The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 18 | Issue 5 | Number 3 | Article ID 5365 | Mar 01, 2020

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Bringing the Circus to Town: An Anatomy of the OlympicMovement

William W. Kelly

Abstract: The Summer Olympic Games is themost watched sports mega-event in the world. Itis also the costliest, the most politicallyprecarious, and the most strangely constructedsports mega-event on the planet. At the 2020Games in Tokyo, athletes and spectators alikewill be focused on the elite bodies in motion, inagonistic contests and aesthetic displays ofexcellence and effort. Behind the scenes,however, is a less apparent but deeply powerfulinstitutional and ideological apparatus—theOlympic Movement—that sets the stage,establishes the rules, and reaps many of thebenefits of this quadrennial spectacle. My essayoffers an anatomy of the Olympic Movement(OM) through the five ways in which it has cometo dominate global sport: through theInternational Olympic Committee as the apex ofa transnational governance structure; throughthe OM management of the Olympic brand asthe most lucrative in global sports; throughOlympism as the OM’s philosophy of universalsports humanism; through OM’s power to defineand defend multiple subjectivities—Olympicsports, Olympic genders, Olympic citizens, andOlympic bodies; and through the ability of theOM to orchestrate the rhythms of global sportthrough Olympic temporal regimes. It wouldappear from these powers that the OM isunassailable and unaccountable, yet the essayconcludes by arguing that the OM is an example(perhaps a rare example) of how powerfulinterests can be made vulnerable to what wecan call “rhetorical self-entrapment” and therevenge of unintended effects.

The Summer Olympic Games and the FIFAWorld Cup for men’s soccer are the mostwatched sports mega-events in the world, andtheir television audiences and other mediaattention dwarf even other mega-events likeTour de France, World Cricket Championships,and Super Bowl. The Olympic Games and theWorld Cup have two features in common: theyboth occur every four years and they are bothrun by vast transnational self-governancestructures, with lofty sporting ideals butopaque, oligarchic procedures, tinged withcorruption. Otherwise, however, they are a veryodd pair.

The Soccer World Cup showcases a single teamsport, which not coincidentally is the mostpopular in the world, played and watched byl i teral ly bi l l ions of enthusiast ic andknowledgeable participants and spectators. Thequadrennial World Cup has a country sponsor(it will be Qatar in 2022), with run-up gamesamong 32 qualifying national teams (totalingsome 850 players), distributed for three weeksacross multiple cities and stadiums.

The Summer Olympic Games, by contrast, ishosted every four years by a single city, not itscountry, and it is the only mega-event in theworld that brings together multiple sports,male and female athletes, and (through theParalympic Games that follow immediately),abled and disabled athletes. The 2020 SummerOlympics will feature 339 separate events in 33different sports, drawing over 11,000 athletesfrom 206 National Olympic Committees packedinto a 17-day schedule. The scale of theseOlympics is just that, Olympian: housing andtransporting tens of thousands of athletes,

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media, and visitors around a single city, themany different venues required, the complexlogistics of 33 different types of sportingcompetitions. The demands of planning andexecuting and financing vastly exceed even thatof FIFA’s World Cup.

And, unlike soccer, the world’s game, whoserules and teams and players are knownintimately by billions of fans, it is equallyremarkable of the Olympic Games that almostall of its 33 sports have very little following inthe world (Slalom canoeing? Madison cycling?Greco-Roman wrestling?). Most of us watching,regular sports fans or not, have little or noknowledge of the sports—the rules, thetechniques, the athletes, the scoring, the stakesinvolved. At best we see them once every fouryears. There may be a certain pleasure inwatching such an unfamiliar diversity oftrained bodies in competitive motion over sucha range of venues from hockey fields toswimming pools to dressage rings to runningtracks and much more. But this is a mostunlikely format to produce the world’s mostwatched sports gathering.

So the Olympic Games are not only compellingfor this array of sports and the 11,000 athleteswho compete. It is even more fascinating tocontemplate just how it is that those whoproduce and broadcast the Olympics canpossibly generate enough knowledge andpassion in billions of potential viewers toactually get us to watch and care and justifythe billions of dollars spent on producing them.Much of the attention is understandablyfocused on Tokyo, its Organizing Committee,and the national government—and theconcerns and controversies generated by thisundertaking to host the Games.

But behind the maneuvering and preparationsin Tokyo lies a far broader Olympic Movement,largely unseen and little appreciated by theSummer Olympics audience, and yet that is theinstitutional and ideological apparatus that sets

the stage, establishes the rules, and reapsmany of the benefits of this quadrennialspectacle.1

It is this Olympic Movement that is the focus ofthis essay, the substance of which is tocharacterize its five key elements. Afteroutlining each of these elements, I conclude byconsidering the effects of such a ramifyingapparatus, seemingly so dominant andunassailable in shaping global sports. In fact,the essay argues that the Olympic Movement’shold on global sport is more tenuous. It is anexample (perhaps a rare example) of howpowerful interests can be made vulnerable towhat we can call “rhetorical self-entrapment”and the revenge of unintended effects.

1. The International Olympic Committee(IOC) as Transnational Governance

Controlling the Olympic Movement (OM) andorchestrating the Games is a transnationalgovernance structure, at the apex of which isthe International Olympic Committee (IOC).The name i s a qua int and decept iveanachronism. The modern Olympics was thebrainchild of a French educator, Baron Pierrede Coubertin, who brought together acommittee of 16 men in 1894 to plan aninternational competition roughly modelled onthe classical Games (MacAloon 2006). But 125years later, from its headquarters in Lausanne,Switzerland, the IOC is a structure of sovereigngovernance on a global scale and density and a

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concentration of claims, powers, and resourcesunmatched in the sports world

It was far from certain in its early days that theIOC would survive let alone grow to suchdominance. The inaugural Games it staged inAthens in 1896 drew 245 male amateurathletes, overseen by 15 members of the IOC.The games that followed (1900 Paris, 1904 St.Louis, and 1908 London) were held inconjunction with and not infrequently lostwithin international expositions. The 1912Games in Stockholm (at which Japan debutedas the first Asian nation) were held on theirown, but the IOC was concerned that hostcities were gaining too much latitude inrunning the Games, picking the sports, andchoreographing the contests, so it moved toassume direct control over all elements of theGames, powers that it was never to relinquish.De Coubertin used his hand-picked committeeto contain the leading international sportsfederations, especially the InternationalAmateur Athletics Federation, and then, in the1920s, his IOC co-opted or strangled severalrival Games, especially the upstart Women’sGames and the Worker Games.2

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of themodern Olympic Movement

Source: IOC

(https://www.olympic.org/)

Meeting of the IOC at the inaugural 1896Athens Olympics (Coubertin is second from

the left).

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

The IOC itself is neither representative nortransparent. It has had only nine presidents inits 125-year history. The president, with fourvice-presidents, controls the executive boardand the 115-member Committee. Committee

members are self-selected and self-perpetuating, and only recently has it

broadened its membership beyond a narrowrange (Chappelet and Bayle 2016). Despite itsname, the IOC is not international governancebecause its constituent units are not nations; it

is not like the United Nations or the WorldBank. Instead, the unit members are NationalOlympic Committees, each of which manages

Olympic-related affairs for usually but notnecessarily a nation-state (like the USA), but

sometimes nation-states with partial andcontentious recognition (such as “Chinese

Taipei” and “Hong Kong, China”), andterritories within nation-states (Guam,

American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, andPuerto Rico have separate National Olympic

Committees, as does Palestine).3 The IOCmakes its own diplomatic distinctions, which

has periodically embroiled it in highlycontentious political struggles.

The IOC—especially its executive board and itsstaff—coordinate the rights and responsibilitiesof six types of subordinate and ancillaryorganizations and institutions:

The IOC authorizes and providesguidelines and some financial support tothe above National Olympic Committees(currently, there are 206 official NOCs).The IOC coord ina tes w i th theinternational sport federations of all ofthe sports represented in the Olympicsand Paralympics; these are governingbodies of individual sports, such as WorldAthletics, the International SwimmingFederation, the International CricketCouncil, etc. Except for major federations

like World Athletics and FIFA, most (73at present) are largely subordinate to thestipulations of the IOC.The IOC also appoints and directs some30 staffed Commissions, charged withadministering and advising some aspectof IOC work, such as the EthicsCommission, the Athletes’ Commission,the Sus ta inab i l i t y and LegacyCommission, etc. There are currently 30such bodies.The Olympic Museum, the InternationalOlympic Academy, the Olympic StudiesCentre, and other cultural/educationali n s t i t u t i o n s a r e o p e r a t e d f o rdisseminating Olympism and runningcultural programs around the world.The two most important judicial adjunctsto IOC sports sovereignty are the Courtof Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and theWorld Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). TheCAS was set up by the IOC in the early1980s, and while its budget is nowseparate from the IOC, the IOC mandatesthat all Olympic-related disputes must goto the CAS for resolution. WADA wasorganized by the IOC as a legalfoundation in 1999, and its Boardmembership is split between IOCappointments and national governmentrepresentatives. It writes and applies theWorld Anti-Doping Code, and, in circularreinforcement, mandates the Court ofArbitration for Sports as the ultimatejurisdiction in deciding all sports doping-related cases (for example, the ongoingcases of massive Russian doping of itsathletes up to the Sochi Winter Olympicshave proceeded through these twoinstitutions).The Host City Organizing Committees forthe ongoing Olympic Games, the entitieswith which the IOC enters into a formal"host city contract" to stage each Games

Thus even among internat iona l andtransnational governmental and non-

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governmental organizations, the IOC incoordinating the Olympic Movement hasextraordinary reach, unusual powers, and adeep history.

New headquarters of the IOC that openedin 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland, adjacentto the villa (at left) that had long housed

its offices.(https://www.admiddleeast.com/ioc-new-hq-to-d

ebut-with-athletics-inspired-design)

2. The Olympic© Brand as Revenue Source

As the IOC grew through the twentieth centuryto consolidate its control over global sportsorganizations and calendars, it was becoming atransnational economic behemoth as well, witha current cash surplus of over USD 1 billion.Using its management of the Summer Gamesas a singular sports mega-event, the IOCdeveloped the Olympics into one of the mostlucrative brands in global sports, perhapssecond only to the corporate Nike brand. Againthis was not inevitable, and in fact its economicpower lagged historically behind its growingpolitical influence.

It was only in the 1960s, through and after theTokyo 1964 Summer Olympics, with newbroadcast and transmission technologies andwith booming television ownership in Europe,North America, and Japan that the IOCrecognized the potential for sizeable broadcast

licensing fees. It was not until 1984, when theLos Angeles Summer Olympics was the first todemonstrate how corporate sponsorship couldbe mobilized to generate a significantly newrevenue stream for the IOC and the host cityalike.

These two revenue streams remain today themost lucrative sources for the IOC (bycomparison, on-site revenues from Gamesattendance themselves yield little). TheOlympics brand has become one of the mostlucrat ive and desirable sponsorshipassociations in all sports, and the IOC jealouslyprotects and aggressively markets what itpresents as the “Olympic Properties.”4

Its Worldwide Olympic Partner Program (TOP)is the top tier of 14 global corporations, each ofwhich pay around USD 100 million to be anofficial sponsor and supplier (six of these areEast Asian-based multinationals and eight areEuro-American-based). In addition, theOrganizing Committee for each Games canrecruit three lower tiers of official Gamessponsors for its own revenue; for 2020, Tokyohas lined up 67 such sponsors. All in all, totalsponsorship and advertising revenue for 2020Games should easily exceed USD 2 billion.

The monopolistic broadcast rights for allOlympic-related broadcasting is even moreprofitable for the IOC. Beginning in 2001, theIOC established its own Olympic BroadcastingServices, to produce and deliver all footagefrom all venues during the Games and tooperate the on-site International BroadcastCenter for all print and digital media). Thismaster feed is distributed to all broadcastorganizations that have purchased televisionand radio rights from the IOC. They are knownas Rights Holder Broadcasters (RHB), presentlynumbering 200, and total media rights willyield the IOC over USD 3 billion for theupcoming Summer Games. Most RHB servesingle countries, and a few control worldregions. Japan rights have been bought by a

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consort ium of NHK and commerc ia lbroadcasters, while the Japanese ad agencyDentsū is RHB for 22 countries in East andSoutheast Asia, subleasing its feed to countrynetworks.

The consequences of this streaming structureare profound. For the duration of the Games,there is a continuous, single, multi-channelmaster feed emanating from OBS to all RHBnetworks, but each of these national networksis then free to edit the master feed to create itsown Olympic broadcasts. In that sense, there isno 2020 Summer Olympics Games but ratherthere are over a hundred national editions ofthe “same” Summer Olympics, a polyglotglocalization of imagery and commentary.

To the occasional spectator, it may seem odd towrite of profits and surpluses, but there is acrucial distinction between the cost burdensand revenue streams for the IOC and theparticular host city for each Games. Theburdens of inflated operating budgets and hugelingering deficits is a common fate of the localhost city, its nation, local sponsors, andtaxpayers. One of the most important clauses inthe IOC host city contract indemnifies the IOCfrom all losses (IOC-TCOCG 2013: 13-14)!

3. Olympism as a Philosophy of UniversalSports Humanism

Many sports like to surround their training andcompetition with pieties about character-building and life lessons—college football herein the US is a prime example—but the OlympicMovement has, far and away, gone the furthestin justifying its sport mission and grounding itsGames in a total philosophy of life. There is nobasketball-ism or kayak-ism, but there is anelaborately articulated Olympism, whose“fundamental principles” appear in the IOCOlympic Charter (2019:11), most succinctly inthe claim that:

"Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting andcombining in a balanced whole the qualities ofbody, will, and mind. Blending sport withculture and education, Olympism seeks tocreate a way of life based on the joy found ineffort, the educational value of good exampleand respect for universal fundamental ethicalprinciples."

Unlike its exponential organizational growthduring the 20th century, Olympism’s ambitionsas a universal sports humanism has been theguiding ethos since Coubertin’s original 1890svision (DaCosta 2006, McFee 2012). He wasaddressing a small, elite population—white,Euro-American males of enough means to playthe amateur sports of the day—but he wasfervent in his belief in the intrinsic power ofsports, properly managed, to foster healthybodies and minds, ethical social relations, andpeace and comity among nations. In theensuing century, the OM has become ever moreexpansive in the ethical imperatives of itssports, even as it consistently falls short ofrealizing them. By the second half of thetwentieth century, the Charter’s Sixth Principleof the Charter proclaimed unequivocally that“the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms setforth in this Olympic Charter shall be securedwithout discrimination of any kind, such asrace, color, sex, sexual orientation, language,religion, political or other opinion, national orsocial origin, property, birth or other status.”The OM mandate has expanded even wider inthe present century, with demands on hostcities to produce Games that are botheconomically and environmentally sustainable.This is a huge social and ethical agenda forsports to bear.

This ideology of Olympism is not only expressedthrough lofty rhetoric but dramatized in symboland ceremony. In the Committee’s very firstyear, 1894, Coubertin coined what became theOlympic motto, Citius, Altus, Fortius (“Faster,Higher, Stronger”), which he introduced at thefirst Olympics in Athens 2 years later. He

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wanted to complement the phrase with a logodesign and several years later produced what isby far the most ubiquitous Olympic symbol, thefive interlocking rings (several interpretationshave been offered for this, one of which is therings represent the five continents, eachdistinctively colored but linked through theOM). Then for the 1912, he fashioned anOlympic flag to better display the five-ring logo.

Olympic Charter, 2019Source: IOC (https://www.olympic.org)

An Olympic flame, presiding over the centralstadium was introduced for the 1928Amsterdam Games, and as part of his grandiosescheme for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitlerpersuaded the IOC to authorize an extension ofthis ritual. A torch was lit by the sun’s rays onMount Olympus, and a relay of “sacredrunners” carrier the torch all the way up toBerlin to light the stadium flame. There was asteady accretion of ceremony. An Olympicanthem was written, athletes took an Olympicoath, an Olympic creed reinforced the motto,medal award ceremonies featured olive branchcrowns, national flags and anthems, and the

medallions themselves, and posters andemblems were designed by the host cityOrganizing Committee to commemorate andsignify each Games. The pageantry becameever more choreographed, with an OpeningCeremony and a Closing Ceremony bookendingeach Games. These are the signature events toshowcase the host city and its nation, evermore elaborate and expensive. Programs inOlympics arts and cultural education runduring the Games (and throughout the year inLausanne and elsewhere).

In sum, there are symbolic redundancies toOlympism to fill every visual nook and auralcranny of the Games (as well as the sponsors’products). Olympism is thus not just thepronouncements of ideals and the display ofassociated symbols and logos, but it isconveyed through the large-scale ritualenactment of ceremonies and programs thatsustain a totalizing ideological force field.

T h i s o f c o u r s e i s R i t u a l 1 0 1 f o r a nanthropologist: take a sanctimonious messageand wrap it in as many media forms and layersas possible to render it edifying, entertaining,and efficacious. But it is also key to thepopularity of the Games as sports as well.Because almost all Olympic sports have onlynarrow audiences, they must be presented asstories and characters and personalities setagainst a tapestry of ceremony and symbolism.The Olympics, then, celebrate sport in ageneralized rather than specific sense, and itsceremonial apparatus becomes integral to this,enfolding the athletes and ennobling thecompetitions.

4. Olympic Subjectivities

At the Opening Ceremony on July 24, the11,000 participating athletes will parade intothe national Olympic stadium in smartly-uniformed formation behind national placardsand flags in an order determined by IOC

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protocols for an extended ceremony ofproclamations, oaths, and garish multi-mediadisplays, organized by the Tokyo OrganizingCommittee, again following IOC guidelines. Thescene of the assembled athletes looks highlychoreographed, which indeed it is, and to theordinary viewer, fully naturalized, which itdecidedly is not. Who are these athletes andhow did they come to be in the formations onour screen?

This is a matter of subjectivity, and along withthe organizational dominance, financial clout,and ideological claims, a fourth key feature ofthe Olympic Movement is its power to definethe subjectivities of the global sports formation.This is manifest in at least four major realms.

Olympic Sports

The sports that appear in the Olympic Gameshave grown in number over its history andthere have been some replacements, althoughthere has been surprisingly little change inrecent decades. For the 2020 Summer Games,baseball/softball returns (after being droppedfrom the 2012 Games) and for the first time,skateboarding, surfing, karate, and sportsclimbing have been added, presumably toenhance the Games’ appeal to youngerviewers.5

The 33 sports at the 2020 Summer GamesSource: Tokyo 2020 Guidebook, Pages 4-5

(https://www2.tokyo2020.org/jp/games/plan/data/tokyo2020-guidebook-en.pdf)

Competition for designation is fierce, and theIOC has set out an exhaustive assessmentprocess by an IOC select committee, whichgrades proposals on 39 criteria in 8 categoriesto determine worthy Olympic sports.6 Sport ishardly an obvious category but rather is highlyarbitrary, contextual, and contingent. The IOChas the power not only to select but also in asubstantive way to shape these sports, andthrough that, to determine what counts asorgan ized compet i t i ve spor t in thecontemporary world. There are many nichesports that lack any Olympic ambitions (and afew major ones, like American football), but formany, Olympic designation is the key topopularity and financial survival. It is thepossibility of IOC stipulation and the allure ofthe Olympic imprimatur that leads so manysporting activities in the world to assume anincreasingly uniform structure of rules,competitive formats, administrative organs,and scheduling.

Olympic Citizens

The OM’s relationship to the modern worldorder of nation-states and nationalism has beenboth complex and contentious from the start.Coubertin initially saw participating athletes asindividuals, but that changed quickly with thethird Games in 1904, when the IOC definedathlete participation in terms of nationalbelonging rather than as unaffi l iatedindividuals, even while refusing to organize itsown adminis trat ion by nat ion-s taterepresentation. The ambiguity continues to thepresent; as noted above, at Tokyo 2020, 206National Olympic Committees will sendcontingents, usually though not alwayscorresponding to a nation-state, with its flagand anthem.

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One consequence has been that Olympiccitizenship, which is to say, one’s membershipon a NOC team entry, is adjudicated by IOCprotocols, rather than the nation-state (Jansenet al 2018, Schachar 2011), and this has led toan increasing amount of nationality shopping,by athletes and countries. The Olympic Charter(Article 41) requires only that an athlete be anational of the country (NOC) for which he orshe is competing. To compete for a differentNOC, they are supposed to wait three yearsafter last competing for their country of origin,but the IOC will waive this if the athlete haspermission from their original NOC and therelevant athletic federation, which is notinfrequent. Changing Olympic nationalities isnot difficult for a talented athlete. At theGames, IOC Olympic citizenship trumps nation-state citizenship, and nationality becomessomething of a free-floating signifier (Carter2012).

This has been criticized as commercializing andcheapening state citizenship with a flood ofmercenaries. For instance, Great Britain, eagerto do well at its 2012 London Olympics, had 60foreign-born and newly-minted citizen-athletes,whom the British press were quick to dub“Plastic Brits.” We should not be entirelydismissive. Japan, too, has used expeditednaturalization to attract foreign athletes (insoccer and rugby sevens as well as certainOlympic events; Kelly 2013a), and theirprominence and sport success, along withJapanese citizens of international marriages(Schanen 2016) have had a considerabledemonstration effect on prospects for a moremulti-cultural view of Japanese citizenship.

Olympic Genders

There are two Olympic genders, male andfemale.7 Apart from a few exceptions (some protennis , i ce skat ing , and t rack / f ie ldchampionships), the Olympics are highlyunusual not only in being multi-sport but also

for jointly showcasing male and femalesports—actually, male and female versions ofthe same sports, side-by-side, with increasinglyequal exposure and rules and equitablemedaling. (FIFA, by contrast, mounts entirelyseparate and vastly unequally supported Men’sand Women’s World Cups.)

At the outset, there was one Olympic gender,the male (or more precisely, the white Euro-American male amateur). Coubertin and theearly IOC as figures of their era saw sport asthe preserve of the male body. The promotionof women’s participation in the Games has notbeen easy—and took most of the twentiethcentury. Even at the 1964 Tokyo Games, femaleathletes numbered only 678 (13%) of the 5151athletes, but the 2020 Games are on target toreach 50%-50%. Despite this long history ofstruggle, it is fair to say that the OM hasprobably been the single most important factorin the growth of women’s sports participation.The U.S has had Title IX, since the early 1970s.The rest of the world has the Olympics (forJapan, see Kietlinski 2011, Kelly 2013b). Japanhas been one of the countries that recognizedthe prestige value of Olympic excellence earlyon, and has been long aware of the value ofencouraging female elite athletes in a widerange of Olympic sports. Indeed, with fewopportunities for professional sports careers,elite women athletes are often drawn intosports that lead to Olympic recognition. KinueHitomi was the sole female in Japan’s 43-member delegation in 1928, winning the firstOlympic medal by a Japan female athlete, asilver medal in the 800 meters run; by 1964,the 61 female athletes constituted 21% ofJapan’s delegation, and by the 2004 AthensGames, Japanese female athletes outnumberedtheir male counterparts 171–141. The list offemale medalists, the media attention theyreceive in Japan and their subsequent careersare testimony to this positive impact on genderequality.

At the same time, the entry and growing

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importance of female athletes has forced theIOC to step into the fraught issue of just who isa female athlete and who is a male athlete, anda series of high profile cases from the 1950s tothe present year has failed to resolve thequestion (Kerr and Obel 2018, Pieper 2016,Sailors 2016). Rather, in fact, the Olympicgender binary remains a tenuous and contesteddistinction, increasingly implausible andindefensible but for the moment, still sovereignin sorting Olympic sports and their athletes.

Olympic Bodies

Implicit in the search for rules of fair play thatenables the equitable competition at the heartof the Games and its sports is some notion ofthe sporting body—the “natural” body asdistinct from its “unnatural” enhancements, bethey material, technological, surgical,pharmacological, or something else. Decidingwhat may be done to sporting bodies and whatsporting bodies may use has been a continuingquestion whose resolution is constantlychallenged by new material and medicaltechnologies. The IOC has long been at thecenter of such decisions for the full range ofsports, working through the international sportfederations and, more recently, through itsCourt of Arbitration for Sport and World Anti-Doping Agency. It renders decisions abouttherapies and drugs that repair injured bodiesversus those that enhance bodies, aboutequipment and materials that create unfaircompetitive advantage (swim suits, rowingsculls, rifle sights, running shoes, etc.), andabout classifications of bodies that createclasses of competition (as in boxing andwrestling weight levels). Many of the decisionsabout the permitted and banned Olympic bodyare arbitrary: Why are cross-country ski teamsallowed to train with high-tech oxygen tents toexpand oxygen capacity but they are bannedfrom using EPO blood doping to achieve thesame effect of increasing red blood cell count?This distinction is all the more difficult when

we consider that only well-supported nationalteams can afford oxygen tent and other hightech training methods, while EPO blood“doping” is an accepted and necessary hospitaltreatment for patients with chronic highanemia.

With the increasingly close pairing of theOlympics and the Paralympics, the IOC hascreated yet another distinction to determineand defend, that between the Olympic bodyversus the Paralympic body; the mostcelebrated case thus far was that of the SouthAfrican runner (and, subsequently, convictedmurderer) Oscar Pistorius, a double-legamputee who competed in both the Paralympicand Olympic Games. In the 2020 Games,Japanese sprinter Itani Shunsuke will competein the Paralympics, but could also haveattempted to qualify for the Japanese Olympicteam as well. Such possibilities not onlyanimate media commentary and the onlineposts of fans around the world but also fill thepages of such scholarly journals as Sport,Ethics and Philosophy and the Journal of thePhilosophy of Sport!

The 22 sports at the 2020 ParalympicGames

Source: Tokyo 2020 Guidebook, Pages 6-7(https://www2.tokyo2020.org/jp/games/plan/dat

a/tokyo2020-guidebook-en.pdf)

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5. Olympic Time as a Temporal Regime

The Summer Olympics is a periodic blip in theglobal calendar, appearing on our screensevery four years, holding our attention for afew weeks, and then quickly receding from ourdaily concerns. During the run-up, there areoccasional controversies that break through thenews cycle, such as the plagiarism of the initialTokyo Olympics logo and the ruckus over theNational Stadium design, but even these giveus no sense of just how intr icate andcontinuous are the Olympic temporal rhythmsthat schedule not only the Games themselvesbut much of the global sports calendar.

Olympic temporality is composed of extended,overlapping, and interpenetrating cyclescentered on the Games, each of which passesthrough a long, four-stage chronology beforeand after the event itself. First, a Games has apre-history that begins 15 years or so beforethe Opening Ceremony, as a city mobilizesmunicipal support from business interests andresidents, competes with other cities withinthat country to move ahead, and then mounts along bidding campaign with the IOC for“applicant city” status; if successful, it moves to“candidate city” standing, which requirespreparing a detailed Games infrastructure planand budget along strict IOC guidelines anddemonstrating sufficient local political,economic, and civic support. The “host city” isselected among the candidates after multipleIOC site visits.

In this sense, the 2020 Olympics began inJapan back in 2004, when then TokyoMetropolitan Governor Ishihara, mindful ofBeijing’s upcoming 2008 Games and ignoringcivic skepticism and opposition, set the city’ssights on the 2016 Summer Games. He pushedTokyo to applicant city status and then tocandidate city designation, but the city lost toRio in 2009. Undaunted, he immediately beganrevising the bid for 2020, advancing to

candidate city status in 2011, and finally beingsuccessful in 2013. This initiated a secondstage, the ongoing, extended run-up to theGames itself, during which the host city and itscountry undertake massive and intensiveinfrastructure construction, broadcasting andother commercial rights and forms arenegotiated, an aesthetic design thematic of theGames is created and promoted in multiplemedia and products, Olympic educationalprograms are launched, and so on.

IOC Guidelines for Candidate CityApplication

Source: IOC (https://www.olympic.org/)

The Games themselves are thus a brief freneticmoment in this long temporal sequence, aconcentrated burst whose very compressiongives energy and significance to the mega-event. But even as the flame is extinguished, afourth and often longest stage of the Games’

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cycle begins, its aftermath. There arerequirements to be met, in completing andpublishing official and unofficial records of theGames (statistics, reports, documentaries, etc.),but the culminating project is the fashioningand burnishing of public memories of theGames. The OM has adopted “legacy” as itsofficial term for such memory work, but thelong endgame of a Games is a clash ofcompeting accounts, sanctioned andunsanctioned, as the Games are fit into localcontentions and a global Olympics history (e.g., Holt and Ruta 2015). As other papers in thisSpecial Issue have documented, the legacies ofTokyo’s two previous Summer Games—the“phantom” 1940s Games and the 1964Games—are still actively shaping the planningfor and the discourse about the upcomingGames.

Thus, the Games cycle moves from mobilizationand bidding process, to the long preparatoryrun-up, the Games themselves, and the long tailof legacy—each of which is fi l led withcontestation, suspense, and expense. This is ofcourse a generic chronology, and the rhythm,intensity, content, and historical longevity ofeach Games has varied significantly.

An important effect of this extended timeline isto create multiple overlapping Games cyclesthat mutually condition one another. Tokyo’sbid for the 2016 Games and then the 2020Games not only addressed and built upon itsprevious Games but was also shaped byongoing Olympic cycles. Indeed, for the last 20years, East Asian geopolitical rivalries havespurred competitive hosting among Japan,China, and South Korea: Japan watchingBeijing 2008 as it planned 2016 and 2020,South Korea watching both as it prepared the2018 PyeongChang Winter Games, Chinajumping in to host the 2022 Winter Olympics toimmediately follow Japan, and so on. Olympicshosting has become its own geopolitical sport.

All organized sports are built temporally on a

conjunction of cyclical (one play after another,one game after another, one season afteranother, etc.) and linear movements (a fasterrecord time replaces an earlier time, andathletes’ careers, a team’s history, etc.). Whatmarks the OM as distinctive is the powerfulways in which the rhythms of its calendar, fromdetailed protocols of host bidding to legacyplanning and curating, organize the efforts ofcities around the world as well as the operationof some four dozen sports , creat ingsimultaneity and competitive pressures. TheOlympic temporal regime has come to impose astandardizing framework on global sport,within which each city, each Games, and eachsport strives to craft a distinctive appeal.

The standardization of difference is an essentialfeature of globality, and the OM has been oneof the most effective forces in bringing aboutthis condition of contemporary life.

Conclusion: OM governance and rhetoricalself-entrapment

Given the above characterization, it would bereasonable to assume that a transnationalmovement with jurisdictional tentaclesreaching throughout global sport, financed byone of the world’s most profitable brands andproselytizing the most expansive claims aboutthe beneficial roles of sport in human life wouldbe omnipotent and unassailable. In fact, it hascourted controversy, criticism, and resistancethroughout its history. To its sharpest critics(e.g., Hoberman 1986, Lenskyj 2008, Zirin2007), the IOC is a deeply corrupt organization,cynically using a gauzy humanism as a coverfor its self-aggrandizement. Even its supportershave been dismayed by its political timidity andslow progress towards inst i tut ionaltransparency and towards more fully realizingits animating vision (e.g., Kidd 2010).

And yet, the arc of historical experience for the

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Olympic Movement has slowly bent from amore exclusive to a more inclusive vision ofsports; what was originally the preserve of thewhite privileged amateur Euro-American malehas become increasingly a much more openfield of opportunity. In part, this comes fromthe persistent demands and agitations ofoutside forces and interests. Equally important,though, as the OM has become ever larger,richer, and more dominant, it has become evermore exposed to pressures of its own making.The Olympic Movement and its central organ,the IOC, is an example (perhaps a rareexample) of how powerful interests can bemade vulnerable to what we might call“rhetorical self-entrapment” and the revenge ofunintended consequences.

In particular, the OM faces at least threesources of vulnerability. Its first exposure issimply the grand public scale and the longtimeline of its primary production, the SummerGames. When the scale of investment by theIOC, by the local host city and country, by thebroadcast media and commercial sponsors is somassive, when the media exposure is so global,and when the prestige of so many nations is onthe line, even an institution with the powers ofthe IOC can find (and has found) itselfcompromised and challenged by unanticipateddevelopments (and even, we might say, theanticipation of being overtaken by theunanticipated).

A second source of vulnerability and fulcrumfor change lies in the OM need to define anddefend distinctions that can prove elusive andeven indefensible. It operates multi-sportcompetitions on a massive scale, all of whichmust be plausibly equitable to gain anyacceptance. And yet , consider threefundamental debates about participantsubjectivities that have forced continualreconsideration and recalibration by theOlympic Movement.

As noted above, the slow increase and now

nearly equal participation by female athleteshas required a deeply problematic effort toidentify just what counts as a male-femalebinary in sports competition. The IOC begansex-testing in the 1960s, but its every attemptsince then has proven to be unsupportable.Initially, it required demeaning, mandatory on-site anatomical inspections of all femaleparticipants, replaced a decade later bychromosome testing (the Barr body test), whichin turn was superseded by genetic DNA testingin the 1990s. Yet again this failed to documentthe presumed male-female binary, and wasreplaced by endrocrinological PCR testing inthe present century, although deception hasnever been discovered, even as legitimateathletes’ reputations were attacked. The mostrecent controversies (e.g. about runners CasterSemenya and Dutee Chand) center onhypoandrogenism, that is, women whonaturally produce higher levels of testosterone,but scientific opinions remain inconclusiveabout the impact of such levels on competition.Trans-athletes, admitted to some sportscompetitions in Rio 2016 and who will competein Tokyo, further undermine any rigid sexbinary.8 There is a strong case to be made thatin many sports , sex d ichotomy is anunnecessary classification, and other standards(weight classes, testosterone levels) couldreplace it (Kerr and Obel 2018, Krieger et al.2019, Pieper 2016, Sailors 2016).

Equally problematic over the decades has beenOM efforts to determine the limits of the“natural” sporting body. It seeks to insure faircompetition among Olympic bodies in the faceof constantly evolving technological andpharmacological interfaces and intrusions thatenhance elite sports performance (Geeraets2018, Miah 2010, Schantz 2016). To seek theOlympic imperative of “faster, higher,stronger” elite athletes are always fashioningthemselves as cyborgian bio-mechanicalentities (Kelly 2017), and the OM faces aSisyphean task in adjudicating and justifying.

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The dissolving lines between the natural andthe artificial bear upon another distinction thatis testing OM’s own sport philosophy, thatbetween ability and “disability.” In furtheringits goals of diversity and inclusiveness, it isbringing the Olympics ever closer to theParalympics, in scheduling and venues andevents, but also in requiring its sponsors nowto commit to advertising in both and to equallydisplay the two Games logos. This closejuxtaposition raises questions about whetherthere really are clear lines between the twocategories of athletes. Is the high-techprosthesis that Japanese Paralympic sprinterItani Shunsuke wears really different from thenew Nike Vaporfly running shoe that ispropelling Olympic marathoners to recordtimes? Indeed, as with greater integration ofmale/female events, by the logic of theOlympism itself, we can readily conceive of acloser integration of the Olympics/Paralympicswith coordinate events (much as wheel-chairathletes compete side-by-side with otherrunners at the Boston Marathon) and evenevents structured to al low equitablecompetition among all bodies.

Paralympic sprinter Itani Shunsuke intraining.

Credit: Tanaka Chisato, Japan Times

Indeed, there are a few voices within the OMthat recognize the powerful demonstration

effect of Paralympics by elite athletes thatdisability need not be seen as special needs butalso as special talent and character. AsFeatherstone and Tamari (2019:5) put it:

“The Olympics and elite sports generallyvalorize heroic performances and a willingnessto endure pain for higher achievement. TheParalympics takes this further. It goes beyondheroic performances to offer the commitmentand dedication to a way of life that in manyways exemplifies the heroic life. Paralympiccompetition becomes a school for the will andthe life project to demonstrate one’s ability andrise above disability.”

In such ways, the OM is changing, as often asnot by the virtues it claims for the Games as bythe vices brought to light by critics. Holding itaccountable for its own rhetoric has beenamong the most effective strategies ofamelioration. Its Olympic Aid program from1992 (reorganized as Right to Play in 2000) andthe more recent Olympic Refuge initiative seekto align the OM with the Sport for Developmentand Peace movement (Henry and Hwang 2014).Embarrassed by criticism in 2008 that it wascomplicit with China’s crackdown on protestsbefore and during the Beijing Olympics, andangered by Russian heavy-handedness in the2014 Sochi Olympics, the IOC added an explicitanti-discrimination clause for host cities, whichdeemed any form of discrimination with regardto race, religion, politics, or gender to beincompatible with the Olympic Movement. In2016, over 50 LGBTQ athletes participated inthe Rio Olympics. The guidelines will allowmore transgender athletes to compete in thefuture. Indeed, in 2017, the IOC felt compelledby pressure from Human Rights Watch andother leading organizations to strengthen itsHost City Contract even further to insurecompliance. The OM is susceptible to and notimmune from challenge in its own terms. TheOlympic Games in fact can be a vehicle(cumbersome, reluctant, to be sure) for theextension of human rights to protect a variety

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of social categories and statuses to ensureequal participation and fair treatment.

These and other deep controversies reveal thatsports—especially the Olympics—have beenone of the most influential public stages fordramatizing the modern conundrum: for all ofour efforts, strenuous and continuous, toconstruct and codify and police the distinctionsof modern life, we are equally challenging andquest ioning and eroding those verydistinctions.

The Olympic Movement is unique in the worldof global sport and uniquely powerful for itsdistinctive qualities, especially its self-perpetuating political structure and economicmonopoly on the one hand and its pious, publicprofessions of Olympism as a balance of body,will, and mind, as a combination of effort,exertion, and achievement—a contest betweenthe Olympic Brand and the Olympismphilosophy.

And the temporal structure of the Olympics andthe distributed geography of hosting leads eachOlympics to strive for twin goals, bothexemplifying the generic form of an OlympicGames (with its rigid IOC-imposed stipulations)and producing a uniquely memorable andconsequential mega-event--fitting in andstanding out simultaneously.

We can see these twin imperatives in theirnascent form in the 1964 Olympic games and intheir mature form in the recent Olympics,including the upcoming 2020 games. It istempting to characterize and discount the crasscommercialism and the lofty idealism as ahypocritical and disabling contradiction at theheart of the Olympic Movement. But it is alsopossible, and I think more analyticallyproductive, to see this as a dynamic anddramatic entanglement, as a mutualconditioning that has demonstrated itspotential for progressive as well as regressiveoutcomes. The Olympics may be fun to watch,but more va luably , they are good to

scrutinize—and maybe even better to change.

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This article is a part of the Special Issue: Japan’s Olympic Summer Games -- Past andPresent, Part II. See the Table of Contents here (http://www.apjjf.org/2020/5/APJ.html).

William W. Kelly is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor Emeritusof Japanese Studies at Yale University. His most recent book is The Sportsworld of theHanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan(https://www.amazon.com/Sportsworld-Hanshin-Tigers-Professional-Baseball/dp/0520299426/

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/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)(University of California Press, 2018), which appears in Japanesetranslation (by Takasaki Takuya) as Tora to batto: Hanshin Taigāsu no shakai jinruigaku(Daiyamondo sha, 2019).william.kelly@yale.edu (https://apjjf.org/mailto:william.kelly@yale.edu)

Notes1 While the Summer Olympic Games generate world attention and huge financial income (forthe IOC, though seldom the host city), they are but the headline mega event of an increasingroster of global sports gatherings now operated under the auspices of the Olympic Movement.As mentioned above, the Tokyo Summer Paralympics, increasingly paired with the regularOlympic Games, will use the same venues and facilities for 22 sports, beginning two weeksafter the OG Closing Ceremony (avoiding Japan’s mid-month Obon holidays), running fromAugust 25 to September 6. A separate Winter Olympic Games have been held quadrenniallysince 1924, though its scale of participation and audiences are far narrower than the SummerGames. Additionally, the OM has recently initiated the Youth Olympic Games (from 2010) andhas absorbed in its orbit the Special Olympics, and Deaflympics.2 For me, among the most useful general studies of the Olympic Movement are Boykoff 2016,Gold and Gold 2017, Horne and Whannel 2012, Lenskyj and Wagg 2012, Sugden andTomlinson 2012, and Young and Wamsley 2012. For the Paralympics, Brittain and Beacom2018 is a recent compendium. Japan’s Olympic experience is well covered in Hamada 2018,Ishizuka 2018, Ishizuka and Matsubayashi 2018, Niehaus and Seinsch 2007, and Shimizu2004.3 A current list is maintained at https://www.olympic.org/national-olympic-committees4 https://www.olympic.org/olympic-rings/5 For a complete list of discontinued sports,https://www.topendsports.com/events/discontinued/list.htm6 The criteria may be found athttps://stillmed.olympic.org/Documents/Commissions_PDFfiles/Programme_commission/2012-06-12-IOC-evaluation-criteria-for-sports-and-disciplines.docx.pdf7 Which is wrong, of course. Male and female is a sex binary (referring to biological sexdifferences of anatomy or secondary sex characteristics), not a gender binary (which refers topersonal identification with cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity). Unfortunately,the OM continues to conflate and confuse sex and gender. 8 The current IOC guidelines stipulate that female-to-male transgender athletes can competewithout restriction. Male-to-female transgender athletes must document that theirtestosterone level in serum has remained under 10 nanomoles per liter for the previous 12months.