An Olympics for the People?
In 1936, Clara Thalmann hitchhiked from Switzerland to Barcelona to participate in the People’s Olympiad as a swimmer. But Thalmann was not representing any country—Thalmann was a Left-Communist who’d been an early member of the Communist Party of Switzerland (before being expelled for opposition to Joseph Stalin) and was going to Barcelona as an affiliate of the Workers’ Swim Club.
Trade unions, workers’ clubs, socialist and communist parties, and other assorted left-wing groups sent the bulk of the 6,000 athletes who registered for the People’s Olympiad. The event was organized by Spain’s new Popular Front government, and was held in opposition to that year’s Olympics in Berlin, which were a celebration of Hitler’s Nazi government. Many of the athletes in Barcelona were Jewish exiles from Germany.
But the day before the People’s Olympiad were scheduled to start, Spain’s military revolted against the leftist government, and the Spanish Civil War prevented the games from ever taking place. Most of the athletes left the country, but some, including Thalmann, stayed. She was inspired by the workers’ revolution taking place in Catalonia, and eventually joined the Durruti Column, a unit of anarchist fighting against Fracno’s forces.
The People’s Olympiad was only one of many attempts to form some kind of alternative the Olympics in the interwar period. There was also the Spartakiad, which was held in 1928 and 1931 by the Red Sport International, which was sort of an athletic branch of the Comintern, and therefore a very Soviet affair. There was also the International Workers Olympiads, sponsored by the socialist trade union movement. They held games in 1925 and 1931—attendance at 1931 games was reported to exceed attendance at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles—before joining with the Red Sport International to host games jointly in 1937.
Both organizations were created in opposition to the “bourgeois” spirit of the Olympics. Athletes came from the working class, not the elites who disproportionally made up the participants at the IOC’s games, and instead of waving national flags, they waved the red flags of socialism.
When I read about events like this, a small part of me finds it inspiring. But they mostly seem like historical oddities, more significant for the fact that they happened at all (or, in the case of the People’s Olympiad, that they almost happened) than for anything that went down at the games themselves. (At the first Workers’ Olympiads, a record was set in the women’s relay, but it was never ratified by the IAAF.) It makes me wonder if there is any possible model for an Olympics that is not tied to the nationalism and colonialism that plagues the current games. For all the talk about the spirit of competition and the beauty of sports, it seems that what people really want out of the Olympics is some way of channeling national pride into a feel-good story of athletic achievement, whether that’s medal counts or an inspiring personal story of an athlete who lives in the same nation-state as you.
On the other hand, it is the official position of this Substack that sports are labor, and so the Olympics at least offer an opportunity to see your nation represented by people who are fundamentally workers, instead of members of the ruling class. But it is still hard to see ourselves in those athletes, not only because they are so elite but because, at least in the United States, there is a real lack of a working class sports culture. According to a Harvard study, only about 25% of American adults play sports, and of those, only about a third play in a competitive team or league. So it’s not just that Olympians are achieving at a higher level than those of us watching—they are doing things that the vast majority of us have no familiarity with at all.
When I think about Thalmann making her way to Barcelona to swim in the People’s Olympiad, I wonder: How good a swimmer was she, really? If she was willing to sneak into a country on the brink of civil war to participate in an international swimming competition, it must have been a pretty big part of her life. Presumably she was the fastest swimmer she knew, or at least in the top five, right? Or she at least liked competitive swimming so much that she didn’t care if she won or lost.
And I wonder how many people today have experience at all akin to that. I certainly don’t, and if statistics are to be trusted, neither do most working-class Americans. People who play sports in this country generally do it for exercise, they generally do it alone or with a small group of close friends and family, and they are generally wealthier than those who don’t. There is not an open, egalitarian spirit of competition, excepting a few niche subcultures like CrossFit and skateboarding and, I guess, golf.
But that is precisely what would be necessary to make something like a “workers’ Olympics” possible. Without that, it’s no wonder that the only way to identify with an athlete is what flag they wave.