bourgeois values such as competition and profit maximization to sport.
The workers’ sports movement therefore organized its own Olympic Games. The first Workers’ Olympiad took place in Frankfurt in 1925. The Waldstadion, which is now called the Deutsche Bank Arena, was built for this purpose. In the festival book of the games it was recorded: »Here it is not nations that fight against each other, but sports comrades from all countries. We all have the same enemy: capitalism, which created nationalism and nourishes it on its breasts. It is not nations that are crowned victorious with us, it is not their flags that flow before us, but brothers and sisters unite under the flags of socialism. “
The biggest workers’ Olympics took place six years later in Vienna. It opened 90 years ago today. Again a new stadium was built, the Prater Stadium. Now renamed the Ernst Happel Stadium, it is still Austria’s national stadium. Exactly 77,166 worker athletes took part in the games. Most not in competitions, but in mass exercises by gymnasts, track and field athletes and swimmers. The exercises in military sports were due to the fascist danger. In Austria there were close links between workers ‘sport and the workers’ militias of the Republican Schutzbund.
Participants in the week-long games in Vienna came by bike from Palestine and on foot from Latvia. They were housed in mass dormitories and tent camps. Younger participants stayed with working-class families in communal buildings. The achievements shown in the competitions did not need to hide. 18 international records were set. The events attracted a total of 200,000 spectators. In a book on the history of the Austrian workers’ sports movement, the historians Paul Nittnaus and Michael Zink described the crowd as follows: »The parking lot in front of the stadium was overcrowded with bicycles, here and there you saw motorcycles, but not black limousines, because at that time the politicians and drove Top officials with seven special tram trains to the stadium! “
In a brochure with the title “Under red flags! From record sport to mass sport, “the Austromarxist Julius Deutsch, President of the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SASI), characterized” civil sport “as follows:” It is in its purest form at the large, splendid events organized by sensationalism. The advertising drums are stirred weeks in advance until tens of thousands of people flock to the day of the event. They then watch full of feverish passion, artificially incited with all refinement, as some record-hunters fight for a high price. “In contrast,” proletarian sport, “according to Deutsch, is” collectivist in its inner being “and serves to” train the masses «.
The first workers’ sports associations were founded in Germany after the socialist laws were repealed in 1890. Instead of races, hikes were organized, instead of swimming competitions there were courses in lifeguarding and social cycling was more popular than duels in tennis or fencing. “Festivals” replaced “tournaments”. Instead of “national teams”, “federal elections” took place.
The Workers’ Gymnastics Association, founded in 1893, played a pioneering role. The Workers ‘Cyclists’ Association “Solidarity”, founded in 1896, was also of particular importance. After the Nazis came to power and the workers’ sports clubs were banned, its infrastructure was to prove useful in resisting the fascist regime. Former “Solidarity” members performed important messenger services. The Stuttgart worker athlete Wilhelm Braun wrote in his memoirs: “It was not the SPD, but we workers athletes from back then who carried out the illegal work, and nothing happened after us.”
The conflicts between Social Democrats and Communists had split the workers’ sports movement in the 1920s. In addition to the SASI, the Red Sport International (RSI) was created in 1921, a communist workers ‘sports organization that organized international Spartakiads, including one in Berlin in 1931. It took place a few weeks before the Workers’ Olympics in Vienna. Most of the RSI members came from the Soviet Union. The German RSI offshoot was the Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit, or »Rotsport« for short. RSI athletes were also involved in the resistance against the Nazis. Rotsport chairman Ernst Grube was killed in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Only in the course of the popular front policy of the 1930s did athletes from SASI and RSI compete together in a workers’ Olympiad, in Antwerp in 1937. However, the games in Antwerp could not follow on from those in Frankfurt and Vienna. The workers’ sports movement was already too much weakened by fascism.
After the Second World War, the successor organizations of the workers’ sports associations were no longer to achieve the importance of their predecessors. They also changed their profile. There was no longer any talk of class struggle. In 1986 the successor organization of the SASI, the International Confederation of Workers’ and Amateur Athletes, even joined the International Olympic Committee.
