As the Paris 2024 Paralympics begin this week, you may discover that they were created by German physician Ludwig Guttmann in 1948 in Stoke Mandeville, to help wheelchair-bound veterans … without ever really knowing that there was more to it than that. It’s wonderful that the Paralympics has risen to the international, multi-event, multi-sport, multi-ability competition that it has become. But its laudable origin story covers over the fact that the IOC picks and chooses which types of international events that it wants to embrace, while rejecting others. The IOC has absorbed, like the Borg, the Paralympics and the Special Olympics. They have ignored the Deaflympics and Math Olympiads. They have absolutely positively not allowed gays, women, or anyone outside their predefined circle, to be Olympic.
While I don’t yet know enough about the Paralympics to report on its competitions (and I will be on vacation as they occur–sorry), I can try to help set the stage. There were many Olympiads that happened before, during, and after Coubertin and his IOC buddies decided that they could own and trademark the word, the logo, and the activities that constituted an Olympiad.
Before the 1896 Games
The first Modern Olympic Games were held in … Sweden! No joke. In 1829, two key things happened. Greece finally threw out the Ottomans and achieved its independence as a country. This allowed scientists to start uncovering the past, and they starting digging up the site of Olympia. As the archaeologists unearthed urns with running figures and speculated about the location of the original stadia and temples, other scholars–especially classical Greek professors–were inspired to wonder what those competitions had really been like. A Swedish professor, Gustav Schartau, formed the Swedish Olympic Union and held competitions in Lund, in 1834 and 1836.
Montreal followed suit with its own Olympics in 1844, and, in the late 1850s, the Greeks built their own stadium and hosted their own Games. Athens called them Olympics, but they were also nicknamed the Zappas Games, after the dude who funded the stadium. That building, the Panathenaic Stadium, still stands today and was used in the 2004 Games.
While the efforts of Sweden, Canada, and Greece were short-lived, the work of a fellow in Shropshire was not. Up in the English northwestern countryside, Dr. William Penny Brookes designed a set of Olympic-style competitions, some track and field events and others more typical contests for an English “fun fair.” Everyone was welcome: all genders, all classes, all ages. Brookes dubbed them the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1850, and they have survived (more or less) to now, making them the oldest version of the revived Olympic Games. The IOC may have considered squelching use of the word “Olympian,” but, after all, Brookes inspired Coubertin and the IOC, rather than the other way around. Much Wenlock has the photos to prove it.
The Other 20th Century-iads
Pierre Coubertin, considered the “father” of the Modern Games, was inspired by Much Wenlock, the French archaeologists, Greek poets, ancient urn designers, the Rugby School, and classical scholars everywhere to push for a rekindling of the Olympics. He wanted the competition to be international and peace-inducing. Dr. Brookes had tried to go big, too, back in the 1860s, but the Greeks never responded to his inquiries. The international mail system was pretty slow; perhaps the Greeks couldn’t translate English. By 1894, Coubertin and his newly created IOC were eyeing the Panatheniac Stadium with glee, and they pressured the Greeks to hold the first IOC-sanctioned Modern Olympics in Athens.
The Olympic Movement, as it’s called today, was still slow to get off the ground after those first competitions. At the turn of the century, World’s Fairs were much more popular, and when the Games combined with World’s Fairs in Paris and St. Louis (1900, 1904), the Olympics were hardly noticeable. World War I caused cancellations, and by the time Paris 2024 rolled around, the IOC’s Olympics were not the only game in town. Several other Olympiads had also been launched.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the workers and comrades–those who stressed all men are brothers and that women were their equals, too–held their own group events. The Czechs started the Spartakiada, built off the sokol movement, in 1921. The Soviet Union picked up on the theme and sponsored Spartakiads, i.e. Worker’s Games, from 1928 through 1937. While Communist leaders later used these events as a glorification of their political system, they started as events where people could perform sport together, both competitively and cooperatively.
Women also held their own international competitions and called them Women’s Olympiads. Alice Milliat, a French sportswoman, was the driving force behind these Games, created because the IOC in the early 1920s refused to expand opportunities for women in track and field and other athletic pursuits. The first Woman’s Olympiad was in Monte Carlo in 1921; the first Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in 1922. By the time they got to Sweden, the women’s events brought in 20,000 spectators and royalty to watch. The IOC was not pleased.
The most ironic moment for women in the 2024 Opening Ceremonies may have been when NBCs cameras passed over the statues of Milliat, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine de Pisan, and others. The women’s statues had been installed on the Seine for the Olympics to bring focus on the need to reduce the emphasis on Parisian male statues. NBC described the problem of all the many male statues at length… but then passed over the women’s names and neglected to show any of the actual statues, choosing to focus instead on “joke” notes that cohost Peyton Manning had strapped to his wrist. Alice Milliat still remains unknown to American audiences.
The Swedes created their own Games, too, an international winter competition called the Nordic Games. They started in 1901, only 5 years after Athens. The IOC pretended they didn’t exist, then complained that those Scandinavians were too commercial. But the Nordic Games were popular and lasted for over thirty years.
Resistance Is Futile
Why did these groups create their own games? The IOC implied they were jealous, but the white, male, aristocrats Europeans who formed the IOC wanted their international peace-promoting Games made in their own image. Professionals were not allowed–even though that definition varied, since professional might mean someone paid to run, someone paid in an outside sport, or even simply someone paid. Gentlemen athletes were not paid for anything. They were also men only and able-bodied. They chose the sports and the time period.
Thus, the IOC would not have allowed mass gymnastics demonstrations a la the sokols, unless they were a dozen Danish gymnasts showing a bit of leg. Theyalso didn’t want a competing winter festival. By 1924, they convinced the French to hold a winter sports festival to precede the 1924 Paris Games , then convinced the Swedes and Scandinavians to end the Nordic Games in favor of the newly crowned Winter Olympics. Once that special word “Olympics” was attached, the Nordic Games fell apart.
The IOC didn’t want women in the Games, but they didn’t want them filling 20,000 seat stadiums either. Milliat and the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) just wanted to compete and started their own Olympiad because they were rejected. But the IOC “relented,” or “took over” depending on your point of view, by the late 1920s. Women’s track and field events were added to the 1928 Amsterdam Games, though only some–no shot put, no 1500 m, etc. Even worse, the IOC agreed to ten events, but after the women cancelled their own scheduled competition, the IOC reduced Amsterdam’s women’s athletic schedule back to five and claimed it was only an experiment. After the events, they further eliminated the 800m after reporters inexplicably lied and claimed several women had collapsed. Women running the race did not, and there is video to provide it. But, by then, the IOC had the upper hand, and the FSFI decided to push the IOC for expanding sanctioned Olympic events rather than to recreate their own games again.
The Spartakiads continued for a while, but after World War II, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe decided that the Olympics weren’t too bourgeois for them. The invention of the atomic bomb provided a reason for the USSR to demonstrate world domination through sport rather than conventional warfare. The Soviets and other communist nations joined the Olympics in 1952, and the IOC looked the other way when told that government support by the new set of countries was not “professional.”
Occasionally, Resistance Is Ignored
As the Olympic Movement grew and grew, there was one organization that stayed curiously separate from the encroaching blob that the IOC had become. The international Silent Games had been created in 1924 by Eugène Rubens-Alcais, President of the French Deaf Sports Federation. Unlike the Paralympics, which was created to showcase athletes who were wheelchair-bound (and later amputees), the Silent Games supported athletes who were able-bodied in all but one thing. They couldn’t hear.
Part of the original rationale for the Deaflympics, as they came to be called, was to demonstrate the strength and capabilities of the competitors. It was a contrast to the wisdom of the day that labelled deafness as close to disabling. The competitions were organized with visual cues as substitutes–lights for referee whistles for example–but in other respects, the athletes were fully capable. One woman, reporting on the Melbourne Deaflympics in 2005, noted that the entire city had been transformed to fit a different paradigm. Suddenly, those who couldn’t sign or understanding the signals were the “impaired” ones. Over the past century, 25 Deaflympics have been staged and are now done in separate years, separate cities, but sanctioned by the IOC. The deaf sporting federations has remained separate from the Olympic Movement pyramid, but the Olympic colors remain a permitted part of the Deaflympics logo.
The Paralympics were also created outside the IOC’s purview. From its origin in 1948, the “wheelchair” or “paraplegic” contests were expanded to include amputees and then athletes with other impairments (other than hearing). In 1988, the Olympic Games in Seoul also began to include a Paralympic version.
In the 1960s, the Special Olympics were created in the U.S. under the aegis of the Kennedy administration and Eunice Shriver, Kennedy’s (niece? sister-inlaw?) They highlighted the capabilities of mentally disabled athletes, and, as they moved to staging in non-Olympic cities and years, they were rather quickly pulled underneath the IOC’s wing. Today, the Paralympics is yoked to the Modern Olympics, and the Special Olympics shares governing bodies, though it takes place in different years and cities.
But not every group was treated the same as those with disabilities. If you’re older and LGBTQ, you might recall the fight over the Gay Olympics.
The Battle Over Image
Or perhaps you haven’t heard of the Gay Olympics, the international, multi-event competition launched in 1982 in San Francisco. Dr. Tom Waddell, a Mexico City decathlete, along with a group of other LGBTQ visionaries, designed a set of competitions open to all sexual orientations, genders, and abilities. You didn’t have to fit a qualifying standard–these games were in all ways open to anybody. They did borrow many of the trappings created for the Modern Olympics, from torch relays to the parade of athletes.
These first Games took place at the end of July 1982 (here) in San Francisco. Three weeks before the Gay Olympics were scheduled to start, the USOC — the American arm of the Olympic Movement — sued to prevent the group from using the word Olympic. Some have argued that the IOC has always sued to prevent others from using “their” word–they are notoriously aggressive about anyone using the Olympic rings–but the record of who could things Olympic was broader. Nevertheless, the LGBTQ group lost at the U.S. Supreme Court, which said that the IOC could govern who was now allowed to use the word, even though they let other groups freely do so (Nude Olympics, Police Olympics…)
The Gay Games, like any other giant international sporting competition, are hard to stage and lack the infrastructure and backing that the IOC has built over a century. There is never enough money and plenty of topics to fight over. Yet there have been thirteen sets of competitions staged since 1982. The Gay Games in New York in 1994, the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, included more athletes than the Barcelona Olympics of 1992. While initially Waddell and friends were forced to quickly regroup to create other logos and brands for their Games, at this point, they have returned to using Olympic-like colors and logos.
Gilbert Baker, creator of the rainbow flag, also had his own lawyers, who have successfully sued any who try to trademark the rainbow colors. While the IOC can protect against use of the rings, they can’t protect against anyone using any old color and any old shape. Add purple, and you can change the Paris Paralympics logo to the Paris Gay Games logo.
Late in the 20th century, another international group created a competition called the Math Olympiad. The IOC simply ignored the group, and even let them create an Olympic-colored logo. Clearly, some Olympiads are considered more Olympic than others.
So enjoy the wonderful events and athletes that compete in Paris, starting tomorrow and running for the next two weeks. The Paralympics does stand for excellence and inclusiveness. But keep in mind that inclusiveness is still according to someone’s definition.
Meanwhile, I may be blogging about Italy instead, if I can stop eating gelato long enough to open my tablet.