Alan Tomlinson:

The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System

Jean-Loup Chappelet and Brenda Kübler-Mabbott, The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System: The Governance of World Sport, Routledge, 2008, 208pp. + xiv  ISBN 978-0-415-43168-2

(This is an amended version of a book review to be published in the academic journal Sport in History)

This is the twenty-fourth book to appear in an ambitious initiative, the ‘Routledge Global Institutions’ series edited by Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, political scientists based in New York and Manchester (England) respectively – at least sixteen more books are also published or commissioned. But it is the first in the series to focus upon a sport-based organisation: as the series editors say, the book ‘deals with one of the less visible aspects of global governance’ (p. xiii), filling ‘a curious void in the contemporary literature’ on institutions of global governance. Their point is that the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as an ‘informal civil institution’, has had a massive profile in and immense impact upon world culture and politics, but has not really been subjected to analytical scrutiny of its organisational ways of working and its institutional politics. There have of course been innumerable studies of aspects of the IOC’s work, or of particular products (the IOC’s main one of course being the Summer and Winter Olympic Games) or controversies (vote-rigging, bias in decision-making). But Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott’s brief was to produce an overview and analysis of the IOC and its ‘system’ that could take readers beyond official sources or opportunistic commercial perspectives – an overview that would be of use to anyone from diplomats to undergraduates.

The authors have provided a comprehensive, detailed, and invaluably informative text. It is clearly structured on the basis of their conception of the Olympic system. Early on, we are given organisational graphics – elements of the Olympic system represented as circles, with arrows connecting the different links between those elements, and showing the swirling reciprocity between most of them, in a system that the authors understand as one of negotiated equilibrium in an imperfect world. Reading the book in one go, I was acronymed out, given the thorough coverage of any type of organisation related to the IOC, and the splinter movements that some organisations stimulated in challenging the IOC, or the IOC itself – through, say, a particular IOC president’s cunning, Machiavellian (a word not used by the authors) manoeuvres – put in place. I have read a lot of IOC documents and consulted the increasingly dense detail available on the IOC’s website. Indeed, the IOC is to be congratulated, in the post-Samaranch era – Juan Antonio Samaranch stepped down as IOC president after the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympic Games – on this level of public accountability and organisational and financial transparency; Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott organise this material in a very systematic fashion and take the reader on a clear journey through the institutional dynamics of Olympic organisations, and some of the politics of intra- and inter-organisational dynamics. For that they are to be congratulated; I felt like a lucky tourist who’d got lots of attention from a top tour guide. But there was so much on the tour, that I wasn’t always getting the full story before moving on to the next item.  

The first chapter overviews the Olympic system, and the different ‘actors’ or ‘entities’ that make up the ‘robust structure’ of the Olympic Movement. The core five actors are the IOC itself, the respective and relatively short-lived Organising Committees of the particular Games, the International Sports Federations, the National Olympic Committees, and the National Sports Federations. Four newer actors are governments and inter-governmental organizations, multi-national sponsors, national sponsors, and professional leagues of teams/athletes. It’s become a closely linked network, ‘a new, expanded Olympic system’ (p. 9), encompassing ‘a broad range of partners: public, private and associative, and national, international and transnational’ (p. 16). Joint governance by this range of partners and interests is, not surprisingly, complex and volatile, so ‘the equilibrium is a precarious one’ (p. 16). Three regulating influences that the IOC has spawned are the Court of Arbitration for Sport (1983), and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Ethics Commission, both founded in 1999 in a climate of controversy and crisis for the IOC amidst revelations of administrative corruption and escalating revelations of drug abuse by athletes and coaches. The IOC at the end of Samaranch’s reign hardly emerges with much credit here, reforming and restructuring only in response to pressure from the world media, partner sponsors (US company John Hancock in particular) and US Congress investigations. The book’s penultimate chapter is dedicated to the emergence and role of these three regulators, including a lengthy case-study of WADA, and the final, eighth chapter offers ‘five major political and management principles’ (p. 177) upon which a more developed model of adequate governance by the IOC might be based: transparency, democracy, accountability, autonomy, and social responsibility. Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott are enthusiasts of the IOC and the Olympic Movement/System, reiterating several times throughout the  book that the Olympic Games constitutes an important cultural heritage for humankind, and that the IOC has achieved across its 114 year-long history a remarkable significance as a symbol of international co-operation and , peace (see p. 124 for instance). Yet they worry for the future of the IOC and its system, and the core product of the Games, threatened as the latter is by the scale of the events (the issue of gigantism, as discussed in Olympic circles). Their final words are that there are ‘very real threats to the credibility of sport: doping, violence and corruption’ (p. 181). Their solution is that the United Nations steps in with a global sport policy; and that the IOC stimulates a diplomatic conference to get as many countries in the world as possible to sign up to ‘Lausanne Conventions’ confirming sport as a public good, and ‘the Olympic Games as a world heritage’ (p. 180).

After their exhaustive collation of the mechanisms, systems and practices of the actors in the Olympic system – chapters 2 to 6 cover the IOC itself, National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, Organising Committees, and governments – you can see why they might recommend an even higher level of global oversight of the sport sphere. The authors have certainly captured the transformation of the IOC, and show how Samaranch modernized it and why and how his successor Jacques Rogge has reformed aspects of its administration. They also catalogue some of the cases of corrupt administration that stimulated a review of practices and procedures at the end of the 1990s. And there are some carefully worded assertions, too; former UK prime minister Tony Blair is in effect accused of violating Olympic bidding ethics in Singapore in July 2005, in his intensive lobbying of IOC members just hours before the vote to decide the 2012 Olympic host – but the IOC Ethics Commission chair had not gone to Singapore, so nothing could be done (p. 163). Blair was of course supporting a bid led by former athlete Lord Coe, who became inaugural chair of football federation FIFA’s new ‘independent ethics committee ... FIFA’s third judicial body’ (p. 160) the following year. The authors are very good on the IOC’s belated entry into the Ethics field, commenting that after reading redundant, reworked ethics and rules texts over the years, ‘the impression gained is one of a juridical tangle that is difficult for common mortals to grasp’ (p. 161). But there is, also, a tone to the book of the insider. In their Acknowledgments they express their gratitude ‘to a number of IOC members – including presidents – and senior and junior staff who have interacted with us over the years’, answering their questions and explaining what ‘Olympism’ is and how it works. No interviews or interrogation, it seems: rather, careful cultivation of contacts, assiduous information-gathering and faithful collation. It’s as if, at times, courtesy to your sources prevails over analysis and interpretation. It’s never noted, for instance, that Samaranch came to the IOC with a pedigree as a high-ranking figure in Franco’s Fascist regime. Nothing is really made of Horst Dassler’s role as the Mr. Fixit of world sport finances in the 1970s and 1980s. And when the Swiss government revised its arrangements for sport organizations’ status – including entry to the country, work and residence permits, property acquisition, and taxation of staff – in 2001, this is described as the provision of ‘sufficient flexibility in order for them to function in an unrestricted way as the entities governing world sport’ (p. 109) – isn’t this management-speak for unaccountability? How does this fit with the authors’ own list of necessary principles for good governance? There’s no doubt, though, that this addition to the ‘Global Institutions’ series will be a widely used source for policy-makers and sport lobbyists, as well as academic constituencies. Among the latter, historians of sport may have wanted more on the earlier IOC, its leaders and practices. It’s a fascinating fact that only one country has provided two IOC presidents, but one of these – Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, of Belgium – gets very little coverage: his successor, Swede Sigfrid Edstrom, who preserved the flickerings of an Olympic flame throughout World War II and into the 1950s, gets none, beyond a listing. The topic of the IOC and its networks is vast though, and the authors have chosen to concentrate upon the transformational phase of IOC history from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. To do that, lucidly and succinctly, in so much meticulous organisational and policy detail, is a service to the field. As a prospective further contributor to this series – commissioned to write on the world governing body of football, FIFA – I am grateful to these authors for their painstaking attention to detail and their contextualization of the IOC in the world sport system. My own perspective may aspire to give fuller voices to the influential actors, past and present, in world sport, but this valuable study provides a splendid marker for those entering this field of research.

© Alan Tomlinson, October 2008

Understanding Sports Culture

Tony Schirato, Understanding Sports Culture, Sage Publications Ltd, 2007. 150 pp. Price not stated.

Review by Alan Tomlinson

Tony Schirato has written an ambitious book in which we are conducted on a worldwide tour of the history of sport, from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary world of globalized international sport. It is a story that has been attempted before, most notably and even more ambitiously by Allen Guttmann in Sports: The First Five Millennia (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Schirato does not attempt a synthesis as comprehensive as Guttmann’s and indeed, Guttmann is one of his major authoritative sources – of which more later. What Schirato brings to his integrated history and sociology of sport, though, is a deep immersion in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, and a background in literary theory and the cultural analysis and theorisation of visual culture. These are undoubted strengths, and embody a welcome contribution to the understanding of sport from the perspective of what we have come to see as the cultural turn in socio-cultural studies.

The book begins with an extended analysis of a Nike advertisement featuring male sporting superstars of the early twentieth century. Well-trodden paths are then taken through definitional typologies and debates: the sports of ancient Greece, ancient Rome and Byzantium, and the European Middle Ages and Renaissance (‘forerunners of football and other ball games’ and aristocratic tournaments, tilts and jousts’ [p. 33]), before Western European pre-modern societies are re-discovered at various rustic and far from standardised forms of play. And then we enter the modern period of industrialization, which sees the formation of more organised forms of sport – very much seen to be influenced by an Anglo-Saxon, or British, model; and discussed in Bourdieu’s language as ‘sport as field and habitus’. Various directions of diffusion – or spread – of sports are then identified (sport is shown, following John Hargreaves’s work, to have developed as a form of surveillance in 19th century England; the USA’s distinctive story is summarised, with a revealing vignette of sports entrepreneur Albert Spalding). Chunky chapters are then dedicated to the political, business/economic, and media-related influences upon contemporary sport. The high points of the book include the bold theorising of the history, which constitutes many astute insights and generates numerous cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons and claims: for instance, semiotic concepts from Claude Lefort and post-colonial insights from Homi Bhabha are brought to bear on Byzantine factions and British imperial administration respectively (pp. 31 and 64). Problems are inevitable, though, in undertaking a problem of this scale and boldness.

Schirato makes no claims for historical originality, and the book is a textbook, not a research monograph. I can imagine Schirato in the lecture-hall, stimulating undergraduates on the basis of his wide reading and his enthusiastic syntheses. He is also honest about his sources, generous in citation of those on whom he is most dependent: his students, and now his readers, would know his indebtedness to Guttmann for some of his summaries, and to seminal histories by the likes of Denis Brailsford and Richard Holt. But this can create serious scholarly problems. If the accounts of ancient Greece and Rome, or of the violence of crowd factions at the Hippodrome in Byzantium Constantinople in the late 4th and early 5th centuries A.D. that we have here are essentially Guttmann’s accounts, but we are not told on what Guttmann’s account is based, this is scholarship based upon summaries of summaries. Obviously in introductory books and texts we want to engage students, and ambitious and condensed syntheses are a way of doing this: but is the summariser adequately concerned with the source of the initial summary? Schirato talks of Byzantine sport without saying where Byzantium was, or when chariot races of particular types flourished there On some of these topics, a few tips on further reading (for an in-depth understanding) would have been useful for students and lecturers alike.

Where Schirato is at his best is on the media/communications themes. In chapter 7 he subjects Guttmann’s ‘definition of a spectator’ (p. 92) to a sympathetic but rigorous critique, and develops his own take on the relationship between the spectator and new media forms form the 19th century onwards. Here, drawing upon his own previous work on visual cultures, he talks of the nature of the cultural literacy brought to bear by the sport fan in the interpretive process: ‘... the human visual apparatus doesn’t give us the world in an unmediated form. It effectively decodes it.’ (p. 93). Chapter 8 is dedicated to the consideration of the move from ‘sport to spectacle’, conceived as sport’s transformation into a ‘field of business’ – the sport spectacle as an attractive form of consumption to the individual, a commodified capitalist product. The final chapter surveys new media and multi-media forms of watching, interacting with and engaging with sport. The concluding chapter includes some discussion of Michel de Certeau’s work on strategies of everyday living, cites Arjun Appadurai, and provides more engagement with Guttmann, and Bourdieu: the book is actually ‘dedicated to the memory of Pierre Bourdieu’. The final word from Schirato is that, despite the influence of ‘governments, media and capitalism’, sport can be seen to be a ‘set of sites’ continuing to ‘value, provoke, and provide occasions for the disposition to play’ (p. 138). It’s a widely shared conclusion increasingly arrived at by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural studies scholars, a version of the structure-agency problematic at the heart of the social scientific enterprise: whatever the determining structures that mould, re-shape, or reconfigure our sporting practices institutions and cultures, people continue to carve out their own meanings in social and cultural spaces of their own making (with apologies and indebtedness to Karl Marx). Schirato does not cite Marx in this book, but his Bourdieu-inspired framework goes a long way towards confirming this general position.

Professor Alan Tomlinson
University of Brighton
August 19th 2008

Beckham on the Bus: Reporting the Beijing Olympics

All Olympic Games raise predictable questions of knowledge control, and generate fiery exchanges among journalists and cultural critics and commentators about access. Things are a far cry from the provision of a few telephone and telegraph lines at the local post office, which was all that Amsterdam needed to provide 60 years before Beijing’s Olympic summer. At Sydney 2000 around IOC-accredited media people were in town, and a further 5,000 or so media personnel were accredited by the host city. This scale of media presence was exceeded in Beijing, where the IOC accredited 21,600 media professionals: 5,600 of these were for the written and photographic press, writing the millions of words of unused or killed copy that the Olympics always spawns, as well as everyday copy on their own countrymen/women’s sporting and competitive highs and lows. But the Olympics are not merely about sport: host cities have their wider messages and Beijing’s use of the world media spotlight is part of a wider project to remake the image of China. The media challenge at the Beijing Games has been to operate not just in the Olympic cocoon, but to place the event in this wider context – one made still more complex by the issue of Tibet and the tragedy of the Chinese earthquake. IOC President Jacques Rogge had said consistently in the build-up to the Games that the Olympic Games could change China itself: a bold claim, reiterated in his later statement that ‘the proof is in the eating – these Games will change this country but also the perception of the world towards this country’. At the beginning of the Games journalists, and then Rogge himself, had successfully challenged Beijing’s control over media access (to websites such as Amnesty International) and it is true that normal Chinese restraints on communication and information were loosened for the duration of the event. But how long would this be for? As Rogge and his committees and sponsors left the city and the country, what substantial changes were really accomplished?

Such issues framed a fascinating event staged at the University of Westminster, London, England, at the end of May. The launch event of the London Asian Cultural Studies Network, The Race is On – Trailing the Beijing Olympics featured five talks from Asian Studies specialists homing in on the Olympic theme. Anthropologist Susan Brownell, in Beijing on a Fulbright scholarship, was both observing and participating in the educational side of the Olympic event. She had been working with intellectuals and professionals collaborating with Central China and Beijing City governments ‘to shape the next generation of Chinese people through “Olympic Education”’. Her main theme was the underlying hostility of the West to the Beijing project, which she presented as a collaboration of unprecedented proportions between not just the intellectuals and the politicians, but the international community and non-communist parties. Brownell described her position - adviser to the IOC education committee - as a cultural bridge between China and the outside world: in the USA, Brownell’s become the insider outsider for the event, particularly before the media pack arrived in Beijing. She noted how, given her unusual level of access (and anthropological expertise on China), journalists had been using her ‘in desperation’ as a stand-in for real Chinese people. Desperation indeed – picture this: one American anthropologist speaking for the largest human population on the planet. In a realistically positive, but far from idealist or naive way, Brownell conceded that ‘the Olympics alone will not change China for better or worse’, but could certainly ‘open up spaces’ for cultural and political exchange and understanding. Kevin Latham talked on the new media and identity, linking the Olympics to China’s strategy to achieve national ‘informatization’, and to amend or reshape Chinese national identities: how would mediated events of the Beijing Olympics feed into ‘the construction of new Chinese social, political, and cultural identities’? In some ways the answer’s quite clear. Coming out on top, widely praised for planning, organisation and administration, the Chinese people – whatever that means – would be told just how great the country is, its culture and civilization now better understood by the world, its national prestige more than intact. But Latham warned against an over-simplification here, noting that in China the portable television currently has more consequences than the internet, that the media world is a very fragmented one, making it difficult to judge general impacts. Latham and his research colleagues were in Beijing undertaking fieldwork to try and see just how this fragmented media world was making sense to Chinese people themselves. Mark Harrison looked at television-news reporting of the Beijing Olympics, detecting a ‘deep anxiety about China’ in media discourses focusing in recurrent ways upon the ‘rise of China’ and its consequences. Citing examples from Channel 4 News, BBC 24 and Sky News, Latham’s clips showed the Western media’s simultaneous trivialisation and almost demonisation of the Beijing project. Veteran China journalist John Gittings looked at the Tibet context, asking whether the issue could provide a lesson for foreign journalists and for the Chinese state and media on how to adequately tackle ‘similar “off-track” stories’. His main argument was that the coverage of the Tibetan situation lacked any ‘complete picture or analysis of why this was happening’. Gittings’s remarks were very sobering: the quick in-and-out of journalists at the time of and during a news event or cultural event is hardly a thorough preparation for grasping the detail underlying complex historical, political and cultural issues. The earthquake had effected a 180degree change in the state authorities’ approach to the world media, what Gittings called an ‘amazing change’ and an opportunity for media people and journalists to say ‘open the door’ still more. But would there be any sustained ‘openness’ when the Games (and the Paralympic Games) were over, after and beyond October 1st? The final presentation by Bingchun Meng, picked up the topical theme of the Olympic torch relay. In the ‘midst of the torch relay turmoil’ in April, a newspaper at the University of Maryland, USA, published a cartoon of the Beijing Olympic logo, re-presenting and transforming the design (representing human harmony and co-operation) as a bloodstain. Chinese students at the university were enraged by this, and the episode illuminated the complex cultural dynamics at the heart of Olympic iconography. Much of the discussion at the Westminster event centred on control and access, core themes in any analysis of the cultural and political significance, and potential, of the media. Such themes were also prominent in the book Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the new China (University Michigan Press, 2008, edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dyan), published too in the run-up to the Games. As Price himself put it in his essay ‘”One World, Different Dreams”: The contest to define the Beijing Olympics’, the issue is ‘who has what degree of control over the narratives that define our lives’. Price talks of ‘the jurisprudence of platforms’ in relation to how representations of China have been constructed in the drama of the Beijing narratives: who constructs these, and has access to them; who controls and/or defends these constructions; what are the modes of ‘seeking access’? The Guardian’s Marina Hyde (Saturday August 16th) reminded us that only 40% of the tickets for the Games were available to the general public, so took a look at the state media provision on China Central State Television (acronym,in English, CCTV): unsurprisingly, pro-Tibet protesters abseiling down the side of CCTV’s head office didn’t make it onto the screen. Rather, the channel replayed Olympic ditties welcoming you to Beijing, and thousands of locals singing ‘Beijing I love you; and focused, as most national broadcasters do, on its own, on Chinese Olympians, but with little detail on the individual athlete’s story: ‘It is as if the only narrative that matters is that of China’s. Hence endless focus on the medal table’. Hyde’s observations provide on-site testimony to the perspicacity of Price’s agenda. The contributors to the Westminster event also pointed usefully to some beginnings towards answering these crucial questions.

In the week before the Games BBC radio correspondent Mihir Bose got more realistic than the idealists, noting that the change agent in this story could well be not the Olympics itself, but the host: China showing the USA’s national Olympic committee (NOC) and the established sponsors that their cosy partnerships might be questionable. Why, if Beijing staged such an acclaimed show, should the US NOC get a disproportionate share of Olympic revenues, circulating these monies back into the economy from which much of it came? The Beijing Olympics confirmed the (albeit limited) transnational power of bodies like the IOC to transcend normal regulations and procedures – Bose noted that his laminated Olympic card got him into China, without the elaborate visa bureaucracy that would normally be essential for entry. Sport events do this regularly: UEFA effects such deals regularly for the one-off occasions of Champions League finals. But a laminated card for a few weeks in a single year isn’t going to change history. As the Olympics dissembled the sport journalists left for other patches. The political stories had faded anyway, as Michael Phelps eclipsed Mark Spitz, Usain Bolt shattered Michael Johnson’s record, journalists from the UK lauded Team GB’s medal haul, and an unknown young woman from Mansfield, England, broke swimming’s longest-standing world record: Rebecca Adlington’s first response to her new superstar status was to hunger after a McDonald’s (the contract’s in the post Rebecca). This was a long way from Tibet and earthquakes: when the whistle goes, or the flame is lit, the attention switches to the stadium. Beijing and China won’t have been fundamentally changed by the glow of success; the country’s position atop the medals table simply confirms its body politic, national prestige and international ambitions. The IOC will go its predictable way to London 2012 and beyond, and after the wonders of the Water Cube and the thrills of the Bird’s Nest, the five-ring circus just moves on. Beckham on the bus began the journey away from Beijing: no doubt President Rogge was happy to hitch a ride on the double-decker, and chug towards a simpler set of questions and issues than the political agenda plaguing the 2008 Games.

© Alan Tomlinson August 21st/24th 2008