War, Sublimated — How Nation and Capital Swallowed Sport

The ideal of amateurism that Pierre de Coubertin had raised aloft crumbled quietly across the twentieth century. Not for money but for the contest itself — behind that noble pretence, sport was steadily changing shape into an enormous business. The prestige of nations and the money of corporations: the process by which these two swallowed sport lays bare, as it unfolds, the truth that modern sport is war, sublimated.

Sport Was Dancing with Money from the Very First

To think of the bond between sport and money as a modern corruption is to get it wrong. The two had been dancing together long before.

Go back to seventeenth-century England. After the Restoration of 1660, society was swept up in excessive gambling — so much so that by 1664 a law was needed to regulate it. In this era, sports such as cricket, horse racing, and boxing were funded by precisely those gambling profits. The patrons who held the stakes assembled strong teams to represent their own interests. This, it is said, is the origin of professional team sport. Not pure competitive spirit but monetary desire and showmanship gave birth to organised sport.

In the late nineteenth century, this current became decisive. In 1870s America, baseball split into professionals and amateurs. The professional game swiftly became the mainstream, and the focus of sport shifted from the ‘individual player’ to the ‘club’ — the franchise. People came to cheer not for individual heroes but for organisations. Here, the prototype of sport as business had appeared.

The One Man Who Saved an Olympics on the Brink of Bankruptcy

In the latter half of the twentieth century, this wave of commercialisation at last swallowed the Olympics themselves. The turning point was Los Angeles, 1984.

The spur was a disaster eight years earlier. The 1976 Montreal Olympics posted a vast deficit and left the host city with debt that lingered for years. Thereafter, the number of cities putting themselves forward to host the Games collapsed. It cost too much, and it did not pay — so ran the verdict. In Los Angeles it went further still: the city’s residents, by referendum, forbade the use of tax money to cover any Olympic deficit. No public funds whatsoever could be used. To hold the Games even so, there was no choice but to run them on private power alone.

The man who took on that ordeal was the organising committee chairman, Peter Ueberroth. He rebuilt the Olympic commercial model from the ground up. First, he pared down the sponsors. He contracted with only a single company per industry, and gave that exclusive position a high value. Firms such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Visa paid enormous sums to be bound to the Games. Beyond that, he built almost no new facilities and wrung every use out of existing ones, and he maximised the revenue from television broadcasting rights.

The result was dramatic. The Los Angeles Olympics became the most profitable Games in history, leaving a surplus of more than 230 million dollars. The Olympics pay — Ueberroth had proved it. Cities the world over reversed their attitude and began racing one another to bid.

Broadcasting Rights, the Unseen Lead Player

From 1984 onward, the true protagonist of the Olympics was no longer the athlete in the arena but the viewer on the far side of the television camera.

The rise of mass media and of global communications networks lifted sport from a local amusement into worldwide entertainment. Professionalisation advanced further still, and pushed up the very popularity of sport. Today, the greater part of the Olympic movement’s income is made up of broadcasting-rights fees and sponsorship revenue. For a host city, the Olympics are no longer a mere festival of sport. They are a vast economic project — redeveloping the city and selling the nation’s brand to the world. The extreme case is Barcelona in 1992, where in fact more than eighty per cent of the investment poured not into running the Games but into the regeneration of the city itself.

Yet where there is light, there is shadow. The more the value of victory soars, the stronger grows the force that seeks to turn it into money. Critics lamented that corporate logos and broadcasting rights had taken the lead role, and the athlete had been driven into the background. The amateur ideal Coubertin had dreamed of was, by now, far away. And at the destination where the ‘desire for victory’ finally arrived, another darkness lay in wait — the artificial lifting of the body by drugs. That is the theme of the next episode.

From gods, to rules. From rules, to nation and capital. The subject of sport has shifted with the ages. But there is a fundamental question we have not yet answered. Who, in the first place, holds the right to stand on this stage? Women? Bodies of every kind? Those who reached for drugs? The story continues, on to the last of the lines drawn around the human body.