Is sport on the verge of becoming a totalitarianism like any other? This is the thesis defended by the philosopher Christian Godin, through the book he published on the Olympic Games. In The Olympic empire, the author strives to show how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a key element of capitalist globalization and international finance, structured like a multinational in permanent expansion. Unfortunately, according to the philosopher, the humanist image that the institution maintains prevents any serious criticism.
Marianne: Your book is a radical critique of the Olympic Games, the “totalitarian” nature of which you denounce. How are they?
Christian Godin: The Olympics are not totalitarian in themselves, but since they claim to bring together humanity behind a spectacle organized in a despotic manner, and they admit no criticism, they present a totalitarian character.
Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), among others an admirer of Hitlerism, was the one who reestablished the Olympic Games in 1896. How do you explain that he is still honored?
This is a sign that sport has become our totem and our taboo, that it is untouchable. There is talk of debunking the statues of Colbert because of the Code Noir, while hundreds of gymnasiums, stadiums, streets and boulevards are named Pierre de Coubertin whose worldview was marked by eugenics, racism, misogyny and, finally, fascism.
The reference that is sometimes made to the Athens Games of the ancient Greeks is, in your opinion, an usurpation. For what ?
First the sport, of which the Olympic Games are the crowning achievement, appeared in imperial England in the 19th century.e century. It transposes competition and the logic of the capitalist market onto the stadium. The Greeks would never have had the idea of measuring the performance of their athletes. Furthermore, their Games had a religious meaning that the modern Games do not have, even if we continue to use words like “ceremony”.
READ ALSO : Why Western countries no longer want to organize the Olympic Games
The title of the film Olympiasby Leni Riefenstahl, the propagandist for the 1936 Berlin Games, was translated into French by The stadium gods. If there are gods on the stadiums, it's because the gods are dead.
The Olympic flame burned for the first time during the Amsterdam Games in 1928. What meaning do you give to it today?
Lit by the fire of the Sun in Olympia, the Olympic torch participates precisely in this fiction of ancient heritage. It gives our Olympic Games a solemnity that would be sacred. The Sun was a god to the Greeks, which it is obviously not to us.
The values on which modern sport is based “are the values of capitalist techno-economy”, you write. Sport in general or the Olympics in particular?
The Olympic Games are the periodic and globalized staging of professional sport, structured throughout by the imperatives of capitalist techno-economy: commodification of the entirety of human reality, competition between teams managed like real businesses, etc.
The IOC is a multi-billion dollar company. I specify that it is appropriate to make a clear distinction between sport, an industrial and commercial system, whose meaning is also political (at the Olympic Games, there is also, and even first of all, competition between States), and physical activity, essential to human health and development.
You don't seem to believe in the integration of young people from the suburbs through sport. For what ?
Like all mass spectacles, sport provides illusions, both among champions and those who aspire to be champions and among spectators. The power of integrating young people from the suburbs through sport is one of the favorite arguments of sportivist ideology. A young person does not engage in football to engage in physical activity, but to be Zidane.
READ ALSO : The 2024 Olympics “should cost” between… 3 and 5 billion euros of public money, according to Moscovici
He has about as much chance of becoming a champion as winning a jackpot in the lottery or becoming a CAC 40 boss. And then, for those who succeed, what exactly does integration consist of? Without sport, they could remain little thugs. Thanks to sport, they become big thugs.
The Olympic Charter states that “Practicing sport is a human right”. This revolts you!
And how ! This article confirms the diagnosis of the totalitarian tendency of the Olympic Games at the same time as the degeneration of our concept of law. A human right is a natural and universal right: every human being, for example, exercises his freedom. If he cannot, it is because this right has been violated by a despotic power. Saying that playing sport is a human right is like saying that watching television is one.
The Games are also an opportunity to test new methods of video surveillance of the population. Isn't this legitimate in the face of the terrorist threat?
Of course. But this video surveillance, the technique of which progresses from Olympiad to Olympiad, would be carried out even without a terrorist threat. The Olympics which took place in Moscow and Beijing served to strengthen control and surveillance of the population. Democratic regimes follow a similar logic.
For the Paris Games, a Paris 2024 committee was established. He wrote an Ethics Charter. Do you think it's a showoff?
The more corrupt an institution is, the more it has an interest in exhibiting its supposed purity and supposed transparency. The Stalinist Constitution of 1936 was, according to the propaganda of the time, “the most democratic in the world”: reading it, we see that it was true.
Do you think the Olympics promote gender discrimination? It's not false. But should men and women compete together?
The discrimination lies in the highlighting of a certain physical inferiority of women (see the difference in records in athletics) and in the respective importance given to men's and women's competitions by the broadcasts.
READ ALSO : After a first failure, a second… When the Olympic anti-drone system fails
Sport, which is war fought by other means, is, like pornography, intrinsically masculine. Equality for women should not be about allowing them to behave as vulgar and brutal as men.
When it comes to sport, equal opportunities are a pure fiction in your eyes. For what ?
Like the economic and social world, sport is based on the fiction that work (training, discipline) results in success. The initial physiological inequalities, as well as social inequalities, are thus denied. There are sports for the rich, like horse riding, and sports for the poor, like boxing. Systemic doping makes a mockery of the idea of merit.
Neither intellectuals nor supporters find favor under your pen on the subject of globalized sport. What do you propose ?
We observe, in the relationship that intellectuals have with sport, which their fathers rightly despised when they were not indifferent to it, a real betrayal of the clerics.
READ ALSO : Video games may soon be at the Olympics: ultimately, what is sport?
They gave up their critical function to play their little accompanying music. I can't offer anything, I regret.
Finally, do you think Russian athletes should participate in this summer's Olympics?
Russian athletes are much more than representatives of their country, they are civil servants of their state. Therefore, their absence is politically necessary.
***
Christian Godin, The Olympic empire. A political mystification,QS? editions, 162 p., 20 euros.
