For a while now, Vladimir Putin has been looming over the threat of a boycott of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. a decadent and oppressive West. By organizing counter-Games of the Future in February, BRICS in June, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in September, he also aims to bring the Global South on board.
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He challenges the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which he accuses of having “politicized” the Games by raising regulatory barriers against the participation of Russian athletes following the invasion of Ukraine. For its part, by not excluding Russia, but by weakening its sporting nationalism, the IOC will have avoided a sanction that is inherently contrary to its pacifist ideal. All the ingredients come together to replay an episode in the long history of Olympic boycotts.
Organized by the Third Reich, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin offer themselves as an example of an aborted boycott. However, the protest movements were powerful in the United States and Europe, led by Jewish and anti-racist, feminist, worker, communist, socialist, social-democrat and Christian-democrat organizations. They came up against the weakness, if not the complacency, of many governments and sporting powers. For having kept the boycott across the Atlantic in check, Avery Brundage, then president of the American National Olympic Committee, was co-opted into the IOC, which he chaired from 1952 to 1972.
Anti-Semites like him, many of his colleagues reject parliamentary democracy as much as communism. Although racist, they denounce the discrimination suffered by black athletes in the United States to justify the exclusion of Jews from German sport. And their pacifism only serves the cause of Hitler, who sings “the contribution of sport to strengthening the bonds of peace between nations”.
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As for the USSR, denouncing the Olympics as individualist, capitalist and nationalist, it experienced a splendid Olympic isolation from 1924 to 1948 and praised its Spartakiades, collective prowess and socialist solidarity. She will enter the Olympic ranks in Helsinki in 1952 with a new strategy: physical and sporting challenge launched in the United States, entry into the IOC and international sports organizations, grafting of socialist friendship and peace onto Olympism. , organization of the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980.
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2024-03-19 15:53:00
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