Every time I hear an official Chinese voice or a pious sports blazer from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) tell us that the Beijing games are not political, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Why would an undemocratic regime organise a $35bn event—under the slogan "One world. One dream"—if not to reinforce its international prestige and domestic legitimacy?
Alongside its 28 sports, 31 venues, 200-plus national teams and over 10,000 athletes, the 29th modern Olympics is the political event of 2008. And Prospect's short guide is your roadmap through the political twists and cultural turns that await.
Below, you will find Beijing's place in the long history of political Olympics; a sketch of the city's architectural transformation; a guide to some of the sports that we (in Britain) ignore but that are revered by others; a look at the potential political flashpoints; and a guide to following the games on television.
Also online, in Prospect's expanded coverage of the Olympics, you can read a special report on China's critics: author Christian Tyler interviews internationally famous Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, and Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Jimmy Lai writes on his hopes and fears for China; and a supplementary feature on the history of the Olympics, from Athens 1896 to Athens 2004, listing the very best Olympic books, films and websites.
You can discuss all these pieces atFirst Drafts, Prospect's blog.
Making the modern Olympics
The modern Olympic movement has promised a depoliticised universalism: the global games for a global humanity. In reality, it established its cosmopolitan festival on the narrowest of franchises
Between the start of the modern Olympic era in 1896 and the first world war, the games were financially precarious and often held in the shadow of world fairs and commercial exhibitions. Almost all Olympians were white western men of independent means. One can see the subsequent development of the Olympics as a long revolution in which the IOC—founded in June 1894 by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin—has been forced to deliver on its universalist promise. In 1922, the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale staged the first of four women's Olympics, attracting over 20,000 spectators. The IOC then permitted a token expansion of women's sports in 1928 and 1932, although it didn't gain its first female member until 1981. Meanwhile, Europe's workers' sports movements were created by communists and social democrats, who staged three workers' Olympics in the 1920s and 1930s to offer an alternative to the elitism of "bourgeois sport."
Since 1945, the barriers to professional, female and disabled athletes have been largely dismantled, but the western bias of the organisation remains. For decades, the global south has formed a majority of the nations affiliated to the IOC (today, of 205 national olympic committees, around two thirds are from developing nations). Yet Africa, Asia and Latin America, with 80 per cent of the world's population, have 51 of the IOC's 110 members, compared to 59 for Europe, North America and Australasia. Only four summer Olympics have been hosted outside the western, developed world—Tokyo, Mexico City, Seoul and now Beijing—while only one of the four cities left in the running for the 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro, lies in the global south. The winter Olympics have only ever been hosted in Europe, the US and Japan. Reforms such as a formal rotation system between continents and positive discrimination for poor countries have been discussed, but none has yet been put into practice.
The games have often had an overt political dimension. In Antwerp in 1920, the Belgian hosts pointedly did not invite the remnants of the first world war's defeated central powers—Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. Berlin 1936 set a high-water mark for the games as an event hitched to the host's ideological agendas and saw the first calls for boycotts. The cold war ensured that both of these practices became entrenched. At Helsinki, in 1952, separate Olympic villages had to be built for the two blocs. The invasions of Suez and Hungary inspired stay-aways at Melbourne 1956. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the trigger for a US boycott of Moscow 1980, reciprocated by the Soviets and friends at Los Angeles 1984.
Alongside this, the games have sometimes functioned as a "coming-out" party—the seal on successful capitalist industrialisation (Seoul 1988), and/or full readmission into the international community (Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964, Munich 1972). Barcelona added city-wide redevelopment as part of the package in 1992. Beijing 2008 draws on most of this repertoire. But there are other, more violent, precedents: Mexico City protests and repression in 1968; the terrorist attacks at Munich in 1972 and Atlanta in 1996. If you put on a political party, don't be surprised if someone out there wants to gatecrash it.
The rebuilding of Beijing
Governments are central to bidding and hosting, but Olympic Games are awarded to cities, not nations. It is through their architectural transformation that the games leave their greatest mark
In 1936, Berlin's sports complex announced the inauguration of the thousand-year reich. London in 1948 offered a stripped-down picture of postwar austerity. Barcelona's new waterfront took the process of urban boosterism to new heights in 1992. Athens 2004, at $18bn, was the most expensive Olympics ever. Estimates for Beijing vary but middling figures suggest a doubling of this—partly because China is a relatively poor country and has had to build a lot of infrastructure from scratch. Its new airport, designed by Norman Foster, is the world's biggest. Subway capacity is more than doubled, while 7,000 buses will provide transport to and from venues on roads emptied by a temporary space rationing system.
While Seoul, Barcelona and Sydney all saw forced evictions, Beijing is another league—over 1.5m people have been moved. And the games have given another big push to the transformation of the city. Less than 30 years ago, Beijing was entirely low rise; by the end of the year it will have over 300 towers. Beijing's rebuilding is in the key of giganticism. Size is reinforced by flamboyance in the case of the "bird's nest" main stadium—designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron—and the bubbled aquatic centre conceived by London-based Arup. The two are set in the giant Olympic park that extends the old north-south axis of the city running from Tiananmen Square to the Forbidden City. All are dwarfed by Rem Koolhaas's new Chinese state television headquarters—one of the most complex towers ever built.
Yet over it all falls the shadow of social discontent. The authorities struggle to remake their citizenry, tightening control over everything from car use to spitting. The Beijing Organising Committee, headed by ex-mayor of Beijing Liu Qi, has controlled every aspect of preparation for the games with a precision bordering on the paranoid: an attitude reflected in the Chinese population, which is at least as suspicious of what it sees as the anti-Chinese western media as it is of its government.
There is certainly much that could go wrong. Beijing's air is among the worst in the world. Its drinking water is little better—along with refitting three major drinking water plants, China will be pumping up water from the Yangtze river in an effort to provide clean and sufficient water for all. As well as restricting car use, the government has entirely closed down some factories and power stations to provide a modicum of clean air to the games; it is even hoping to control the weather and the worst of the smog by seeding rain clouds. All this, coupled with the possibility of political protests, means the success of the 29th Olympiad is far from assured.
The games other people play
With 28 sports and over 200 countries represented, the Olympics offers a unique lens on other people's sporting preferences. What will the Angolans and the South Koreans be watching?
Sport may bring us together, but it also demonstrates how different we are. Indonesians will be watching a great deal of badminton, which their men excel at, but I doubt it will get much coverage in Cuba or the Dominican Republic, where everyone will be tuned into the baseball tournament, an event registering almost zero television ratings in Africa. While handball is a matter of complete indifference to the British public, in Scandinavia and Germany, where the sport is professionalised, it will attract more interest than the football tournament. Angola will be following the basketball, South Korea the table tennis, Mongolia the wrestling and Bulgaria the weightlifting.
The current roster of official and recognised Olympic sports is the outcome of over a century of experimentation and political struggles within the Olympic movement. From just nine sports in 1896 in Athens (aquatics, athletics, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, tennis, weightlifting and wrestling) there will be 28 at Beijing and there are another dozen trying to get in.
Host cities have often taken the opportunity to showcase local and national games. Asian Olympic Games have featured a number of martial arts, like taekwondo in Seoul. Barcelona gave us pelota, a game sacred to the Basques. After decades of expanding the games, however, the IOC has now decided to try and cap them. Some original demonstration sports, like baseball and judo, have become integrated into the official Olympic programme; others have fallen by the wayside. Rugby, golf, lacrosse, polo and cricket have all appeared and departed, as have real tennis, racquets, hard-surface croquet, tug-of-war and motor boating. Both rugby and cricket are making their cases for reinclusion to the IOC.
Technically, admission is dependent on enough national associations in enough countries playing the game. But it is also a matter of politics and money. Snowboarding, whose global reach is limited but whose following is affluent, is now a winter Olympic sport. In most sports that have remained on the programme, some of the more eccentric versions have been culled. Underwater swimming, the standing high jump, pigeon shooting and pistol duelling will not be on display in Beijing. More's the pity.
The pleasing arcs of feathered projectiles formed the basis of games in China, Greece and Rome, and later resurfaced in early modern Europe as battledore and shuttlecock, but the game we now play is a British codification of the Indian game poona, first imported from the Raj to the Duke of Beaufort's country pile—Badminton House.
Since the 1930s, the game has had a special place in Indonesian society. It was first played by the Chinese community in Medan before spreading to Java and beyond. As well as recreation, tournaments provided the entertainment at fairs and night markets. The Dutch never played at all, meaning the game had no colonial taint for the independence regime.
Unlike many areas of Indonesian life, the sport has proved an area of ethnic harmony, with the game's stars and audiences coming from both the Chinese and Javanese communities. Badminton has also provided the country with its greatest global sporting successes. The Chinese, the Japanese and even a few Brits might be challenging, but nowhere else will so much national pride be riding on the tournaments.
Like football, whose own World Cup dwarfs the significance of the Olympic contests; Olympic baseball lives in the shadow of another tournament—the American professional league, Major League Baseball (MLB), where the world's leading players will be working through the final stretch of the season while the Beijing games go on.
The Olympics provide a platform for the leading lights of amateur baseball, especially the Cubans. Cuban students in the US took the game home in the late 19th century and re-exported it to the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Fidel had a mean curveball in his day and the country follows the national team closely. Cuban players are not allowed to play in the US if they retain their Cuban citizenship, so expect a major performance and maybe a few defections.
If Venezuela makes it through the qualifying rounds we will see some interesting statements out of Caracas, where Hugo Chávez has matched his threats to cut off American oil supplies with pledges to stop the flow of Venezuelan shortstops to the major leagues. Meanwhile, the high standards of the Taiwanese will be perfect for stirring up some difficult diplomatic moments for their hosts.
Ancient carvings tell us the Egyptians liked a bit of swordplay, but the version we have now is Europe's own martial art. Fencing owes little to the slash and hack of medieval warfare, but was born of the new use of the sword by early modern cavalry units.
Habsburg Spain and Renaissance Italy gave us the murderous lunge and the rapier blade; 18th-century France demilitarised the sport with modern facemasks and the blunted foil. The French also formalised the interaction of competitors, turning a bout from a mêlée into a conversation between attacking and defending blades. The Hungarians, drawing on their encounters with the Ottomans, made the sabre their blade of choice. These two nations, along with Italy, remain centres of fencing excellence, joined more recently by Russia and Romania.
Team games in which both sides try to score goals by hitting a ball with a stick can be found in most ancient civilisations—from the mass participation ritual of "gena" in Amharic Ethiopia to the many variants found in Ireland, China and south Asia. Codification of field hockey was a British invention and the game proved enormously popular with the army and public schools, especially the women's game, which has dominated the British public consciousness.
Outside of Britain, it was in south Asia that the locals really took to hockey. At independence there was a good case for arguing that hockey rather than cricket was India's national game. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, Olympic hockey has been dominated by India and Pakistan.
Cricket has long since surpassed hockey as south Asia's leading sport, in part because hockey has for so long all over the world held on to a rigorously policed amateurism and anti-commercialism. The Olympic tournament will get big viewing figures in India, but it is the Australian women and northern European men who will be the favourites.
If your sports culture cannot accept women playing football, what else can be played with the same ball and pitch? Handball was the answer. The game was invented simultaneously in Germany and Scandinavia in the early 20th century, initially as a wholesome game for girls, throwing and passing a standard football on a standard football pitch.
Since then, the region's weather has driven the game indoors. The court and the ball have shrunk and team size has dropped from 11 to seven. The penalty area has changed from a box to an arc and everyone has to keep out. While handball's relentless high-scoring rhythms have found little purchase here, Germany and Denmark have professional men's and women's leagues. In 2008, a staggering 23m people worldwide tuned in to watch the men's world championship final, making it the seventh most-watched global sporting event that year.
The game is now played in over 150 countries, but its heartlands remain in Protestant northern Europe. Handball has a peculiarly intensive collectivity to its play—individual brilliance has a more limited place than in many team games.
Olympic wrestling comes in two forms: Greco-Roman, in which participants may only use their upper bodies, and freestyle, where legs and trips come into the equation. The latter was codified in 19th-century America, drawing on folk wrestling traditions from Ireland and Britain. The former was also an invention, consisting of what 19th-century Europeans thought the Greeks might have been up to. In fact, similar forms of wrestling emerged in the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Persia, and among the Nuba of lower Sudan and the Igbo of the Niger delta.
Indeed, in Iran, where wrestling can trace deep historical roots and was a key component of the early gymnasium cultures of Iranian cities, the sport takes on a special significance.
Opponents of the current Iranian regime will look back to the great champions of the 1960s who brought Olympic glory to the nation but aligned themselves with the liberal opponents of the shah. The theocracy has sought to claim wrestling for its own purposes, offering an ancient Persian nationalist talisman to set against the dominance of football, which has been deemed foreign and salacious.
Reading the games: politics and PR
Lines have been rehearsed and entrances practised, but no one knows how the stories will play out
One of the great pleasures of the games will be watching the Chinese authorities, the official media and the western PR agencies involved (such as New York-based Hill & Knowlton) attempt to keep the chorus of protest off stage. A huge number of edicts, crackdowns and regulations are now in force. Dog owners are required to carry registration papers for their pets, the whole of Beijing is subject to queueing practice and the local government has been distributing cardboard spittoons in an attempt to keep the pavements saliva-free. Known dissidents, street sleepers and temporary shack dwellers are all being moved on, or forcibly detained—in April, Hu Jia, one of China's most vocal activists, was sentenced to three years in prison for "inciting subversion." The security budget of $3.5bn is more than double that of Athens.
When the press do arrive en masse, battle will be engaged as the government, domestic opponents, the international media and a cluster of global NGOs all attempt to shape the stories and the images of the games. A total of 5,600 journalists are expected to receive accreditation. Thousands of bloggers and independent observers will no doubt arrive too, although draconian visa restrictions have sharply reduced the number of foreigners expected at the games. The Chinese government would like the journalists and observers who do make it to stick to the sport. But NGOs are sending out press packs and briefing sheets in the hope the press will get out of town and do some real reporting. Don't expect much from mainstream sports writers, but their mass presence and the authorities' grudging acceptance of a temporary window of relative press freedom will offer a unique view on China.
The opening and closing ceremonies will provide some limited symbolic punctuation to the cacophony of messages. It will be interesting to see who does and doesn't show up. Nicolas Sarkozy, in a reversal of his earlier position, will attend the opening, as will George W Bush and Australia's Kevin Rudd; Angela Merkel will be absent, along with her Polish and Czech counterparts, while plenty of athletes will also be giving them both a miss. London 2012 gets its five minutes during the closing ceremony, when Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson will be forced to endure each other and some urban dance routines.
On your marks, get set, watch
For most of us the Olympics is a television experience, so you might as well get in training
Beijing is seven hours ahead of British summer time, so live broadcasts of early events will appear on our screens in the small hours, and evening events at lunchtime: from approximately 2am to 6pm each day. As a consequence, there are going to be a lot of early starts. (NBC, which paid around $1bn for the US television rights, has been pressuring the Beijing Olympic Committee to shift the times of key finals in swimming, track and field, men's basketball and gymnastics from their evening slots to the morning to allow them to be shown in the US at prime time.) Those of us unable to take on this kind of schedule can relax in the knowledge that early evenings will provide plenty of condensed highlights. Radio 5 will be its usual incessant self and, for the deranged, there will be round-the-clock coverage on the digital radio station BBC Five Live Sports Extra. Eurosport is threatening 24-hour coverage, while those with digital television and the internet will be able to catch up at their leisure.
NBC certainly intends to get its money's worth, showing 1,400 hours of live coverage (compared to the BBC's 300) plus the entire games, at over 2,200 hours, archived online. For the first time, every broadcast will be available in high definition.
Seven events to look out for
1 110m hurdles: China's Lu Xiang won gold in Athens, and the nation's iconic athlete is expected to lead the charge towards the Chinese government's target of 119 medals.
2 Basketball: The American NBA superstars were humbled in Athens by Puerto Rico. Track the rate of US decline as they attempt to reverse this disaster; catch a glimpse of the extraordinary Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.
3 Volleyball: The Chinese love volleyball, and the women's event will be among the hottest tickets in Beijing. The Chinese women's team took gold in Athens and look set to do the same again.
4 Rowing: The IOC has suspended the Iraq Olympic Committee for the Iraqi government's political interference in its affairs. If the Iraqis are readmitted, look out for rowing pair Haider Nawzad and Hamza Hussein.
5 Triathlon: The game's environmental test case. Beijing's "canaries" will have to deal with water pollution when swimming and air pollution when running and cycling.
6 Baseball: Baseball is Taiwan's national game, so expect a volatile event when China takes on the Taiwanese (in the guise of Chinese Taipei) in the group stages on 15th August.
7 Waterpolo: Since the bloody encounter between Hungary and the Soviet Union in 1956, the sport has continued to produce violent encounters with a political edge. Pick of the bunch is the first round game between Serbia and Croatia.
Also online, in Prospect's expanded coverage of the Olympics, you can read a special report on China's critics: author Christian Tyler interviews internationally famous Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, and Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Jimmy Lai writes on his hopes and fears for China; and a supplementary feature on the history of the Olympics, from Athens 1896 to Athens 2004, listing the very best Olympic books, films and websites.
You can discuss all these pieces atFirst Drafts, Prospect's blog.
