By William W. Kelly
We might reasonably assume that the transnational Olympic Movement (OM), with jurisdictional tentacles reaching throughout global sport, financed by one of the world’s most profitable brands and proselytizing the most expansive claims about the beneficial roles of sport in human life, would be omnipotent and unassailable. In fact, it has courted controversy, criticism, and resistance throughout its history. To its sharpest critics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a deeply corrupt organization, cynically using a gauzy humanism as a cover for its self-aggrandizement. Even its supporters have been dismayed by its political timidity and slow progress towards institutional transparency and towards more fully realizing its animating vision.
And yet, the arc of historical experience for the Olympic Movement has slowly bent from a more exclusive to a more inclusive vision of sports; what was originally the preserve of the white privileged amateur Euro-American male has become increasingly a much more open field of opportunity. In part, this comes from the persistent demands and agitations of outside forces and interests. Equally important, though, as the OM has become ever larger, richer, and more dominant, it has become ever more exposed to pressures of its own making. The Olympic Movement and its central organ, the IOC, is an example of how the most powerful interests can be made vulnerable to what we might call “rhetorical self-entrapment” and the revenge of unintended consequences.
The OM is vulnerable to its own rhetoric in several ways. Its first exposure is simply the grand public scale and the long timeline of its primary production, the Summer Games. When the scale of investment by the IOC, by the local host city and country, by the broadcast media and commercial sponsors is so massive, when the media exposure is so global, and when the prestige of so many nations is on the line, even an institution with the powers of the IOC can find itself compromised and challenged by unanticipated developments.
It is further vulnerable in its need to define and defend distinctions that often prove elusive and even indefensible. It operates multi-sport competitions on a massive scale, all of which must be plausibly equitable to gain any acceptance. And yet, the Olympic Movement is a history of endless fundamental debates about participant athlete subjectivities.
For instance, the slow increase and now nearly equal participation by female athletes has required a deeply problematic effort to identify just what counts as a male-female binary in sports competition. The IOC began sex-testing in the 1960s, but its every attempt since then has proven to be unsupportable. Initially, it required demeaning, mandatory on-site anatomical inspections of all female participants, replaced a decade later by chromosome testing, which in turn was superseded by genetic DNA testing in the 1990s, and most recently by endrocrinological PCR testing. None of this has produced any stable measurement of a supposed male-female athlete binary. Trans athletes, admitted to some sports competitions in Rio 2016 and who now are competing in Pais, further undermine any rigid sex binary. There is a strong case to be made that in many sports, sex dichotomy is an unnecessary classification, and other standards (weight classes, testosterone levels) could replace it.
Equally problematic over the decades has been OM efforts to determine the limits of the “natural” sporting body. It aims to ensure fair competition among Olympic bodies in the face of constantly evolving technological and pharmacological interfaces and intrusions that enhance elite sports performance. Seeking the Olympic imperative of “faster, higher, stronger,” elite athletes are always fashioning themselves as cyborgian bio-mechanical entities, and the OM faces a Sisyphean task in adjudicating and justifying its distinctions between a sporting body and its enhancements and equipment.
The dissolving lines between the natural and the artificial bear upon another distinction that challenges OM’s own sport philosophy, that between ability and “disability.” To further its goals of diversity and inclusiveness, it is bringing the Olympics ever closer to the Paralympics, in scheduling and venues and events, and in requiring its sponsors to commit to advertising in both and to equally display the two Games logos. This ever-closer juxtaposition raises questions about whether there really are clear lines between the two categories of athletes. Is the high-tech prosthesis that Paralympic sprinters wear really different from the Nike Vaporfly running shoe that is propelling Olympic marathoners to record times?
Indeed, there are even voices within the OM that recognize the powerful demonstration effect of elite Paralympic athletes that their “disability” should be seen not as special needs but as special talent and character. As Mike Featherstone and Tomoko Tamari wrote in 2019:
“The Olympics and elite sports generally valorize heroic performances and a willingness to endure pain for higher achievement. The Paralympics take this further. It goes beyond heroic performances to offer the commitment and dedication to a way of life that in many ways exemplifies the heroic life.”
In such ways, the Olympic Movement is changing, as often as not by the virtues it claims for the Games as by the vices brought to light by critics. The OM is susceptible to and not immune from challenge in its own terms. The Olympic Games in fact can be a vehicle (cumbersome, reluctant, to be sure) for the extension of human rights to protect a variety of social categories and statuses to ensure equal participation and fair treatment.
William W. Kelly is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and the Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies at Yale University.