A Festival of Nations — Politics and Propaganda

So far, we have traced the ideals Coubertin championed and the modest, hand-built beginnings of the modern Games, born amid financial hardship. It was a vision of a festival of friendship beyond nations, captured by the phrase ‘taking part is what matters.’ Yet a stage that draws the eyes of the whole world to a single point takes on great power in itself. Vast crowds, vast coverage, and rows of national flags standing in perfect order. There was no way that nations would fail to find this appealing. In this installment, we trace, neither in praise nor in condemnation, how the Games came to be used as a stage for projecting national prestige — centered on Berlin in 1936 and the medal races and boycott exchanges of the Cold War.

Berlin 1936 — The Games That Became a Stage for Propaganda

In the summer of 1936, the Olympics were held in Berlin. The host city is said to have been decided in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, but by the time the Games arrived, Germany was already under the regime led by Adolf Hitler. Scholarship and reporting widely argue that the regime used the event as a propaganda opportunity to display the nation’s power and order to the world.

A vast stadium was built, the delegations of each nation entered in perfect order, and the scene was recorded using methods advanced for the time and conveyed to the world. For visiting foreigners, the impression of a prosperous and settled society is said to have been staged, and the Games are judged to have brought the regime great propaganda value. The festival of friendship Coubertin had envisioned became inseparably bound here with a state’s strategy of image-making.

At the same time, this event does not fit into a simple story. The American track athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals, and his achievements have been described as shaking the propaganda logic of ‘Aryan superiority’ through the results of competition themselves. As for the famous anecdote that Hitler deliberately avoided shaking hands with Owens, some hold that parts of it were embellished in later years, and assessments of the details are divided. What is certain is the fact that, in a setting prepared as a stage for propaganda, the athletes produced moments that could not be contained within the regime’s intentions.

The Cold War Medal Race — A Proxy War on the Track

When the Second World War ended, the world divided largely into a Western bloc centered on the United States and an Eastern bloc centered on the Soviet Union, entering a long era of tension. Rather than clashing in direct warfare, the two camps competed for power in many fields — science, space exploration, and sport. The number of Olympic medals won came to be treated as a kind of indicator of the superiority of a given system.

The number of medals won would be spoken of as if it proved the rightness of one’s own institutions and way of life. Results that should have been the honor of individual athletes came to bear the prestige of nations. Tracks and arenas took on the character of a stage for a proxy war fought without weapons. It is fair to say things had come a long way from the simple feeling of cherishing competition for its own sake that we saw in earlier installments.

In this era, athletes competed under enormous pressure. Victory did not stop at personal joy but linked directly to the standing of the bloc they belonged to. Such a structure raised athletes to heroes while also exposing them to excessive expectation and political use. The more sport became a matter of national concern, the larger the money and organizations moving within it grew — it is fair to say that the soil for the commercialization we will see in later installments was quietly being cultivated within this competition between nations as well.

The Exchange of Boycotts — The Politically Shaken 1980s

Carrying the prestige of nations, the Games finally reached a point where ‘whether or not to take part’ itself became a tool of politics. At the 1980 Moscow Games, in protest against the previous year’s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, many Western nations led by the United States are said to have declined to participate. Reports state that in the end around sixty countries did not take part, and the Games were held with eighty-one participating nations. Japan was one of the countries that chose non-participation at this time.

Then, four years later, a movement in the opposite direction occurred. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, it was reported that the Soviet Union and many Eastern bloc nations declined to take part, citing concerns over safety and other reasons. A retaliatory aspect — a response to the action the West had taken in Moscow — has been pointed out. Amid an exchange in which boycott called forth boycott, many athletes who should have competed lost their chance to appear, regardless of their own will.

A Festival That Became a Tool of the State — And On to the Next Burden

The propaganda of Berlin, the medal race of the Cold War, and the exchange of boycotts. Lining these up, a single current comes into view. The Olympics, which gather the gaze of the world, became — by that very gravitational pull — an appealing stage for nations. The festival revived under the banner of ideals had, before anyone realized, turned into a place made to bear national prestige and political claims.

What we want to be careful of here is not to dismiss this simply as ‘the corruption of the Olympics.’ It is precisely because nations staked their prestige that splendid arenas were built, broadcasting and reporting spread, and people around the world could share the same moment. Light and shadow often spring from the same source. The involvement of nations made the Olympics look grand, while also serving as the trigger that swelled their scale and cost.

And it is this very force — the desire to ‘look grand’ — that becomes the gateway to the next story. As if competing in national prestige, host cities built vast facilities and tried to stage magnificent Games. But an expansion of scale always comes with a price. Next time, we head to the Games where that price weighed heavily on the shoulders of citizens — Montreal in 1976. How did a festival everyone wanted to host transform into a burden no one wanted to host? We trace that turning point.