In the late 19th century, a French aristocrat came up with the idea of reviving the sporting contests that took place at Olympia in ancient Greece, and so the modern Olympics were born. The games have gone on to become one of the greatest spectacles on earth, but have never been free of controversy.
Our guest in this episode of the podcast is Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University, Oregon (and avowed sports fan), who has spent years investigating the impact of the Olympics on athletes, communities and host cities. Jules tells us, ‘Olympians to show their stuff on the global stage and for us to all stand in admiration. But I wrote What Are the Olympics For? to be a book for the critical, thinking sports fan who cares about sports or is interested in the Olympics, but really wants to see what’s going on behind the scenes and understand the full complexity of the Olympics. So in the book, I try to celebrate athletes while at the same time critiquing those who make it more difficult for them to succeed.’
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Watch the podcast on YouTube here:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Jules Boykoff is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. His writing on the connection between politics and sport have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times and New Left Review. He is also a former professional soccer player who represented the US U-23 men’s national team in international competition. Follow him on Twitter: @JulesBoykoff
What Are the Olympics For? is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:31 – When did the Olympics first make an impression on you, and what was that like?
3:08 – What is the contrast between that 8 or 9-year-old you being excited by the Winter Olympics in 1980 and the you who’s heading off to Paris?
5:02 – Why does the question of what the Olympics are for matter?
6:54 – How important is it to understand the nature of the IOC?
12:53 – Has politics always been part of sport and the Olympics?
16:18 – Does the Olympics bring genuine, long-lasting benefits for the wider community in the host cities?
19:25 – Would we be going too far to say that the Olympics need cities more than cities need the Olympics?
21:14 – Are things happening that make you feel positive about the possibility of change?
23:59 – Are there ever moments when you just think pulling it off just cannot be done without downsides?
26:44 – Do you see the athletes as being absolutely key to positive changes?
29:29 – What is your favorite piece of Olympic history or trivia or lore?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of a new series from BUP that launched last spring: over the next few years What is it for? will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies and other key elements of the contemporary world: from war to philanthropy; nuclear weapons to free speech; conspiracy theories to veganism.
The latest addition to the series is What are the Olympics for? by Jules Boykoff. Jules represented his country as a soccer player in his earlier years and currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon. He has a long-standing interest in the Olympics, as you’ll hear and has published widely on them. He’s interested not just in the sporting achievements, though he undoubtedly has that, but also in the impacts of the Olympics: who really enjoys the much-touted benefits of the games (in terms of health, participation and the economy) and who bears the cost, not just financially but in a host of other ways. He’s also, critically for this series, interested in ways in which the Olympics could be different and really work for the athletes, the fans and the host cities.
I spoke to Jules just before he left the US for the 2024 Paris games. And I began by remarking that I knew that sport had been a really important part of his life from way back, and I wondered what age he was when the Olympics first made an impression on him, and what that was like:
Jules Boykoff: Well George, I grew up in Wisconsin in the United States, and I was fed a steady diet of Winter Olympics coverage in part because a lot of the athletes that made the Winter Olympics for the United States came from Wisconsin, whether in hockey or speed skating. I have vivid memories of cheering on Eric Heiden as he went for gold in the 1980 Olympics and achieved gold. He went to my high school, Eric Heiden did, Madison West High School—give it a shout out there in Wisconsin. My mother knitted for me this beautiful rainbow cap that was sort of Eric Heiden’s signature, and so that really sucked me into following the Olympics. I’ve followed them really ever since. So, about age 9 or 10 is when I got involved and have been following the Olympics and watching them ever since that time.
GM: And did you have a sense even back then that they were a really big deal? It wasn’t just another sporting tournament, another competition, there was something really special about the Olympics in the sporting calendar?
JB: Absolutely. I mean, this was fed to me by my parents. We would sit around the television and watch together with my siblings. The Olympics were a really big deal, the Winter Olympics in Wisconsin. It was the pinnacle of athletic success in these sports, and I was well aware of it at that time.
GM: So if we fast forward to today, you’re very shortly setting off for the Paris Olympics. I wondered, can you just give me a contrast between that 8 or 9-year-old you being excited by the Winter Olympics in 1980 and the you who’s heading off to Paris? What kind of frame of mind are you going to Paris in, and what kind of things are animating you in advance of that visit?
JB: Well, a lot has changed, George, since I was 9 or 10 years old and my relationship to the Olympics. One thing that’s remained the same is that I have massive admiration for the athletes that manage to make it to the Olympic Games. I have particular athletes that I’m really excited to cheer on at these Olympics, including Simone Biles, the great US gymnast who I thought was super courageous in the last Olympics in Tokyo by pulling out of competition and showing that it’s okay to make space for your mental health even if that means not competing in the Olympics. I’ll be really interested to see how she does. I’m really excited to see Nikki Hiltz, the non-binary runner who qualified in the 1500. The International Olympic Committee has gone out of its way to exclude trans women athletes. Yet here is Nikki Hiltz, a non-binary trans runner who will be there representing the LGBTQ spectrum. So I’m excited about that.
But you know, what’s changed is I’ve learned a lot about what’s behind the Olympic curtain. Not to be too blunt, George, but it’s not pretty, a lot of what you see behind there. There’s a lot of corruption, a lot of greed, a lot of taking advantage of the host city, a lot of taking advantage of the host city taxpayer. So, you know, I tend to try to do both things at once: cheer for the athletes and also critique the sort of social and political and economic structures that sort of bend the Olympics toward injustice instead of toward justice, which Olympic honchos will often tell us they’re trying to do.
GM: I was about to ask, you know, why? Why does the question of what the Olympics are for matter? You’ve already adumbrated some of the ways in which it matters because I guess some people seeing the title of the book might think, well, you know, it’s an elite sporting competition. It’s entertainment. It’s one of the greatest shows on earth. Sure, there are problems with cost overruns. There might be problems with doping and various other things. But, you know, basically the answer to the question is fairly straightforward. You’re here to say, well no, hang on a minute, it’s not quite as straightforward as all that.
JB: Yeah, it really is for these high-level sports and for athletes, Olympians to show their stuff on the global stage and for us to all stand in admiration. But what are the Olympics for? I wrote it in a way to be sort of a book for the critical thinking sports fan who cares about sports or is interested in the Olympics but really wants to see what’s going on behind the scenes and understand the full complexity of the Olympics. So in the book, I try to celebrate athletes while at the same time critiquing those who make it more difficult for athletes to succeed in many ways. I think the prime culprit there has to be the International Olympic Committee, the self-proclaimed supreme authority of the Olympics that is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that really pulls the strings when it comes to the Olympic Games. They’ve made a number of decisions in recent years that have made it more difficult for athletes to thrive in this system. I think the world needs to know about that.
My approach to thinking through the Olympics, George, and I hope it comes through in the book, is that we need not devote ourselves to the death of complexity. We can both hold in one hand the glory of these athletes and appreciate them and boost them, and also at the same time critique those who are making it more difficult for these athletes or for everyday people in the host city. I hope that’s what the book managed to achieve.
GM: So how important is it, Jules, to understand the nature of the IOC, this organization that sits in Lausanne and seems to have a great web that extends out in all sorts of directions, a web of power and money and influence? How much is the nature of that body sort of critical to the whole enterprise?
JB: It’s extraordinarily important, George, to understand the International Olympic Committee. They’ve changed a lot over the years, but today they are an economic behemoth. They bring in almost $8 billion according to the last cycle of the Olympics, and they defray that money out—a lot of it at least—to various sporting bodies around the world. So it does sort of trickle down in some ways to athletes, not as much as athletes want or I think they deserve. But the International Olympic Committee is at the centre of all things Olympics. It really does do us well to slow down and understand how they emerged historically. That’s what I tried to show, that there was this plucky baron, this aristocrat from France named Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was really the guy who helped give birth to the modern Olympics. While he showed a lot of pluck to make it happen, he also created the Olympics on a pretty firm bedrock of sexism, racism, and classism. Unfortunately, those aren’t just vestiges of the 1890s when he started the Olympics. You can see those sort of tentacles of sexism, racism, and classism making their way all the way to the Olympics today.
The International Olympic Committee has a big responsibility when it comes to the Olympics. They sit at the core of this power nexus involving really powerful media entities and involving huge corporate sponsors, the names of which all of our listeners and viewers would know about. Like Alibaba, Panasonic, Visa, the biggest names in corporate culture from around the world. They tend to get a lot of their money from media and corporations. Some nine out of every $10 comes from television broadcasters and corporate sponsors. If you put that in the back of your head when you watch the Olympics, it helps you understand a lot.
Let me just give you one example. You might be wondering why are we watching the Olympics in July and August? These are obviously the hottest months. This can’t be good for the athletes. The answer is money and that nexus of the International Olympic Committee and their media sponsors. NBC, the big television broadcaster from the country that I’m coming to you from, pays a lot of money for the rights to the games. They don’t want the Olympics interfering with their big football schedule in the fall—U.S. American football, I should say. So there’s a real interest in making sure to hold those Olympics in July and August even if it comes at the expense of athlete health because there’s money to be made and they don’t want to interfere with that cash cow known as U.S. American football over here. That’s what I try to do in the book is like scratch at the surface of the Olympics and show that it might seem like it’s one thing on the shimmering surface, but if you scratch and sniff, it’s often quite different.
GM: You mentioned how illuminating it was to go back to its origins. You find that the classism, the racism, the sexism there, which you know, in common with many institutions that began in the 1890s, I guess we’d kind of expect to find those things there. Some institutions managed to evolve better than others. You might think about universities. They were highly elitist and betrayed many of those things. You could argue that they have evolved quite significantly beyond that. Of course, the IOC is not the same as the organization that Baron de Coubertin set up. Nonetheless, what do you think accounts for its difficulties in coming to terms with some of the aspects of the modern world that you criticize it for falling down on?
JB: Yeah, I mean just sticking with the Baron for a moment, I think part of it was his dogged determination to make the Olympics work basically at all costs. He was a tremendously busy man. He was writing, he was traveling. He didn’t ever really evolve on the issue. Let’s just take sexism for example. I mean, let’s be clear. The Baron said that women should not be involved in sport at the Olympics. Instead, if they wanted to participate, they could place the laurels on the heads of the men champions or perhaps produce baby boys that might one day make it to the Olympics.
It’s true, George, that a lot of people had those sort of sexist beliefs in the 1890s, for example. But he clung to those beliefs well into the 1930s, okay? So he was a man of his times, sure, but he was also a sexist of his times. There was a lot of women had gotten the right to vote, let’s just say, in the United States well before the Baron ever would consider letting them participate in the Olympics. I think it’s fair to put that in historical context. But there were plenty of people in the 1930s that thought that what the Baron was saying was cretinous and had no space in the context of sport.
In fact, I guess the positive was though that out of that sexism was born ingenuity, and women held what are called the Women’s Olympics in the 1920s and 30s, demonstrating that they were perfectly capable of engaging in sport without their uterus falling out or other claims that people at the time would make. There was this funny malady that even doctors were saying was real. It was called the bicycle face, George. The idea was if a woman rode a bike, she would all of a sudden, her face would start to deform. Obviously, this was all a way to control women at a time when they were asking for more and more rights. The Olympics just kind of was part of that bigger picture. But I think it’s an important part because the Olympics have long been influential culturally and they set the tone for some of the debates that we have in society. I think we can see that today around the issue of trans inclusion in sport and society as well.
GM: And what you’ve just said, Jules, suggests that contestation has often been part of it. It’s not a modern phenomenon. I think the IOC wants to put out this message of politics having no part in the Olympics or in sport. But in fact, politics, as your book shows, has always been part of sport, hasn’t it? And also this contestation aspect of it, which I guess gives you hope that change is possible.
JB: Absolutely. First, the Olympics are political through and through. There’s no question about it. If they weren’t political, then why do the IOC and local Olympic organizers ask the athletes to march into the opening ceremonies by country, thereby inflaming political nationalism? Hey, we could organize it by all the pole vaulters walking together. Now that would be interesting international solidarity being shown there. But that’s never going to happen because it works much better to get people to think in terms of political nationalism. The International Olympic Committee likes to say that they are apolitical, but anybody who really looks seriously at that will tell you that that’s pretty much a joke. They’ve evolved their thinking a little bit. They now say that they’re politically neutral, but it’s essentially the same thing.
Contestation, either from athletes or from groups outside of the athletes, has been a big theme of Olympic history. Just to give one example that people might not know about, the 1906 Olympics in Athens, there was this athlete from Ireland. His name was Peter O’Connor, and he was forced to compete for Great Britain at those Olympics because Ireland did not have a National Olympic Committee. Peter O’Connor was an ardent Irish nationalist. So the thought of competing for Great Britain, even though it was ruled by Westminster at the time, was pretty execrable to him. So he won a medal, and as the flag, the great Union Jack, was hoisted up the flagpole, he ran over to the flagpole, shimmied up the thing, yanked down the Union Jack, held up an Erin go Bragh (Ireland forever) flag while his two Irish buddies stood guard at the bottom of the flagpole so the Greek police could not get there. So 1906, George, the Olympics have long been a pedestal for athletes to act out their political beliefs.
But it’s not just athletes, it’s also groups that see the Olympics rolling like a juggernaut into their town and they realize, wow, the Olympics are going to affect the issues that I work on, whether it’s housing and inequality in my society or whether it’s policing and the intensification of policing in my city. All of these issues are affected deeply by the Olympic Games. So sometimes these activists that were working on other issues start working on the Olympics issue. And then more recently, there’s actually been the emergence of a transnational anti-Olympics movement that critiques the Olympics for being too high of costs, militarizing public space, displacing local poor and unhoused people, engaging in greenwashing, and all manner of corruption. They’re trying to build a movement that travels around the world to contest some of these things with the Olympics. So you really can’t talk about the Olympics without talking about athletic contestation, but you certainly also need to talk about political contestation if you want to understand the full deal.
GM: Yeah, because for quite a long time the Olympics were touted as bringing benefits that were lasting to the communities which hosted them in terms of economics and social benefits and sporting benefits and infrastructural benefits. I think that the gilt has come off that image, hasn’t it? I think there’s a lot more scepticism, to put it mildly, about whether the Olympics actually bring genuine, long-lasting benefits for the wider community.
JB: Absolutely. Let’s just take the London 2012 Summer Olympics, which a lot of Olympic mavens view as a relatively successful Olympics. If you look at some of the promises that were made before those games and the follow-through, there’s still a massive gap. Before those Olympics in 2012, you had boosters of those games saying that building the Olympic village where the athletes stay during the games would create new housing, new social housing for people who aren’t necessarily rich people in London. Well, 30,000 units they were promising. How did that work out? Well, only a fraction of those units ended up going to working-class folks in the city.
London organizers also said that if we get to host the Olympics, it’s going to boost the rates of participation in sport from our youth. Did that work out? Well, not according to The Lancet, which did a study afterwards and found that no, there was no uptick in the activities of youth engaging in sports in the wake of the London Olympics. In fact, a national audit in Britain found that actually the participation went down over time, which is kind of amazing to think.
So I think the bottom line is that when Olympic leaders and people from the International Olympic Committee roll into your town and make all these grand promises about what the Olympics will manage to do, it would do you well, if you live in one of these prospective host cities, to approach it with a bit of healthy skepticism.
Last example I would say, just outside of London so we don’t just think it’s a London thing, it’s an Olympics thing. I lived in Rio de Janeiro as a Fulbright research fellow in 2015 and ’16. One of the big promises that Olympic organizers made there was that they were going to clean up this one waterway called Guanabara Bay, where a lot of people recreate and fish and where they were going to hold Olympic competitions. The promise was that they were going to filtrate some 80% of the water that flowed into the bay, 80% before the Olympics started. Well, by the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics, it was more like 25 or 30%.
So they did not follow through on their promise. This was really painful to a lot of people, everyday people who I would speak with in Rio, who were actually pretty excited at that prospect of having a clean Guanabara Bay. They were extraordinarily disappointed that it never happened. Of course, once the Olympics moved on, the incentive moves on with it, and the bay just never got cleaned up as they wanted it to. So yes, I think the Olympics have a pretty shoddy track record when it comes to following through on some of these big promises. That’s maybe where the pressure comes from activists and from locals to make sure that these things happen, but it’s a difficult road to hoe.
GM: We’re talking on the day when the mayor of Paris is taking to the Seine to prove that the waters are safe to swim in, which is quite an event. I wonder, Jules, would we be going too far to say that the Olympics need cities more than cities need the Olympics? Are we getting close to that position? Because that’s a position we’ve reached with the Commonwealth Games where no one actually wants to host it. Obviously, the economics are slightly different there. It’s a much smaller scale thing. But it struck me that with the cost overruns having reached the magnitude of many billions of dollars, we might see a similar situation with the Olympics.
JB: Yeah, I think you phrased it exactly right. That’s because over time, we have definitely seen that the Olympics tend to bring out the best in athletes, but they tend to bring out the worst in host cities. I think that’s sort of a corollary to what you’re talking about there. Because there’s now a pretty established track record of this happening in city after city, it’s more difficult for the International Olympic Committee to get bids from prospective cities to host these things. I mean, it’s been fascinating for me to see over the last 15 years of writing about the Olympics how much the public discourse has changed.
It’s become much more critical. People still love their athletes, but in general, the media coverage and the academic work around the Olympics has gotten much more critical over time just based on the empirical reality that’s out there. So yeah, I think that’s an important backdrop to understanding what we’re going to see this summer in Paris. Mayor Hidalgo getting there in the water, she did promise to do it. She actually did it. Some people promised to get in the water down in Rio de Janeiro, and they never did it. So, credit to Hidalgo for actually making the dip. We’ll have to see how these things unfold in the coming weeks.
GM: Jules, you quote the IOC’s Thomas Bach back in 2014 acknowledging the need for change. Was that just lip service, or are things happening that make you feel positive about the possibility of change?
JB: Well, I have to admit, when I heard Thomas Bach say that way back when, I was optimistic. You had a new president on the scene that was talking about change. It was coming at a period where you had numerous cities that were saying no to the Olympics, really putting the Olympics on their back foot. They needed to change. So I thought they might address some of the issues that you and I have been talking about. Unfortunately, that simply hasn’t really been the case, not in a substantive way.
One of the first things that really jumped out to me was the International Olympic Committee had this long list of 40 recommendations that they really wanted to engage with. One of the first ones they acted on was creating an Olympic television channel. Well, I can tell you from covering these issues, that wasn’t one that people were jumping up and down clamoring about and critiquing the Olympics for—not enough good TV owned by the International Olympic Committee. But yet that was the first thing that they really moved on with a lot of verve and vim. So that jumped out to me.
After that, I noticed over time that a lot of the changes that Thomas Bach and members of the International Olympic Committee were making were actually pretty cosmetic. They were recommendations more than actual reforms. Therefore, you’ve seen really not that great a change in the way the Olympics are run. Paris 2024 promised that it was going to be a different Olympics. It was going to avoid all these pitfalls of overspending, police militarization, greenwashing, and so on. But as the Olympics are on the horizon, they’ve actually conformed to a number of those trends. Cost overruns are at about 115%, and they will only go up over time.
There’s been a lot of militarization of policing to get ready for those Olympics. They put AI-powered video surveillance into effect, becoming the first nation inside of the European Union to do so, much to the stress of many civil libertarians in France that are very concerned about this. There will be a horde of police on hand in part because the organizers in France decided to try something different with their opening ceremony, having it float on boats down the Seine instead of just in a stadium. While this might be a beautiful aesthetic spectacle, it’s also a massive security risk.
Going into these Olympics, George, I’m going to say it—I know I’m a political scientist, so I’m sort of primed to think these ways—but I would say these are the most politically charged Olympics that we’ve seen in decades. I’m very eager to see what happens as we move toward Paris 2024.
GM: One possible conclusion is that the Olympics are just an impossibility. It’s impossible to arrange games on this scale without the sort of corruption of big money and ensuring social justice all the way through and that athletes are treated fairly. It might just not be possible. Are there ever moments when you just think pulling it off just cannot be done without downsides?
JB: Scale is really the issue. So it’s important that you mentioned scale, George. This is a massive event. I mean, this is the biggest, most complex sporting infrastructure for a single event around. The problem is that it’s also the International Olympic Committee overseeing it. It’s one of the most least accountable sport organizations in the world. The specter of climate change is really changing the sporting world. The Olympics have been pretty slow to adapt on that front.
For scholars who follow sustainability and sport, they’re very concerned at the scale of the Olympics and wonder out loud now, is it even possible to make a sustainable game where you have all these people—the athletes, of course, the coaches, the staff, the journalists, the tourists, the fans—that are flying from all manner of places to attend this event? Is it even possible to be sustainable? Most people that look at this question seriously say no, it’s just not. We need to change the way we think about these events, either making them smaller and regional, like regional Olympics instead, where if you’d like to attend, you have to be within train range to get there, not flying, and that kind of thing.
France is holding the surfing competition in Tahiti this year, which is hard to say as a green measure. Setting aside the carbon bomb in the form of travel miles—9735 miles between Tahiti and Paris where the people will have to travel from to go to participate. Plus, George, this is painful to tell you, but when they were getting ready to create this optional viewing tower so that the broadcasters could get the optimal takes on the surfing competition, the barge that flowed into Teahupo’o, where the surfing competition will be, ground up a delicate coral reef while locals were sitting there watching and shrieking in agony.
How is this sustainable? Clearly, that’s just like a massive own goal fail. But the fact that we rack up these huge carbon miles to attend these events really raises the issue of can the Olympics be sustainable in the modern era? Most people, like I say, that are looking at this say, unfortunately, no. Change has to happen on some level if the International Olympic Committee really does take climate change as seriously as it claims to.
GM: There’s clearly a vast power disparity between the IOC and athletes, individual athletes, even the most famous athletes, even groups of athletes. Do you nonetheless see the athletes as being absolutely key to positive changes? Is that where we have to look in order to think about how the Olympics might be different?
JB: No question about it. One of the main areas of fight back needs to come from athletes. We’re seeing more athletes get ready to unionize. I think this is a positive step toward actually organizing for their interests.
I had some very eye-opening interactions with athletes that were going to the Tokyo Olympics back in 2021. You’ll remember that they were scheduled for 2020 but put off one year because of the coronavirus crisis. At that time, 83% of the population in Japan did not want to host the Olympics because they were under-vaccinated, and they didn’t want all these athletes coming from all over the place. The International Olympic Committee said, you know, everything is going to be safe. There will be what we’re going to call an Olympic bubble, and everyone will not get COVID.
Well, guess what? Not everybody, but 8,000 people did get COVID inside of the Olympic bubble, for starters. Second, at the same time that the International Olympic Committee was saying everybody’s going to be safe, they sent a waiver to athletes that said if you die of coronavirus, you cannot sue the International Olympic Committee or local organizers.
Athletes who got this document were really shook by that. One of them ended up leaking it to me as a document that I shared with the Japanese press. I say all that to say this: there’s a rising tide of athletes being very concerned about athlete well-being, being very concerned about the small piece of the money pie that they get relative to, say, the International Olympic Committee. They’re really the group to watch here. I think moving forward, if the Olympics are going to be reformed—and I really hope that they are—athletes have to play a key role. It’s already working.
Athletes who’ve been standing up for their rights inside of track and field can deserve some of the credit for the fact that, for the first time in the history of the Olympics, world athletics, the governing body that oversees track and field, will be giving $50,000 to gold medal winners. That’s never happened before where they get this kind of payment from world athletics. I think this is a sign of the future that athletes organizing can make a difference, make it more equitable, help them get a bigger piece of the money pie, and hopefully fight back against some of these ingrained downsides that host cities experience when they decide to plunge lots of money and effort into hosting the games.
GM: Jules, I just wanted to finish on something lighter. The book contains really serious critique of the Olympics. It also has some very thoughtful suggestions about how positive change might come about. But one of the great pleasures of the book is appreciating how deeply steeped you are in Olympic history, Olympic lore, even Olympic trivia. I just wondered, can you tell me what your favorite piece of Olympic history or trivia or lore is? Because it’s clearly something that you sort of collect, you amass as you go along. I think for the reader, that’s something that kind of illuminates and lightens this picture.
JB: Oh my gosh, if I had to just pick one. I mean, I do love the Peter O’Connor story that I told before. So anyone who’s interested in that, I would encourage you to do so. But you know, I’ll shimmy forward and create a bookend on the other side because I have enormous respect for athletes who decide to engage in politics on the world stage. 1968 was a key moment when John Carlos and Tommy Smith put their fists up for human rights and racial justice around the world while Peter Norman, the athlete from Australia, stood on the medal stand wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button in solidarity with them. But I’m going to shimmy all the way past that and talk about an interesting incident of athlete activism that I really quite like. That was when Raven Saunders, the U.S. shot putter, won silver at the Tokyo Olympics, and she put her hands above her head in the shape of an X. She said it was meant to represent oppressed people all over the world. I thought, wow, that is, first of all, just a beautiful gesture to be thinking about the entire world in that kind of collective way. Two, it was really courageous because it was against the rules to do that. The International Olympic Committee has a rule against using political actions or protests on the medal stand.
I just think it was really indicative of this rising tide of athletes who care about things beyond their sport. I think that it’s on their shoulders that we will ride to a more glorious and fair Olympics.
GM: Jules Boykoff, thank you very much for talking to us today.
JB: My pleasure, George. Thanks for having me.