Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia

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СКАЧАТЬ the IOC or whichever licensing organization it works with, are on caffeine-overload so they will take down those YouTube clips no sooner than you can utter the magic words Citius, Altius, Expialidocious.

      Chapter TWO

      The Socialist Sports Machines

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      From the Spartakiades to the Arirangs

      Games, festivals, mass celebrations have been used and misused throughout history by both democratic and despotic governments. The socialist Proletariat Games and the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin are the forerunners of today’s massive, lavish, Olympic and like ceremonies. Mounted by the Soviet-bloc, Nazi and Mao Zedong regimes, the socialist aura to those games is still very much alive in one of the last totalitarian regimes left in the world, in North Korea’s Arirang Games.

      Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1918, and then spread their socialist ideology to other countries, the use of mass gymnastic displays to further socialist ideals was not far behind.

      On 23 July 1921, the Bolsheviks organized the “International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations” (later known in short as “RSI” or Red Sport International) in Moscow to promote communist-based sports and gymnastics. RSI was created to steer worker sports organizations around the world away from the rival Lucerne-based Sport International, and as the emerging communist world’s answer to the aristocracy/royalty-dominated, Lausanne-based International Olympic Committee.

      Start of Communist kitsch. In October 1922, Czechoslovakia’s communist sports federation became the first foreign chapter to join the new organization, followed shortly by the similar federations of France (1923) and Norway (1924). However, it was not until the RSI’s Fifth World Congress in the fall of 1924 that RSI was officially recognized by the Comintern. By that time, the Sportintern had become primarily an instrument of the Young Communist International, the youth wing of Comintern. Other chapters in North, South America and Europe quickly followed suit. And in August 1928, the RSI held its first Spartakiade in Moscow. By the end of the 1920s, even with branches in three continents, the RSI was disbanded by the Comintern in April 1937, the eve of World War 2. However, for some reason, the Czech Republic chapter remained very active in putting on the Spartakiades after the war, and kept meticulous records of those events from its communist era.

      Gymnasts as far as the eye could see-- Velky Strahovsky Stadium, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1955.

      Some positively mind-numbing communist-era Czech Spartakiade statistics (note: the massive participating gymnastic numbers are on a national basis rather than just for the Prague-based events):

      •The Velky Strahovsky Stadium in Prague, of course, fulfilled all the bombastic superlatives that the former socialist regimes so loved to spout. The playing field, surrounded by seating on all sides, is 63,500 sqm (nearly 6.5 hectares or eight football pitches in size). The stadium has seen as many as 230,000 spectators recorded at the 1967 Spartakiade. Today, it is the largest stadium in the world today no longer in use for sports purposes. (Only the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is larger, with a seating capacity of more than 250,000—but that is for motorized sport.)

      •In 1955, over half a million gymnasts took part in the first national Spartakiade (photo above) held on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army—so members of the all-high Moscow Politburo were in attendance.

      •In 1960, more than two million spectators viewed two four-programme cycles of Spartakiade performances at Prague’s Strahov stadium.

      •In 1965, 1,365,514 gymnasts performed in 410 district and county Spartakiades across Czechoslovakia.

      •Ten years later, the summer 1975 Spartakiades nationwide saw that number double to a recorded participation of 2,714,666 gymnasts all across the country.

      •In 1990, more than 800,000 trainees participated in learning seventeen different displays.

      Old Habits Die Hard. After Czechoslovakia split into two nations in 1993 and as late as 2000, the original Czech half, post-communist era, was still staging these mass spectacles now called Sokol Slets.

      But never was this monolithic, totally controlled, one-mindset ambiance in an Olympic Games more apparent--amazingly and sadly, all at the same time--than in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

      1936. The Nazis continued the Comintern tradition of imbuing a major international sporting event with their own political agenda and visual identity—and none more blatantly so than at the 1938 Games in Berlin. It was a strange confluence of events in the early 1930s that resulted in the Games of the XIth Olympiad being hijacked by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. In 1930, the XIth Olympiad (so a Winter and Summer Games in the same year) were awarded to Germany. The winter was set for Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer for Berlin. At the time, Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were just on the verge of assuming power in Germany.

      Before they formally assumed power in February 1933, the Nazis, according to Olympic historian Bill Henry, dismissed the Olympics as “… (another) infamous festival dominated by Jews.” However, once Hitler and his thugs realized that they could use the international event to promote their cause of Aryan superiority, the Olympics after all being a mostly physical contest, they tried by every means possible to gain control of the Games. They set out to turn them into a Nazi coming-out party. And to some degree they succeeded, but not before a valiant fight was put up by both the IOC and the local German Organizing Committee (OC). The Berlin 1936 Organizing Committee was headed by Drs. Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, old-line German sports leaders who were not in any way affiliated with the Nazis; although it didn’t help matters any that Dr. Lewald was part Jewish.

      In the years leading up to the Games, the Nazis attempted to replace Dr. Lewald with their own henchman, a Von Tschammer und Osten, as president of the OC. However, the IOC blocked this move with a counter-ultimatum that if the Nazis interfered in the OC leadership, the Games would be cancelled. As Olympic historian Bill Henry noted again: “To the ever-lasting credit of IOC president (1925-1942) Count Baillet-Latour and his fellow members of the International Olympic Committee, Dr. Lewald was retained…” Henry also recognized this situation as “…probably the only instance in which a Nazi ultimatum was flatly rejected and Hitler was forced to back down…” The Nazis’ candidate, und Osten, was then charged with the task of building the host German team.

      ‘Olympia’ the documentary. Still, as so beautifully caught in Leni Riefenstahl’s award-winning documentary of those Games, Olympia, the Nazis managed to put on a streamlined, visually impressive Games that belied the darkness that was to come. Under the guise of a peaceful, efficient, even “happy” utopia, Riefenstahl captured a certain poetic beauty to those 14 days of competition even while cloaked in the omnipresent Nazi trappings.

      First Torch Relay. When the summer of 1936 arrived, the Nazis ratcheted up the cauldron-lighting drama to perfection by adding a Torch Relay. It was the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem. With the IOC’s blessing, elaborate arrangements were made with the Hellenic (and six other) Olympic associations for a flame-lighting ceremony at Olympia, Greece (which German archeologists had discovered decades before). The flame was then to be run through six countries before reaching Berlin. On 1 August 1936, a most Aryan-looking athlete named Fritz Schligen entered Berlin Olympic Stadium, torch in hand, to become the first person in history to light the cauldron of a modern era Olympics.

      First Screenings in the U.S. Riefenstahl came to the U.S. СКАЧАТЬ