Olympic history: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra
""‘What inspired the birth of the modern games? And who was them, who was the driving force behind the reemergence?’
‘So there's a simple answer, which is wrong and a complex answer, which is long. The simple answer is Baron de Coubertin, a French Catholic aristocrat, who was the founder and entrepreneur that created the IOC. And his inspiration, if you believe his own very, very unreliable memoirs, and documents, is a child, a childhood obsession with Olympia, and the Olympics that burned all through his life, until he got the opportunity to realize it.
And then there's the real one. So the Olympics disappears from European consciousness, from the fourth fifth century CE, for pretty much 1000 years. Most of the texts in which mentions of it are available, disappear. Who's reading those documents? Nobody's reading Pliny, you know, in the, you know, in 1066, these documents disappear. And Olympia itself is hit by a tsunami in the sixth century CE and disappears under a layer of Mediterranean silt. So even archaeologically, it pretty much disappears. And, during the Renaissance, all of those Greek and Roman works reappear, and suddenly in Europe, people have access to this idea, oh these games that the Olympics. And so you have from about the 17th century onwards, you have in popular culture and literature, people kind of calling stuff the Olympics or Olympian. You find it in Milton's poetry. You find it in Shakespeare.
You have the Dover, Robert Dover’s Olympics, which are basically a kind of rural games of the 17th century being given the Olympics moniker. In the late 18th early 19th century, people have now really absorbed a bit more information about what the ancient Olympics are. And a modern sporting culture is beginning to emerge. And those two things together produce a whole series of attempts to revive or reinterpret the Olympics way before Baron de Coubertin gets to it. So you've got, during the French Revolution, they rewrite the calendar, and they discover, what, we've got to have a leap year in the calendar and a leap day. What should we do with that Leap Day, and it's actually proposed in the French revolutionary parliament in the 1790s, that we should have a Republican Olympics, and they stage a French revolutionary popular Olympic sporting festival in the streets of Paris in the 1790s. It then disappears as the Revolution collapses, and France moves on to invading much of the rest of Europe.
You then have attempts in Sweden, you have attempts in Germany, to, to revive some kind of Olympic sporting festival, but the really important ones are in Greece and in England. And in England, you've got Dr. Penny Brooks, who is a rural GP committed to improving the health and wellbeing of the rural poor by encouraging them in sensible, rational exercise. And part of his strategy in Shropshire is to stage a kind of cross between a drunken rural festival and a kind of faux classical Olympic sporting gym karna. And this is the much Wenlock Olympics, or Olympic festivals which carry on through the 1840s 1850s or arrive, revived later on and are locally a very popular event. You have similar attempts to revive the notion of the Olympics in Greece, in the late 19th century where Greek nationalists are kind of, because Greece as a modern nation state is only created in the 1830s. So it's like, hmm, what is modern Greece, who are we? Maybe we’re like the Greek Olympians, maybe if we restage the Olympics, this is a connection to this deep past. And so you have attempts by basically nationalists to revive the Olympics, as a kind of, almost like a sort of battlefield recreation, recreation, the way people recreate the American Civil War in costume, right. Similar kind of thing.
So all of this is floating around in the 1870s and 1880s. Into this comes Barons de Coubertin. And Baron de Coubertin’s main mission initially, is as a French aristocrat trying to work out like, what is my mission in modern France, you know, what is what is the purpose of life? You know, the aristocracy has been moved to one side here, how do they do it in Britain? How have they managed to kind of stay in charge, what's their secret? And he works, he decides, after a whole series of trips to British institutions and English public schools, that of course, it's sport. It's the sporting culture of England's public schools and universities that are training this morally and mentally and physically powerful ruling class, and he wants some of that in France. And he becomes a very, very enthusiastic promoter, and organizer of amateur sports and sports culture through the 1880s but he's not an Olympian. And then he puts an advert in the press as people used to do in those days saying, I am seeking a correspondent in England to exchange letters on the meaning of sport in the modern era. And Dr. Penny Brooks writes to him and says, Baron, come to Much Wenlock. Let me show you how we're doing it. And de Coubertin goes to Much Wenlock. And we don't know all of the details, but they put on a fantastic you know, sort of faux Olympic rural festival.
And at this point, Penny Brooks introduces to Coubertin his whole notion of Olympic revival because he's been trying that in England with other people and it's not been working. And Coubertin goes away, and suddenly out of nowhere, and with only one reference in his entire life to Dr. Penny Brooks, he's suddenly a convinced Olympian. And in 1892, he stages a conference at the Sorbonne where he first announces the call for a modern Olympic Games. And de Coubertin’s genius is to bring together a whole bunch of ideas and people that had not been fused before, pined for the Olympian revival movement to actually make it happen. And at the core, at the core of it, is his notion. It's almost a kind of modern cult of the Neo Hellenic athletic gentlemen, that is what the Olympics is about. It is, as he said, himself, a celebration of manly virtue. You know, this is what the, this is the peak of what sport can deliver in the modern world is the cultured sporting gentlemen of the English public school, or the American blueblood, Ivy League universities...
It's a cult of, you know, masculines sporting virtue. And as Baron de Coubertin said, you know, the Olympics should be a display of manly virtue, for which the reward is the polite applause of women. So that's how most of the IOC, most of upper class sporting culture is thinking about women and women's sports in this era. And so there are virtually no women, there are no women participants in 1896, there are in 1900, but it's only a fluke, because it's really the French Republican games, and 1904, 1908, 1912, you've got a few women's swimmers, you've got a few women archers, no athletics, no gymnastics, basically, very, very few women. And this changes after the First World War.'"
How the 1964 Tokyo Olympics redefined Japan - HistoryExtra
"'First and foremost, the Americans in 1945, had to be historians. Because in Japan, you've got a country where after 1868, when you have a modernizing group of people coming to power, the old shogunate done away with, they have what looks like a really successful modernizing project. You know, you have democracy of a certain kind, you have industry, you have advancements in science and culture, Japan looks like a really promising country really up until probably the late 1920s. So the Americans had to ask themselves, why is it than a modernizing project that seemed to be going well, and was going along vaguely, actually not vaguely, quite specifically, Western lines, which is, you know, good for the American view of the world? Why does it go wrong? Why does it go this badly wrong? And on that basis, how do we then use the occupation of Japan to to put the country on tracks, you know, which we would approve, and I suppose one of the conclusions they reach is that Japan's modernization in that earlier period had been incomplete, that it was kind of superficial, that all the things I just talked about were true.
Japan acquired all these things, these trappings of modernity, but there was still a sort of feudal mentality going on underneath, particularly in the way that people would be prepared to do what superiors required of them, whether it's your father in a family, you know, your boss at work, or your superior in the armed forces, and how do you uproot that mentality? And so, you know, to the question about whether it's successful or not, there are some unsuccessful elements, because for some of the Americans during the occupation, they wanted a real root and branch reform of Japanese culture, of Japan's outlook, you know, so you can't bow any more. You have to hold hands, they were even promoting kissing, because these sorts of things are felt to be more democratic. They put men and women on more of an equal footing. That level of cultural overhaul you can't really successfully achieve it turns out, but in other ways, I think they did.
They did succeed remarkably, we sometimes think about it in terms of 3 Ds. So demilitarization, got rid of Japan's armed forces, completely successful. Democratization, trying to persuade the Japanese that democracy is more than elections every few years, that you have to have a sort of civic responsibility. That I think was was partially successful. Women get the vote for the first time. Lots of left wing parties that would have been criminalized in previous years in Japan do rather well, at least early on. So on those sorts of measures, it seems to do okay, and trying to Decentralize power. That's the other D, the idea that you had these hugely powerful conglomerates, who controlled lots of Japan's wealth, or were in cahoots with the government. So trying to disband those, people would have heard of Mitsubishi, for example. So in trying to piece apart these big conglomerates, known as Zaibatsu.
So, in some ways, I think that most of that was quite successful. But in the end, of course, what happens, your listeners will be well aware, in the late 40s and early 50s, communism becomes the big Boogeyman. And so whereas some of the some of the people that go out from the United States to Japan to run the occupation, very young, idealistic people wanting to really make this, remake the country in the image of New Deal America. In the end, they get overruled by people who say we can't have Japan as a kind of socialist basket case. It needs to be reliably middle of the road conservative, it needs to be friendly towards capitalism, it needs to be very hostile towards communism'"
The rise of the Paralympics - HistoryExtra
"'People with disabilities have been competing in the Olympics since 1904. There was a USA gymnast called George Eyser, who actually won six medals in 1904 in gymnastics with a wooden leg. Pistorius wasn't the first time that an athlete competed in both games. I mean, the first time that happened, was actually Neroli Fairhall from New Zealand, who competed in archery. Now they were in separate years, so she competed in the Olympics in 84, and the Paralympics in 80 and 88. Then Paola Fantato from Italy, also an archer. She competed in both the Olympics and the Paralympics in 1996 in Atlanta, and there's a number of people who've done it since. I think the reason Pistorius got so much media coverage is obviously because of the blades and the arguments around the danger to other athletes and the advantage he was supposedly gaining etc. which many scientists have actually disproved since then, but moving forwards you know, well, I mean, Natalia Partyka, the Polish table tennis players missing one arm from the elbow down, she's played every Olympic and Paralympic Games since Beijing 2008. She's in Tokyo at the moment and I'm sure will play in the Paralympics as well'"
