The Geopolitical Games: Paris 2024

Paris, Politics and Pariahs

The XXXIII Olympiad took place during a tense geopolitical period at the very heart of Europe. After decades of relative peace and stability, national rivalries that might normally play out in purpose-built stadiums have been reignited, with devastating consequences in Ukraine. Russian and Belarusian delegations were banned from participating in the 2024’s Summer Games, and their countries were absent from the Paris Olympic Village and the medals table.

The interplay between international sports competitions and state power is nothing new. Sport at this level embodies three basic political functions. First, a strong performance fosters domestic pride and national unity. Second, states use large sports events to project power and to outperform strategic rivals. Third, participation offers the opportunity to channel those rivalries and to foster a sense of belonging to a wider group, namely that of worthy competitors. 

The Olympic adage that participation is more important than winning has always been taken with a pinch of salt. However, as Russia and Belarus might come to realize, being banned from participating is perhaps worse than losing. And yet, as we shall see, a loss for the wider international community may also be at stake.

Setting the Rules of the Game

The Commonwealth Games, known as the British Empire Games until 1950, continue today as a symbolic legacy of British colonialism. Every four years, athletes from former imperial territories gather to put their skills to test. Originally envisioned as an ‘imperial sports festival’ in 1891, five years before the first of the modern Olympics, the Games stand as the most significant British attempt to forge imperial cultural unity through sport.¹

The logic was to create a wider sense of belonging to the Empire, even if cultural and hierarchical differences between Great Britain and its colonies were abundant. In a way, it was paradoxical: pitting colonies and colonizer against each other channelled animosities that might otherwise be manifested through rebellion. South African boxers could spectacularly defeat Englishmen at the tournament, or Australian rowers might end up in second place after their Canadian counterparts. The key was a controlled environment formed by imperial power. After all, London still defined the rules of the game, sending sporting manuals to all corners of the Empire. Nonetheless, on the playing field, colonizer and subjects were equals.

This fostering of group cohesion was already at work in the original Ancient Greek games, in which sporting competitions brought together representatives of a larger Greek civilization. The Panhellenic Games, which consisted of the famous Olympics and three other events, were open to all city states. Athens and Sparta, despite their political differences, sent their athletes to compete. Although arch-rivals, they recognized themselves as part of something bigger: they were members of the club of the civilized world, worthy competitors, unlike the Persians or other barbarians. 

Separated by millennia, these two cases illustrate the function sport continues to serve in politics: fostering unity, projecting power and offering a space in which to play out and channel grievances. Yet these strategic assets were accessible only to those who belonged to a particular community. This distinction between insiders and outsiders would become more important after 1945 as the sporting community widened its membership. However, before sports arenas could once more ease international tensions, they first served interwar totalitarian regimes as tools of national unity.

Nazi Propaganda and Soviet Sports Policy

The International Olympic Committee had decided in 1931 that Germany, then the Weimar Republic, would host the 1936 Summer Games. It was a diplomatic move to welcome Germany, condemned as the aggressor of World War I, back into the international community. But events decided otherwise.

When the Nazi Party rose to power in January 1933, the Olympic gift ended up in the hands of Adolf Hitler. The Führer immediately seized on the Games’ potential for promoting his vision of German supremacy. In the Third Reich, the 1936 Games initiated significant symbolic innovations: they were the first to be broadcast on television and to include the Olympic torch relay, both now inherent features of the Olympiad. Impressive stadiums (also a feature of modern Olympic bids), adorned with Nazi symbols, were purpose-built for the event. All of this was intended to foster feelings of pride, superiority and unity among the German people.Despite talk of a boycott and a failed attempt to organize a rival People’s Olympiad, the Berlin Games went ahead as planned, with the participation of all delegations.² The documentary film written, directed and produced by Leni Riefenstahl remains a preeminent propagandist movie.

What began as a plan to bring Germany back into the fold backfired spectacularly.³ The Third Reich emerged from the Games stronger, more united and more convinced of its exceptional status than before. A member of the club? Yes. Superior to its peers? Definitely.

To be sure, the Nazi regime’s success in fostering national unity through the Olympics was down to its tight control over sports policy rather than to the feats of German athletes in the competition. Nevertheless, hosting the event boosted its hold over society. 

But the Third Reich wasn’t alone in using sports to its advantage. As a perceptive 1936 article in Foreign Affairs put it, the interbellum was the period when ‘Dictators Discover Sport’.⁴ Stalin’s USSR was another authoritarian state building a state-driven sports system.

Stalin himself was pivotal in pioneering the concept of state-organized and controlled sports. In 1930, he signed a decree establishing physical education programmes across the Soviet Union. This effectively nationalized athletics, dissolved private sports clubs and placed all sporting activity under state control. This highly centralized and military-style management of sport laid the groundwork for later recourse to it as a key geopolitical tool during the Cold War.

Cold War Rifts and Channels

The Olympics rapidly became one more stage on which American-Soviet rivalry could be played out. When the teams of the two superpowers competed against each other, the spectacle took on huge significance, becoming another notch in the Cold War tally. At the 1972 Munich Summer Games, by ending their rival’s 63-match winning streak, the Soviets humiliated the Americans in the basketball finals. A few years later, in the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games ice hockey finals, it was the Soviets’ turn to be defeated by the US in their national sport. Known as the ‘Miracle on Ice’, the match saw the American hosts prevail over the five-time champions.

These confrontations demonstrate how sports competitions serve to project state power. During the Cold War there was a perceived equivalence between winning in the stadium and winning in a battle. National pride was affected by results, with the victorious sides celebrating their athletes’ achievements as a way of beating their geopolitical rivals.

This political animosity played out through sports between nations within the blocs too. Events like the Blood in the Water water polo match (Hungary vs USSR) at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games and the Czechoslovak Hockey Riots (Czechoslovakia vs USSR) in the 1969 World Ice Hockey Championship were fuelled respectively by Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956) and in Czechoslovakia (1968). While the water polo match ended in a headwound for Hungarian player Ervin Zádor and in 38 Hungarian athletes and officials defecting to the US, the Czechoslovak Hockey Riots culminated in public demonstrations and the ransacking of the Soviet Aeroflot office on Wenceslas Square in Prague.⁵ Both countries defeated the USSR in their matches. 

If sports competitions were grounds for state rivalry, they were also fertile soil for the seeds of strategic cooperation. Football played an essential role in West German diplomacy. In July 1955, West Germany's World Cup football champions visited Moscow for a match with the USSR team. It marked the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two states just before Konrad Adenauer’s first official visit  in September 1955.⁶ Subsequently, that state visit secured the release of the last 10,000 German prisoners of war and more than 20,000 civilians from Soviet prisons.⁷

The West German example set the course for the most famous case of sports diplomacy to date: US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 was made possible through sport. ‘Ping-Pong diplomacy’, which defined this early period of Sino-American relations, was a term coined when the American table tennis team visited China in 1971, paving the way for Nixon’s visit, which decisively changed the Cold War dynamics between the US, China and Russia. 

Whether projecting state power or fostering diplomatic rapprochement, these examples demonstrate how sports events enlarged the possibilities of interaction in a hostile world. If the threat of mutually assured destruction instilled constant tension between East and West, confrontations at major sports events served as occasional pressure relievers. But these paths to benign confrontation during the Cold War were open only as long as both sides were considered members of the club. That could and did change.

The United States led the largest boycott in Olympic history following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Deploying its soft power, the US convinced sixty-four other nations not to participate in the 1980 Moscow Olympics in condemnation of the military operations.⁸ As a result of its gradual rapprochement with the US, even China joined the protest.

In response, the USSR boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Games, along with fourteen other countries,⁹ and organized a rival 1984 Friendship Games, which gathered some fifty states into the competition and was intended as a counter-Olympic event. The boycott represented a departure from the traditional political use of sport. Effectively, exclusion from the international community was at stake.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, the bipolar superpower confrontation came to an end both on and off the pitch.

Members Only: The Current State of Play

The twenty-first century reshuffled the international order. For one thing, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia enlarged the international community with newly minted states. For another, the end of superpower rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union changed the geopolitical dynamics; after a brief US unipolar moment in the 1990s, other powers started to flex their muscles. 

This change in the political landscape shaped the ways states began to use sports competitions in their favour. First, newcomers could seek state-recognition through membership of the international sporting associations, keen to show their flag and play their national anthem to the global sporting audience. Second, established members of the community could join the upper echelons of the international community by hosting and organizing sports mega-events. 

Kosovo illustrates the first approach. Following the 1999 Kosovo War, in pursuit of international recognition, the country leveraged the power of sport to achieve its goals. In 2003 the International Table Tennis Federation was the first to grant it full membership. By the time of its 2008 declaration of independence, Kosovo had become a full member of the International Weightlifting Federation and the International Softball Federation, and an associate member of United World Wrestling.¹⁰

Although Kosovo was to become a member of eight other international sporting bodies following its declaration of independence in 2008, a major step towards international recognition came in December 2014 when it gained full membership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). What began with recognition by small sports federations culminated in an avalanche of membership of other organizations – a remarkable achievement after years in limbo following independence from Serbia and the end of the war.¹¹ Although five EU states - Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain - and two permanent members of the UN Security Council - China and Russia - have still not recognized Kosovo’s statehood, the country’s strategy of bringing its flag into the sporting arena as a step towards eventually displaying it in the United Nations has proved successful.

For states whose sovereign status is not in dispute, there is the second approach: moving up the ranks by hosting sports events. In 2006, for the first time since reunification, Germany hosted a FIFA World Cup. The tournament saw an unexpected surge in national pride across the country. Newspapers all over the world reported that Germans were finally waving their national flag without feeling the shame of Germany's Nazi past.¹² The event – referred to in Germany as the Sommermärchen (summer fairy tale) – was marked by an outpouring of national euphoria that had previously been evident in Germany only during reunification in 1990.¹³

Following the 1936 Berlin Games and the 1972 Munich Games, which will be always remembered in the history of sports as tainted by politics, the 2006 FIFA World Cup finally proved to the world that Germany was ‘open to the world and hospitable’.¹⁴

Similarly, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing was staged as a turning point for China’s relations with the world and as a showcase for China’s economic power and technological strengths. The country declared ‘we are back’, in this case as a great power. The timing helped to increase the effectiveness of the message. The Olympics took place just weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, signalling the onset of the Great Financial Crisis that was to challenge the superiority of the Western financial model. 

Russia aimed to copy Beijing’s success with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.  But the event was overshadowed by the Maidan Square revolution in Ukraine and tensions with the West. The Sochi closing ceremony almost coincided with the flight of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Yanukovych and was quickly followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. A noteworthy parallel is evident with the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, held in Beijing as Russian troops were amassed at the Ukrainian border. No sooner had the Games closed than Russia’s president ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  It was as if the Games had held events back. To avoid upsetting his Chinese host Xi, Putin had waited for the sports festival to finish before launching the war. 

While hosting can improve a state’s standing internationally, it can also improve states’ bilateral relations. Qatar, the autocratic oil powerhouse of the Middle East, had been engaged in spats with its neighbours just before it hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The country had been at the centre of a diplomatic blockade led by Saudi Arabia, prompted by its alleged involvement in financing terrorist groups.¹⁵ The World Cup was to become the stage for a symbolic rapprochement between the two Arab states. The Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, donned a Qatari scarf during the opening ceremony, a gesture reciprocated by ​​Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim al-Thani, who was seen wearing a Saudi scarf during the match between Saudi Arabia and Argentina.¹⁶

Sports mega-events have become strategically important for the host cities and states looking to improve their international reputations. In showcasing Paris as a global city, France aimed to reassert its international status. Despite the torrential downpour during the opening ceremony and the intense domestic political turmoil of the recent elections, Paris projected both its beauty and international status to the world. But the International Olympic Committee also deliberately excluded those states deemed unworthy of participation.

Choices and Consequences: The aftermath of Paris 2024

The West cannot effectively banish Russian troops from Ukraine without causing an all-out war in Europe, but it could and did refuse to admit the Russian and Belarusian delegations to the Paris Games. Doing so prevented both states from fostering national unity by winning medals and from projecting state power abroad through positive media coverage. Seeking to circumvent these effects, Russia is organizing an upcoming iteration of the Friendship Games, currently scheduled to take place in 2025. 

However, there is inevitably a trade-off for the state system at large. Russia is already isolated, having been suspended from various organizations, including the Council of Europe and the UN Human Rights Council. Participation in sports competitions could offer an alternative mode of international engagement and provide another channel for diplomatic efforts. The exclusion of Russia and Belarus from the Paris Games effectively closed off that channel to them. 

Despite Russia’s absence, an eerie reproduction of Cold War dynamics played out in Paris as the US and China vied for dominance of the medal count at the Paris Olympics. American athletes raked in a total of 126 medals, while their Chinese counterparts secured 91, leaving the third-placed United Kingdom trailing behind. As the gap in political power between the two superpowers narrows, so does the gap in their sports performance: both nations took home 40 gold medals.

In four years’ time, the Games will be held in Los Angeles, twenty years after Beijing made its comeback. The US will have the eyes of the world on it and the opportunity to project American power to a global audience. The work towards this goal has already begun, with Hollywood superstar and all-American hero Tom Cruise carrying the Olympic flame from the Paris closing ceremony to LA. The next Olympics will no doubt offer another platform for China–US rivalry, so long as they still consider each other worthy members of the same community, and diverging geopolitical and economic interests do not result in a Cold War-style boycott.