Live Show: Paris, Power and Olympic Class War
Citations Needed | July 24, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight for another Citations Needed livestream. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated. We also have a merch shop at Bonfire.com and that is Bonfire.com/store/Citations-Needed. All your help through Bonfire is also incredibly appreciated. We are 100% listener-funded. All of your support through Patreon and Bonfire helps keep the show going.
Adam: Yes, and as always, please support us on Patreon. If you can, it helps keep episodes free and the show sustainable, and helps bring these awesome live shows streaming to YouTube. Without further ado, though, we are very excited to talk about today’s topic and be joined by today’s guest.
Nima: I know, so we are recording just 10 days out from the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France. One might not know from the often breathless media coverage in the runup to these kinds of games. But for months, the city of Paris has been ‘preparing’ for this year’s event by ramping up policing, evicting homeless people from the encampments that they’ve been living in, and even banning food distribution in certain regions of the city, according to the French collective, Le Revers de la Médaille, which in English, translates to “the other side of the medal.” And this really does continue a decades-long pattern of cities around the world, such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, Atlanta, the list goes on and on, of arresting, imprisoning, expelling and otherwise abusing their most vulnerable populations prior to hosting the Olympics. Of course, this always further entrenches pre-existing inequities. All the while, cities harness the immensely powerful PR of hosting the games and enjoy overwhelmingly uncritical, even glowing, coverage from the likes of media such as CBS News, New York Times and, of course, the Olympic broadcaster, NBC.
And so, as Adam noted, we are so excited to be joined tonight to talk about this and so much more by Jules Boykoff. Jules is the author of six books on the Olympic Games. Most recently, What Are the Olympics For?, which was published by Bristol University Press in 2024 and The 1936 Berlin Olympics: Race, Power, and Sportswashing, which was published last year 2023 by Common Ground. Previously, he was a professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team in international competition, and He currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon, and will soon, and we’ll talk about this in a bit, will be headed to Paris himself to cover the games this summer. Jules, welcome back to Citations Needed. It is so great to see you again.
Jules Boykoff: Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be back with you guys.
Adam: Yes, really great to have you on, I think you’re officially our Senior Olympics Correspondent.
Jules Boykoff: Nice.
Adam: Since we, every every two to four years, we will have you on to talk about what are both original problems specific to Paris, but also problems that, of course, you’ve been writing about for years, that are that are inherent in these type of large international sporting events, same with the World Cup, which we’ll also talk about. And I want to sort of begin by talking about this, the issue specifically with France, and we can kind of move out from there, because again, I think that on the one hand, and I think I speak for everyone on this show, on this call, there is a duality. There’s a sort of understanding that these things are sinister and evil, that they prop up despotic rulers, serve corporate interests, purge the poor, lead to surveillance, overpolicing. They help embolden anti-democratic forces, and of course, they’re ripe with corruption, but that’s actually not really something I care about. If some guy gets a bag of cash, it’s sort of less interesting to me. But it’s part of a broader ecology of things that aren’t really, don’t really promote justice, don’t promote democracy, and don’t promote what’s good for the working class.
But on the other hand, they’re badass. They’re cool. It’s cool to watch people at the peak of their game, you know, do it really well, especially since this is kind of the thing they look forward to for four years. A lot of these, most of the sports, you know, this isn’t like basketball or soccer. It’s not provided support year-round. So this four years is what these people look forward to. And of course, there’s nothing. There’s nothing, you know, there’s these great kind of rags to riches stories, right? Every, every time there’s a sporting event on, it seems like every other athlete came out of abject poverty or just got over cancer. So. So it’s sort of dramatic, very entertaining. And of course, we feel for these people. We want to succeed for these people. And these two forces are always, you know, going at it. And so I want to sort of talk about the games in France, how this is playing out in France, there’s been, obviously protests going on there for months now. There was, it was very combative. So I want to sort of talk about what the local pushback is in France. Obviously, you’ll be traveling there soon. You’ve been doing reporting on this for months now. Now the far right did lose the elections. That was something that a lot of people were worried about. This kind of being a kind of mini-1936-Berlin. They avoided that. But at the same time, there’s still a lot of anger, still a lot of activist energy opposing these things. So can you talk about the current lay of the land in Paris as it stands right now?
Jules Boykoff: Absolutely. You did a nice summation there of a lot of the issues that plague the Olympics. One way of summarizing what you said is that the Olympics tend to bring out the best in athletes and the worst in host cities. And it’s not just one host city, it’s all host cities. When people in your city decide to host the Olympics, they decide to bring on all these problems. Now, France was saying that they were going to be different. If we kind of rewind the clock for a second. It was 2017, we are in the midst of a spate of cities just saying ‘No, thank you’ to the Olympics, either by referendum, the mere threat of a referendum, or by an elected official taking office on an explicit anti-Olympics platform, as happened in Rome. So what was happening was there were a number of cities that were bidding on the 2024 Olympics, including Paris and Los Angeles. All the other cities dropped out of the competition, leaving only Paris and Los Angeles. The International Olympic Committee, the so-called and self-proclaimed supreme authority of the Olympics, decided to do a fancy move. They assigned two Olympics at one time. They gave Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028. And the rhetoric around both those cities was really similar. It was like, We’re going to be different. We’re going to sidestep all those problems that you pesky leftists like to talk about, and instead, we’re going to have a perfect Olympics, both of us. Well, how has that turned out?
I mean, it hasn’t happened, first of all. I mean, if you go through the problems that you just nicely delineated, Adam, costs. They’re actually higher. 115% cost overruns in Paris, and it promises to get even worse. The displacement of locals has been really, really intense, and there has been great activism on the ground. I mean, Nima, you mentioned Le Revers de la Médaille. They’ve been really active trying to raise this issue, militarization of public space. Well, they passed the first-ever AI video surveillance law that will be used just supposedly for the Olympics, but that is supposed to be sunsetting in March 2025, they use the Olympics as a pretext to get that law. In fact, it was part of a law called the Olympic Law. It doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to conjure scenarios by which they say, Oh, we have information. We thwarted a number of terrorist attacks. We need to keep that AI video surveillance after the games.
What about greenwashing? You know, the bar was really low. Some of the most recent Olympics have been some of the worst greenwashers of all time. And Paris, I guess you could say, kind of tiptoed over that bar that was sitting on the floor. But still, I mean, some horrific stuff happening. They’re hosting surfing in Tahiti, for example. I don’t know how green that is, traveling 9,735 miles in an airplane to go to Tahiti, setting aside this sort of colonial lacquer that’s on the entire situation when they were building an optional tower to view to get the best video footage of the surfers, the barge that came in ground up a delicate coral reef in Teahupo’o, Tahiti. The locals were going wild, just so upset about what was happening to their area. I don’t know how you can call that sustainable. And so all of these problems have been, we’ve been seeing in Paris, despite the fact that they were saying they’d be different.
Last point. You know, you mentioned that in just in the last few weeks, there was a real threat from the far right. The Rassemblement National almost won the elections. There was real fear that that was going to happen, and this would have gifted an opportunity for the far-right wing in the country to look important on the global stage when the global media show up, in other words, to engage in sportswashing, looking legitimate on the global stage, providing nationalism for all and deflecting attention from various problems that are domestic. So, you know, going into these Olympics, I know I’m a political scientist, but I have to say these are the most political Olympics that we’ve seen in decades for the reasons that I gave, and a lot of other reasons as well.
Adam: Yeah, because I want to, just as a quick follow up, the criticism of the Olympics and the World Cup is that it is this kind of contrived scheduled shock doctrine, because under the banner of hosting a bunch of people from out of town and making the city look good, they do a version of the, you know, Simpsons gag, where they go to the fancy suburban neighborhood and the homeless person turns into a mailbox. It’s like, we just want to sort of bat it away. And which is, of course, the general neoliberal approach to poverty in general. But it kind of speeds it up, prevents democratic pushback. Obviously, in places like Brazil and South Africa, there were, like, literally constitution free zones. Has Paris seen any of this kind of more overtly despotic kind of Judge Dredd type, or do they have the kind of institutional left that can push back against that, although French leftists are always kind of hit-or-miss historically. Can you kind of comment on that?
Jules Boykoff: Sure. Well, first of all, starting with the shock doctrine, Naomi Klein’s idea of disaster capitalism, I think that the Olympics provide an example of a complementary dynamic that I call celebration capitalism. Your listeners and viewers will be familiar with Naomi Klein’s ideas. But basically, disaster capitalism, you know, a tornado hits, an economic downturn, and capitalists capitalize off the catastrophe and phase in as quickly as possible. Neoliberal policies, privatizing everything with a pulse, getting rid of regulations. But it all comes down to the state of exception that that disaster creates. Well, the Olympics create a state of exception as well. It’s just a celebratory state of exception, and it too, allows for local officials, national officials, to ram through all sorts of laws that would be basically impossible to put through during normal political times. Now, were the French more sensible about it than maybe other places in the past? I’m not so sure, really. I mean, if you look at the brutality that’s being meted out right now, day in and day out, as French authorities somewhat desperately try to clear the streets of anybody who even looks like an unhoused person, for fear of like us tourists or journalists coming through and being scared by seeing an unhoused person in the road. That’s pretty intense. That’s happening right now, and people are being bused, many of them against their will. It’s kind of what somebody described as an antechamber to deportation, because many of these folks don’t just, they get housed temporarily, and then they get booted out of the country. And so I’m not sure how friendly that is. And then what I mentioned before about the intensification of AI-powered video surveillance, no other country in the European Union had done that. So France might have this sort of image for the rest of us, but I would have to say it’s largely conforming, under celebration capitalism, to some of the ugliest things that we’ve seen in terms of previous Olympics.
Nima: Yeah, I kind of want to dig into something that you mentioned about how, you know, yes, we did avoid, I guess, a, you know, far right celebration of nationalism, having the Olympics after winning, you know, an election that didn’t happen in France. Great. But I really want to kind of talk about this idea of whitewashing in general. Now, back in January, Jules, you wrote about how the Olympics often provide a useful way for war criminals to whitewash their image. Of course, you cite specifically Russia and Israel as two of the most urgent examples in the world right now, but this list could, of course, just as well include the United States, given its lockstep patronage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and also its entire history as a nation. So, you know, now, people opposed to this type of moral criteria for hosting might say something like, you know, look, if we go down this road, then the Olympics will just be basically contests between Costa Rica and Denmark playing each other in ping pong. Like, you know, you need the whole world to be there. And can you really kind of establish those sorts of barriers? But I guess my question to you is, how does one make these types of distinctions, right in these, in this sense, and can events like these ever really avoid sportswashing? Would it be easier just to get rid of these things altogether, or do we just have to live with these spectacles being simultaneously inspiring at the athletic level, as we discussed, while grotesque at a structural one?
Jules Boykoff: Yeah, I love that question. I mean, for starters, it’s really easy for somebody like me to waggle a finger at China or Russia, for example, for extreme human rights abuses in the lead-up to the Olympics that don’t at all chime with the spirit of the Olympics, let alone specific provisions within the Olympic Charter. But I think it’s important to point out that these same things are very similar things happen in democracies as well. In the lead-in to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the bidders in Beijing and wider China were saying that if you give us the Olympics, it’s going to bring this democratic heyday. Just give us the games, and magic will happen. Well, that magic never happened. In fact, Sophie Richardson, who was in charge of the China program at Human Rights Watch, said that the Olympics in 2008 were actually a catalyst for intensified repression in the wake of the games. And so it’s easy to say that, but at the same time, what people need to remember is that it’s true that the Olympics do not make authoritarian countries more democratic, but what’s also true is that the Olympics definitely make democracies more authoritarian, and you’re definitely seeing that in France in regards to the laws that are being passed, and it raises a real issue around sportswashing. So if we define, accept sportswashing as political leaders using sports as a way to further nationalism, look legitimate while the world’s media shows up, and deflect attention from the domestic problems that plague the particular society, it should be clear, although it’s not to a lot of people, that this can happen in an authoritarian setting or a democratic setting. And I should say, of course, there’s gray zones between those two. I’m just being quick and reductive, just for the point. But sportswashing very much happens in democratic spaces, it allows us to ignore the problems or try to sweep them away.
And you know, you mentioned the issue of Russia, the issue of Israel and those, I’m glad you brought that up, because we very much need to talk about that. Everybody’s going to be talking about those two situations when the Olympics arrive in Paris. So if we start with Russia, they have a long history of being in fights with the International Olympic Committee. I mean, hey, they got caught doping at their own Olympics. It was like a James Bond spy novel. They were like passing beakers of urine through this little secret hole in the wall, clean and dirty bottles. They got caught for that, and then they invaded Crimea between the Olympics and Paralympics that they were hosting in 2014, and then in 2022 they invaded Ukraine, between the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics. So they very much got on the bad side of the International Olympic Committee. And that is why, that last reason, the invasion of Ukraine, is why Russia will not be participating in the Paris Olympics, at least not under their flag. And it’s important to point out, I think, if we want to be specific, that there are two specific reasons that the International Olympic Committee gave to ban Russia from the 2024 Olympics. One of them was they broke the Olympic Truce. Now, the Olympic Truce is basically this piece of paper that the United Nations puts forth. It’s a resolution that they agree to, that everyone’s going to try to shun war for the period around the Olympic Games. It is routinely violated. I don’t have to tell you guys, but the United States did not stop invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq during all those Olympics. They just kept on going, yeah, believe it or not. And of course, the IOC didn’t say a word when the US continued to do that. So it was kind of quirky that the International Olympic Committee all of a sudden started acting like the Olympic Truce had some kind of enforcement capability. The second reason, I think, is more important, because the first reason doesn’t apply to Israel. They haven’t been bombing Gaza and engaging in genocide during any kind of Olympic Truce period. But the second reason that the IOC gave to ban Russia from these Olympics, except under specific circumstances, is that the Russian military took over specific territory in Ukraine, and then the Russian Olympic Committee basically started to run those sports clubs in the territory that had been taken over.
Now, if we pause there for a second and we look at what’s happening in Gaza right now, things start to look kind of similar. Now I am definitely not saying it’s the same. I mean, history does not provide us with those kind of crisp facsimiles of comparison, but if you look at Gaza, every single soccer field has either been decimated or massively damaged where you can’t play on it anymore. Yarmouk Stadium, as Karim Zidan, the great journalist, has covered in detail, Yarmouk Stadium, the storied stadium in Gaza for football, for soccer, was used by the Israeli Defense Forces as an internment camp for detainees. Now, that sounds a lot like taking over territory and taking over sports grounds, doesn’t it? You might think the International Olympic Committee might be jumping up and down about that. Again, not a word. In fact, the International Olympic Committee, when asked about this, has said that they will do everything in their capacity to keep Israeli athletes and staff safe. Not a word about excluding them in the ways that they’ve done with Russia. Those are two of the major reasons why I said before that, I think that these Olympics will be thrumming with more politics than any recent games in memory.
Nima: So are you saying that there’s a double standard when it comes to Russia and Israel? Hold on.
Adam: I mean, yeah. I mean, obviously IOC is full of shit, right? I mean, and this is about who you can kind of get away with, with, with banning, and who you can’t. I mean, again, the US does a quarter of the world’s population. If that’s not authoritarian, I don’t, you know, I don’t know what is, despite having only 5% of the population. But yet that’s never really an issue that’s brought up in terms of that whether or not they meet a human rights criteria, regardless of whether or not they’re backing genocide. And so the whole thing is obviously like, yeah, it’s like any it’s like a lot of international law. We’ve talked about it on the show to death. It’s, it’s, it’s obviously going to be selectively applied based on the relative power, obviously the US, God forbid they weren’t in the Olympics. I mean, that would cost billions and billions and billions of dollars to the IOC and others. And I think that’s kind of what, you know, we talk about, is it just sort of inherent, because I think when you do go down that road, if you did it selectively, even if you had a pretty high standard, I still think you would be left with not as many countries. Because I do think that so much of how these oppressive mechanisms are spread out, especially in Europe and North America.
Nima: Jules, you had mentioned this kind of economic propaganda, right? The idea that amid a frenzy of gold medals and rags-to-riches stories that we’ve been talking about is the promise of this kind of economic heyday. All the while of course masking the reality, which is the impact that these massive sporting events have on the poor in their host countries. And you really kind of laid some of that out. But I want to get back into that, especially because the IOC itself sells this. It’s not only that the host countries are kind of selling this to their own citizens or using these arguments to bid for the games, right? But the IOC itself, and feel free to talk about the IOC and its whole role in all of this, but in its own press release about the games in Paris, said that the games would “maximise the socioeconomic impact of sport.” And especially for France’s lower classes, right? Now, in your experience, in your research and your writing, what does the evidence have to say about these kinds of promises, and what other examples have we seen? There’s a case study every two to four years when it comes to, say, World Cups or Olympics, so what, you know, these games going to Brazil and South Africa, whether it has to do with the World Cup, what was actually the impact both short-term during the games and then longer-term, and how does that match up with the promises made?
Jules Boykoff: Yeah, one of the big myths around the Olympics is that it’s going to create this economic utopia, lift everybody’s boats higher and so on, especially the poor. That’s been the recent argument. Unfortunately, there’s basically no data to support that. I mean, let’s just take a look at an Olympics that a lot of Olympic boosters think was a total success, and that was the London 2012 Olympics. Set aside the fact that they were supposed to originally cost $3.8 billion, 3.8, but they ended up costing $38 billion, according to Sky Sports News.
Adam: What’s a decimal place?
Nima: It’s just a decimal point.
Adam: Was this the one where they had the surface-to-air batteries on top of people’s apartment complexes?
Jules Boykoff: That’s right, where they put surface-to-air missiles on the top of people’s roofs.
Adam: You can never be too sure.
Jules Boykoff: And informed them by slipping the piece of paper under the residents’ door, informing them.
Adam: I forgot about the leaflets.
Jules Boykoff: Yeah.
Nima: So as long as you drop leaflets, you know that you can get away with whatever. Right?
Jules Boykoff: [Laughs] Right, exactly. So, I mean, take a look at London. They had huge promises about how it was going to help people who are struggling economically in the city. And in fact, one of the ways that Olympic boosters do this, and London did this, was they talk about the Olympic Village, the place where the athletes stay during the Olympics that is usually built special for the games. And they talk about how they’re going to take that and they’re going to convert it into a certain portion of social housing. And so that’s what they promised in London. They’re going to create 30,000 new units for poor folks, for people living under the poverty line. Well, guess what happened then? They started building this Olympic Village. Things started going poorly. This Lendlease corporation from Australia basically botched the job. The project was nationalized, which is to say, taxpayers in the UK were now paying for it, and then, as if that weren’t enough, they decided to turn the project over at a taxpayer loss of like 275 million pounds to the Qatari ruling family’s property firm. Well, guess what? When Qatar got in charge of the program, they weren’t as interested in having all those social housing slots. So only a fraction of the of the slots that were supposed to go to those who deserve them under the auspices of social housing actually got them. That’s just the housing. I mean, that just didn’t get followed up on. Sebastian Coe, who you’ll see all over the Olympics in Paris, because he now runs World Athletics, he was the guy penning an op-ed for The Guardian promising these 30,000 units that never materialized. I would love for a journalist to ask Seb Coe at these Olympics what happened to all those units that he promised.
What about other promises around London and other Olympics? London said that if you give us the Olympics, we’re going to basically turn our society around healthwise, it’s going to jumpstart everybody’s interest in playing sport. Well, how did that work out? Well, according to The Lancet, there was no uptick in the amount of youth playing sports after the Olympic Games. They weren’t inspired by the athletes to get out there and try it themselves. A national government audit found that there’s actually a decrease in young people playing sports in the wake of the Olympics. So the track record is incredibly thin when it comes to these things. And one of the built in mechanisms that really helps sustain the games and makes it difficult for people like us to foment change is that most of us, including certainly the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, they just jet onto the next venue. Like, they’re out. You know, the attention is not on that city that hosted before, it’s on the next place. And I will say, you know, I’m somewhat guilty of this as well. You know, I’m trying to keep up myself with what’s going on in each place, but it almost seems like it’s part of the plan. And that’s why I kind of think it is.
Adam: Well, right? Because you’re serving corporate and real estate interests and the electeds they own. And it’s about getting it in, jamming in these developments, you know, having the public finance their real estate projects, and promoting and funding more police and surveillance. And then once that’s done, this sort of, you know, it expedites plans that have, in many, many ways, already exist, which everybody kind of knows. And this is why it’s, you know, this is obviously, but you mentioned that there was only two cities that were even trying to get these Olympics, which I think would be a surprise to many people listening to that. That’s like me winning the Best Citations Needed a host award. No offense, Nima, but–
Nima: We each get a co-host award, Adam. Both cities got the Olympics.
Adam: Oh, that’s true. That’s true. They both got one. So they both get one. So yeah, it would not be the most. I wouldn’t put that on my profile as a point of career pride. So then my question becomes, is, you know, increasingly, we see this with the stadium grift, where owners threaten to leave, and public gives them tax dollars. Now, obviously that still happens. It happened in New York state with the Bills stadium, but it’s happening less. People are kind of hip to this. Democratic forces, again, groups in LA, for example, that you work with have pushed back on this. So do you envision a time 20 years from now when, again, assuming the processes of democracy, or even some of these more maybe technocratic-run governments that don’t have maybe direct democracy, but can still look at a P&L sheet and know they’re getting ripped off, is there a future you foresee where nobody is going to want to have the Olympics, at least based on the criteria, which, of course, leads to my follow-up question, which is, is there a way of doing it where you don’t screw people over and it is more democratic, is more transparent, doesn’t involve liquidating, you know, sort of unseemly homeless people. And what does that look like? Because it does seem like it’s not as popular as it used to be, even among the kind of real-estate-bought technocrats.
Jules Boykoff: Well, first of all, there’s no question about it that fewer and fewer cities are game to host the Olympic Games. That’s just a fact. So what does the International Olympic Committee do when it’s presented with this harsh reality for them? Do they look at all the problems that we’ve been talking about today, from overspending to greenwashing to displacement to militarization of public space? Hell no. They don’t do that. Instead, they changed the rules of how they give out the game. So previously, the standard was to give out the Olympics seven years in advance of actually staging the Olympics. Los Angeles broke the mold in the sense that they gave the Los Angeles the Olympics in 2017, but they won’t host them until 2028, and it’s almost like you can see the flickers in the heads of the International Olympic Committee, like, why are we so wedded to this seven-year thing? So basically, what they do now is whenever they can get the elites from a city to agree to fund the Olympics, and get the governments from those places to say, Yeah, we’ll cover cost overruns, they just lock that city in, sometimes 11 years in advance. Brisbane is a good example of that. And the guy who came up with this scheme of giving out the Olympics whenever is a guy named John Coates. Guess where he’s from, guys. He’s from Australia! Imagine that. And so the first city and country that benefits from that happens to be John Coates’s Australia. This, by the way, is the same guy who, on the eve of the vote for the 2000 Olympics, whether it was Sydney and Beijing and it was neck and neck, he just the night before the vote, gave $70,000 to two different national Olympic committees, where there were people who are on the Olympic Committee that were going to be voting, International Olympic Committee the next day they were going to vote. And guess what? He won by two votes. Won by two votes. And he openly says, like, it wasn’t illegal, it was just the way it works, and I was just being generous, etc., etc. He doesn’t even deny this, right?
So the International Olympic Committee has changed the rules of the game because of the scenario that you described. So how do you get around it? I mean, one way is definitely activism against the Olympics. And an interesting test case is one that we’re going to see unfolding over the next few days, actually, because it looks like the International Olympic Committee is interested in doling out, assigning the 2030 Winter Olympics and possibly the 2034 Winter Olympics at the same time. And everybody who follows these things thinks that the 2030 Olympics might go to the French Alps. Well, all these people in France, like in Paris, are kind of like, Wait a second. We actually know now that we’re on the eve of the Olympics, the way this thing works. And so you got a lot of people organizing in Paris, up in the French Alps, that are saying, No, we don’t want this. And it might actually slow down their process. Their original goal, the IOC’s original goal, was to hand these things out right before the Olympics start. Well, I’ll be interested, really interested, to see whether they’re actually able to do that. You know, this is one of those areas where activism actually has made a difference. I don’t want to overstate it, because this is definitely like a David versus Goliath situation on steroids. This is seriously difficult, but activists, in combination with critical journalists, in combination with critical academics, have really changed the way that we talk about these things, and it made life much more difficult for the International Olympic Committee.
Now, to your second question in regards to, well, can these even be done on an ethical basis? I’ve really evolved my position on this over the years, and I’ve come to this, I don’t think the Olympics can currently be staged in an ethical way under the direction of the current International Olympic Committee. They’ve had a chance. They’ve given it a go. They have shown time and again that they are absolutely not up for the job. You know, last time we talked, a few years back, we were sort of joking about the fact that the IOC has this really high royalty quotient. You know, they have, like, all these counts and dukes and princes. And since 1981 they started allowing women, so they have princesses now, now they have sheiks.
Adam: Oh, that’s progress. That’s progress.
Jules Boykoff: Yeah, they’ve diversified. They allow princesses and sheiks.
Adam: They have sheikesses. Okay.
Jules Boykoff: [Laughs] Yeah, right. And guess what? The quotient is still as high today. So they’re not changing their ways in any sense. So we just got to get rid of this group of people, and if the Olympics need to happen at all, and I’m not necessarily convinced that they have to, especially in light of the fact that they are totally unsustainable event from the perspective of the environment, then you know what? Maybe these have played their course, and it’s time to move on. I’d be comfortable with that. But as you mentioned, Adam, there are hugely powerful economic forces. If you look at the corporations that fund the Olympics, if you look at the broadcasters that fund the Olympics, these are some of the biggest names out there. And if you want to break it down, more than nine out of every $10 that rolls into the International Olympic Committee’s coffers, nine out of $10, comes from either a broadcaster, 61%, or a corporate sponsor, another 30% of their revenues. So that’s who they’re listening to.
Now, Toyota, one of their longtime sponsors, they got shamed into not running their ads during the Tokyo Olympics because it was such an absolute shitshow, and the locals didn’t want it at all. 83% of the population said they didn’t want the Olympics, and Toyota read the signs and they didn’t air their ads, and now they’re actually pulling out of their sponsorship with the International Olympic Committee. My guess is another car company will probably just swoop in there, but that is really where the power is, and, man, it’s hard to get those entities to move. So what would I do? I would either just get rid of them entirely, if they can’t be run in a fair way.
You could envision a future, though, where maybe you could do this in a way if a government said, Yeah, we’re going to pay for it, but then we’re also going to take that Olympic Village that we were talking about, and we’re going to use it to actually solve whatever problems we have in our society. Almost every major capitalist democracy big city has a housing problem right now, like, what if you just use the Olympic Village to target specific groups that really need help? I mean, I know it sounds a little fanciful, but if you would have asked me that Joe Biden was going to be handing out $1,400 stimulus checks, I would have thought that that was a ridiculous thought too. So, I mean, you just really never know, and you got momentum on your side for change right now, it’s just getting some of these big-dog entities to change their tune.
Adam: Yeah, because I think, I think that there’s obviously a culture built around the Olympics. There’s, as, you know, there’s the athletes who look forward to it for three, three and a half years. It’s, you know, their job is their they work in marketing, or they’re baristas, but their entire life is competing in these sports. It has its own culture. Obviously, you have sponsorships. And that all seems very wholesome, right? I think no one sort of thinks that that’s inherently bad, although there’s probably a sort of anarchist critique of nationalism in general being inherently corrosive, regardless of how benign it may seem. I’m sort of of two minds about that. But it’s, and of course, you have people who aren’t participating, who are just Olympic people, who will get really into it again, for the kind of human drama, the fact that it is this high-stakes thing, because if you, if you fail, you have to wait four years, or everyone’s kind of watching for people to fall on their face. And so it’s, and the people who would look at that and say, Look, you guys are just bitter. You’re out of shape, you’re washed up. You just don’t want people to have fun. Everything has a climate footprint. Boo-fucking-hoo. This is awesome. Rah, rah, go capitalism. What do you say to those people? I mean, what do you say to people who think we’re just being buzzkills, we’re being leftist scolds?
And I suppose that’s why I asked the question about what it would look like to do it in a way that wasn’t just putting a boot on poor people. Because I think that, you know, this is a common rejoinder we get when we talked to you a couple, was it two years ago? We did get some people being like, Well, you know, everything has a footprint, you know, but especially when talking about the World Cup. I mean, if you want to build a, you know, a global socialist project about the World Cup, good luck, buddy. You know. So I think it really is an issue of substantive reform versus just like, not having it because you’re right, it’s so intimate to people’s lives. So I guess it’s not really a question, but I’m sort of curious what you think about how you approach this in a way that is about making it fair, rather than just being viewed as, you know, like we are all the time, as just being bitter scolds?
Jules Boykoff: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I hear from those folks all the time, rest assured. You know, OlympicsSuperfan745, I see you, buddy. I think the place to really meet those folks that really are Olympics superfans is with the arguments around athletes. Because, as you started the show with, you know, the Olympic athletes are what make the games even worth watching in the first place, and they are getting absolutely screwed. You know, Adam, the reason why US athletes are being baristas and other things is because they’re not properly funded by the US government. A lot of governments around the world spend much more money than the United States with its free-market mania, that just says you’re basically on your own. I mean, there are hundreds of Olympic aspiring athletes who have to start GoFundMe pages. So start with that. You know, we’re standing up with some of these people. Meanwhile, this crotchety junta known as the International Olympic Committee, if those guys show up, and they’re on the executive board, they just show up to the Olympics, they can claim $900 a day in per diem alone. So if you think about the fact that a US athlete who goes to the Olympics wins a bronze medal, that means you get $15,000, you could be like Henry Kissinger, who, by the way, was an honor member of the International Olympic Committee for a long time before he died.
Adam: Naturally.
Jules Boykoff: And he could just be sitting there, you know, snoring in the fifth row of the badminton competition, gobbling up these per diems over and over again, and making more than an athlete who actually gets a medal at these things. And so, you know, I have mentioned to you guys before that the athletes are just simply not getting their fair share compared to other athletes. The NFL, NBA, NHL, English Premier League of soccer, all those folks make between 45 and 60% of the revenues from their sport. 45 and 60. Olympic athletes, 4.1%.
Adam: Well, they have a union there. That’s one reason.
Jules Boykoff: That’s absolutely the reason.
Adam: Is there any effort to try to unionize Olympic athletes? Is that something that’s come up and on your radar? I think it’s to a lot of people it sounds extreme, but I think if you told me five years ago we’d have a unionized Starbucks, I would have said it was extreme.
Jules Boykoff: Yeah. No, no, there is. There’s movement. A group that I think is a good, to keep an eye on, is a group called Global Athlete. They’re pretty active on social media. And Global Athlete takes together lots of high-level, elite athletes and tries to organize them as a whole, but also sport by sport. You’ve been seeing organizing inside of track and field. I don’t think it’s coincidental that just this year, in the last month or so, World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field, announced that gold medal winners will get $50,000 for prize money if you win a gold. If you get silver, I don’t think you get anything actually, which is kind of wild in itself, but $50,000 if you get gold. You also have these entities that are coming from the side that are really challenging the Olympics, such as the Enhanced Games. I don’t know if you guys have heard about this crew, but the Enhanced Games folks, they are backed, and you’re going to love this, guys–
Adam: Those are Silicon Valley psychos, right?
Jules Boykoff: They are backed by Peter Thiel and run by a very sharp young man named Aaron D’Souza, who to my understanding was kind of one of the thinkers behind the Gawker lawsuit, the Hulk Hogan thing with Peter Thiel. Well, now these guys are turning their attention to an alternative to the Olympics that they call the Enhanced Games. And guess what? They would agree with all of the critiques that we are talking about. In fact, they’ve used the very same ideas on their webpage, but instead of like us saying, Okay, so how can we bring working class folks in and get a fair share? How can we make the Olympics more equitable for everyday people? Their answer is, How can we turn the Olympics into a doping free-for-all, where athletes can become totally enhanced using any kind of substance they want?
Adam: A very, very small part of me appreciates the honesty. It’s still evil, but a part of me is like, you know what? Just a bunch of guys walking around looking like Jack Reacher.
Nima: Just American Gladiators, this shit.
Adam: [Laughs] Yeah.
Jules Boykoff: Well, and, you know, they’ve had some very high-level, recently retired athletes that said, Hell yeah, and they’re gonna, they’re doping up and getting ready. My understanding is that they’re going to have their first competition next year. My understanding also is that they might have a presence on the ground in Paris, where they try to rile up some interest. But look, these folks at the Enhanced Games, setting aside, the health that I’m not convinced about athlete health in that area, but they are saying that the top 10 or so athletes in each one of these sports are going to make upwards of $100,000. That’s a whole lot more than athletes make in the Olympic Games. So, you know, there are, whenever there’s alternatives from the outside that threaten the Olympics, the Olympics tend to all of a sudden get interested–
Adam: They look in the couch cushions and find a bunch of coins.
Jules Boykoff: Exactly.
Adam: Sorry, I didn’t realize that was there. Oh, man, I’m sorry.
Jules Boykoff: And it’s not just today. I mean, with World Athletics all of a sudden forking over $50,000 and all the other international federations look at them like, Guys, that means we might have to start doing it soon as well. If you look in history, I mean, there was the Workers’ Olympics in the 1920s and ’30s, the Women’s Olympics, when women were being excluded from the Olympics. And so out of exclusion comes ingenuity and also pressure on the International Olympic Committee. And so that’s why I think we’re just living in a fascinating moment where there’s a confluence of pressures on the IOC right now. And I’m not a Pollyanna about it, I’m pretty realpolitik, but I think that we’re living in a really interesting moment where more and more people are realizing that the Olympics are, in a lot of ways, kind of a scam. And like, you know, Nima, you were mentioning before, from an economic perspective, it’s totally a scam. You mentioned that Oxford study that comes out every two years, they find that there’s cost overruns with every single Olympics going back to 1960. Every single Olympics, you’re going to have cost overruns. And so the word is out, and I think now is a great time to really revisit the model.
Nima: Now you’ve been talking about where the money comes from, where the money sometimes goes. Oftentimes it goes to a sleeping Kissinger, right? But something we haven’t talked about yet, really is, you know, and surprising maybe for a media criticism show, is the influence that media has over the Olympics in general, and oftentimes, I mean, of course, our own perceptions of the Olympics, as watchers, as fans, as “consumers of media.” And so in your experience, Jules, in your research, in your writing, can you tell us how you think media fits into all of this? We’ve talked about these different committees. We’ve talked about some stuff from the city’s perspective, country perspective, athlete’s perspective. What’s the media to do with this?
Jules Boykoff: It’s absolutely crucial to the entire enterprise, Nima. And it starts with what you mentioned, that for most of us that aren’t going to Paris, and even for some of us that are, it will be a mediated experience. We are going to be seeing this through our television sets, through our apps and so on, and so how the media portray this is really important. NBC, the major broadcaster in the United States, is pretty notorious, to be honest, with totally avoiding politics. I remember during the Beijing Olympics of 2022 they made a kind of casual mention to repression happening with Uyghur Muslims. And it was like two seconds and like, the whole world’s hair went on fire, as if that was, like a big deal. I guess it kind of was. But, I mean, really, I mean, sheesh.
You can understand a lot about the Olympics by thinking through the media. For starters, as I mentioned to you before, some 61% of the IOCs revenues come through that, and so they have a lot of power. NBC gives, according to some journalists, in the neighborhood of around 40% of the IOC’s revenues. Have you guys ever wondered why the Olympics happen in July and August, the very hottest months of the year? I can tell you, in Tokyo, those are horribly humid and hot months. Guess what? It’s because NBC doesn’t want it encroaching on the football season, which starts in September. And so the very timing of the Olympics comes down to media power in certain ways. Again, athlete health takes a second chair to media power and the needs of NBC.
What about future Olympics? I was mentioning before that it looks like the International Olympic Committee may well assign both the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics at the same time. Salt Lake City is in the running for either one of those. They think they could take either one of them. But I’m here to tell you that they will very probably not get the 2030 Olympics. And here’s why. Because NBC’s contract, they paid $7.75 billion a few years back to control the rights to the Olympics in the United States through 2032. So if the IOC can figure out a way of not giving Salt Lake City the Olympics until 2034, it also gives NBC this incentive to ante up once again, with a big fat contract moving forward. You see what I’m saying. Like almost any decision that gets made about the Olympics has something. To do with media, money and power,
Adam: Yeah, just it’s the same thing with any kind of sports where it’s a natural monopoly, like gas or water, in the sense that you just can’t have five Olympics. So it’s a natural monopoly. This is kind of a global natural monopoly. And they get the brand, they get pivoted in there early, and then there’s no competition, and they run it as a cartel. They run it as a racket. They just gouge everybody. They know these athletes will work for peanuts, because it’s, you know, this is great experience, right? You put it on your Tinder profile. Also, you’re just naturally competitive. Again, it’s not something totally foreign to me, but I guess that’s sort of drilled into certain people, and they know that. And so they just, you know, nickel and dime everyone at the bottom. They give the counts and princesses their stipends. And it is just a scam, because they have this kind of incumbency, and they’re a natural monopoly. And so there’s not really any incentive, except for competition, which doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, except for Peter Thiel’s weird libertarian wet dream, there isn’t really anything to incentivize them to make–which is why maybe the one thing that could usher in real reform would be a union, I would think, because, then without the athletes, it’s just, you know, it’s just AI Al Michaels and, you know, that’s it. NBC doesn’t produce, you know, the IOC doesn’t do anything. They just sit on their asses and count money. So I think that would maybe be one way you could make this a little more accountable, a little more democratic, but maybe, again, maybe I am being a little naive.
Jules Boykoff: No, I think you’re totally right. And since there’s a lot of momentum right now in terms of unionizing, I think there’s more and more athletes that are aware of that reality.
Nima: Yeah, I’m really curious about how, you know you’re talking about how we receive this as a mediated experience, obviously, because it’s being broadcast, it’s being recorded, it’s being shown at certain times, in certain ways, and edited, right? I mean, for us, at times, and so I’m curious as to what we’re going to experience. You know, when the world gathers during an ongoing genocide that largely, most people in the world do not support, even if governments do, what we’re going to see when maybe there are protests or acts of solidarity with Palestine, and how that will be mediated out of our experience here in the United States, at least, so that that is just completely marginalized, completely kind of, you know, 45-second bleep delay. But you’re going to be there in person, Jules, so I’d love to hear from you about what your plans are and maybe how you kind of might experience this different, right, maybe at times in person, less mediated experience?
Jules Boykoff: Yeah, well, Nima, you’re identifying the reason why I even bothered to go to the Olympics in the first place. You know, I’ll be traveling with my friend and co-writer Dave Zirin, and we’re not going to be hanging out in the suites with the International Olympic Committee. We’re going to be down in the streets with the protesters, and there will be a huge mobilization alternative opening ceremony. They haven’t released the information yet, but stay tuned for that. And there will be organizers that are fighting for the rights of Palestinians. There will be people who are concerned about the environmental effects. There are just straight-up anti-Olympics activists, this group called Saccage 2024, they’re part of this international anti-Olympics network. And then there’s groups like the group you mentioned before, Le Revers de la Médaille, that is The Other Side of the Medal, that is trying to get us to see, understand displacement. And so there will be protests in the streets, and we will definitely be there to cover it, and I don’t anticipate NBC being shoulder-to-shoulder with us down there at the protests, but that’s kind of what what we’re going to do that’s maybe different than the average mainstream media, and that’s what I think we can contribute, because there will be protests.
Adam: And that’s one of the, yeah, that’s why it’s important to have publications like The Nation and other publications. Are y’all doing, y’all doing video with Real News?
Jules Boykoff: We are, yeah, yeah. I’m getting all trained up tomorrow. I’m excited about it. Learn some new skills. So yeah.
Adam: Over there in Baltimore, yeah.
Jules Boykoff: Yeah, we’re going to be filming and a lot of writing as well.
Adam: Awesome. Well, I really look forward to listening to that content. It’ll be a good contrast to the sentimental schlock, which I also will be consuming. I’m just going to be honest with you. The scrappy kid from, you know, they always have the B roll of them, like on train tracks, you know.
Jules Boykoff: [Laughs] Oh, yeah.
Nima: They get driven to practice for, you know, 16 years by their single mom.
Adam: You know, just once, just once, I want a sob story about a kid who’s like, Yeah, I grew up in Santa Monica. His dad was a patent attorney. His mom was a neurosurgeon. That’s what I want to see. Give me the real–
Nima: There are those. They just don’t get produced.
Adam: Yeah.
Jules Boykoff: [Laughs] Right.
Nima: Everyone who competes is amazing. I love watching it, which is why having these conversations is so important. [Laughs] It gets back to that kind of what do you have to grin and bear? And how do you constantly work toward a more just future for this kind of thing? So, Jules, it has been so awesome to talk to you tonight. Have a wonderful time, or at least a very professional and non per-diem-ed time with our good friend Dave Zirin over in Paris this summer. Of course, we have been speaking with the great Jules Boykoff, author of six books on the Olympic Games. Most recently, What Are the Olympics For?, published this year, 2024, by Bristol University Press, and The 1936 Berlin Olympics: Race, Power, and Sportswashing, which was published last year, 2023, by Common Ground. Previously, he was a professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team in international competition. He currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon, and will, soon, as I said, be headed over to Paris to cover the games himself with Dave Zirin this summer. Jules, thank you again, as always, for joining us on Citations Needed
Jules Boykoff: My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you to the whole Citations Needed team. Thanks very much.
Nima: And that will do it for this Citations Needed livestream. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. It’s great to do these. I’m glad we’re able to do this, Adam. We will certainly be back with another one as soon as we can. But until then, of course, you all can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded, but that will do it. Thanks again for listening and watching, those of you who did. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne tweeten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed livestream was recorded with a virtual audience on Tuesday, July 16, 2024, and released on Wednesday, July 24, 2024.
