The Olympics

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Today, we discuss the Olympics and the real  consequences of having Olympics in your city: displacement, gentrification, militarization. We'll talk about the athletes' under compensation relative to big executives, and the corporatism of the International Olympic Committee.

Jordan Berg Powers, Anna Callahan, and Jonathan Cohn chat about Massachusetts politics in our latest episode. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 55. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth. And today we have an amazing special guest to talk about the Olympics that are not happening in Boston and why we maybe dodged a bullet.
We can talk about all of the things that come with the Olympics, the real world consequences of having Olympics in your city: displacement, gentrification, militarization. We'll talk about the athletes and how, you know, the money and as well as safety and all these other things, really. The athletes are not the beneficiaries as much as the sort of other people behind the scenes. We'll talk about corporatism, we'll talk about theInternational Olympic Committee. So it's gonna be a fantastic discussion.
But before we do, I will have my two fantastically sports minded co hosts introduce themselves. And I will start with Jonathan Cohen. Hello,Jonathan Cohen.
He him his I’ve been active in progressive kind of issue and electoral campaigns for a decade here in Massachusetts. Joining from the south end. As I noted to other folks before this, I apologize for my limited range of facial expressions post-having oral surgery earlier today.
Thank you for being here. And Jordan Berg Powers he him. I'm in Worcester, Massachusetts and I have a very big love hate relationship with the Olympics. But I'm so excited to have one of my favorite thinkers on the topic on our podcast, somebody whose podcast and thinking and writing I have taken into my thinking about these processes about this. So I'm really thankful and I'm not sure I'm going to get a chance.
I'll just say also part of my love-hate relationship is that my grandfather was a trainer. He was one of the first black trainers for the US Olympic Teams. I still have a really adorable sweater from our sorry jacket from the Seoul Korea Games in the eighties that I think could probably fit on an arm at this point.
And so I grew up sort of around it a little and I'm excited about the conversation. Wonderful. And I am Anna Callahan.
She her coming at you from Medford, engaged in a lot of local electoral work. I am currently sitting city councilor and I am excited to talk about theOlympics. So our guest, without further ado, is Jules Boykoff who has been really engaged in the Olympics for many years.
Really an incredible thinker. Jules, if you would introduce yourself, it's such an honor to join you today. Thank you very much for having me on the show.
I use he him pronouns. I teach political science at Pacific University here in Oregon, where I'm coming to you from today. I've written six books on the politics of the Olympic Games.
The most recent one is called what are the Olympics for? It's sort of meant to be a critical primer for the thinking sports fan who wants to get ready for the Paris Olympics this summer. Amazing. And I'm going to start off the conversation by talking a little bit about Jonathan, who, when Boston was being considered for the Summer Olympics that are happening now, Jonathan was there every step of the way for a long time, really working to make sure that they did not come here to Boston.
So I don't know, Jonathan, if you want to chime in just briefly to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I can just go briefly. As I was noting to somebody the other day, having been involved in organizing a sea Olympic bid, what's always wild to remember about it is that being one of those examples where, like, people organized against, like, all of the moneyed interests of a city actually win, because that's not something that we see all of the time in politics.
And so that was actually something that kind of, like, inspiring. It was like, I was fairly new to Boston at the time because I moved here in 2013 and started getting active organizing against the Olympic. But in November of the following year, and it is something I will limit some of my comments to that.
I have so many thoughts about that experience. This was really a wild set of about eight and a half months in the end of 2014 through the first half and then some of 2015. And we're not too far away from the anniversary of when the bid ended for Boston's Olympic bid.
And it was something, funnel fellow then handed it over. What was one of the most fascinating things about that experience to me is the full on media saturation that we had in the Boston media ecosystem about the Olympic bid. When you're working on any campaign, whether for something or against something, typically what you want is you want people to talk about it.
And that is your biggest hurdle, is because you just want people to talk about this thing that you're working on. And it was this, like, nonstop media coverage for that entire period. And it was just fascinating.
It was just a fascinating thing to be involved with. Well, Jules, if I can bring you in, you have a really amazing sort of way of thinking about this and talking about it, and you have a number of critiques of what happens to a city when the Olympics come. And we would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Absolutely. I mean, first, I just want to give a shout out to the activists in Boston. I mean, Boston was a bona fide contender to host the 2024 Summer games.
It could have been you all getting ready to host the Olympics this next week. And were it not for the fact that two activist groups came together, the group that Jonathan was working with, No  Boston 2024.
And then the other Olympic anti-Olympics group there worked together very different groups and then pushed off the bid. They gave it to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles will be hosting in 2028. And I got to say, Bostonians dodge disaster, and they have a plucky band of political activists, including Jonathan right there, to thank for it.
And why they can thank Jonathan is because there are problems that are endemic to the Olympic Games, no matter where they happen. They're Not Boston problems. They're not Los Angeles problems.
They're not real problems. They are Olympic problems that you import into your city. And the first one, it's a big one.
It's around costs. The Olympics basically are etch a sketch economics where they say during the bid phase that the Olympics are only going to cost average x, when in the end, once they're finally staged, they cost y, and y is way more than x. And so Oxford University puts out a study every two years that looks at this, and it found that Paris, despite their big promises, the Paris Olympics, too, have gone over budget.
So this is something every single Olympics has done since 1960, has gone over budget. So that's a one big problem right there. Yeah.
Number two, I would say, is really important as well, is that the Olympics tend to be a pretext for security forces at the national and local level demilitarize and multiply their weapon stocks. It's a once in a generation opportunity for police forces to get all the special weapons, all the special laws that would be very difficult to get during normal political times. And the thing about it is those special weapons, those special laws, tend not to go away after the Olympic spectacle.
They tend to stay on and become part of normal, formalized, and I must say, racialized policing in the wake of the game. So that's a big number two that you want to be aware of as well. Quickly tagging in there.
I remember that being a huge part of the London Olympics in 2012, where really did boost their kind of the city surveillance, surveillance camera infrastructure. And just like, the sheer amount of spend, like we've talked in past about, like, the misplaced budget priorities and things, and when you're boosting that much because of how, because of the threat, inflation, that will happen and the fear of something going wrong, you will belocking in such a higher level of spending that is just not going away when you give people new, new powers and new toys. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah. Yeah. I have to say that it was really not long ago that George Floyd was murdered.
We had the biggest protest movement in the possibly in American history, and so little seems to have changed. And, you know, when these things happen, when the Olympics, for example, come into a city and the police force is given or obtains or whatever, they. Whether it's the actual weaponry or the changing the laws of the ability, the capacity, those things, they don't.They don't go back. You know, these over militarized budgets, you can't cut a police budget. It's sort of defining, you know, defining reality of American city politics is you can cut almost anything except for the police budget.
So in addition to that, I mean, it just sort of culturally inoculates us to militarized policing. I mean, Jonathan mentioned the London 2012 Olympics. It's a really good example.
They actually ratcheted missiles onto the top of buildings, surface to air missiles. And I talked to some of the people who lived in apartment buildings that were having surface to air missiles ratcheted onto their rooftops. I talked to them, and they told me that they learned about this because they had a little slip of paper put under their door that just informed them, oh, by the way, we're putting surface to air missiles on your rooftop.
You might also remember with London that G4S, the private security firm, was supposed to provide a bunch of security, but they fell flat on their face and failed to do so. So they literally had to call in the British military off the field, the battlefield of Afghanistan, straight into the Olympic zone. And you can imagine how unhappy those folks were.
They thought they were getting their well earned vacation, and instead they were policing the Olympics. Unless we think it's just some artifact of2012 in London, if we look to the Paris Olympics, the French National assembly passed an AI powered video surveillance law, green lighting that even though the rest of the European was really slow rolling, allowing for AI powered video surveillance in policing, France pushed ahead and said,you know what? We're hosting the Olympics. We have to have it.
In theory, it's supposed to stop in March 2024. It's supposed to sunset then. But you know what? It doesn't take a great imagination to come up with scenarios by which the french government says, oh, no, we need to definitely extend this because we stopped this attack, that attack, and the others attack.
And so, yeah, once you get these weapons, they're very difficult to take away from the police. Talk to us about displacement identification.Absolutely.
So this is a third problem that comes along part and parcel with the Olympics. The Olympics are a displacement machine, and it comes usually in the global north through gentrification. And in the global south, it tends to come through forced eviction and displacement, although we see the other variety in both locations as well.
So, for example, I lived in Rio de Janeiro in the lead up to endurance. During those Olympics, 77,000 people were displaced by the Rio Olympics.77,000 people.
That's like a big city in Massachusetts there. And behind the numbers sit incredible stories. So a woman that I worked with from a particular community named Vila Todremo, that actually got a lot of attention because it fought back against its displacement.
Yeah, no, go ahead. Oh, okay. A community called Vila Todremo, they had a person there named Eloisa Lena Kosta Bertu, and she was a practitioner of the Candomble religion.
So, like, afro brazilian religion. And her Ori Shah, or her goddess, was right along the water there of the Jacare Pagoa lagoon where she lived. And so for her, just getting up and moving out of her house to a different place in the city, to a new apartment, wasn't just a matter of changing to a new location and a new community.
It was upending her entire spiritual life. And so every single person who gets displaced has a horror story. Um, not unlike Eloisa Elena's.
And so that's a third problem that's really an issue with the Olympics. The fourth is greenwashing. So, talking a big environmental game, but not actually following through.
There's been great social science research that's looked at this and found that some of the worst greenwashers in Olympic history are some of the most recent Olympic games. In other words, as the International Olympic Committee has ramped up its environmental rhetoric in recent years, it's actually gotten worse at following through. So that is something to be aware of with.With the Olympics. Again, if you think about the Rio Games, they were promised that if they hosted the Olympics, that Guanabara Bay, this place where people would recreate, but also where they were hosting Olympic events, was going to get cleaned up, and all the 80% of the water moving into Guanabara Bay was going to be filtrated in the end. By the time the Olympics rolled around, it wasn't 80%, it was like 25% to 30% of the water.
So one of those big false promises, a massive greenwash. And those are just every, everywhere with every single Olympics. It's definitely not justRio de Janeiro and then fifth.
Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I'll just say, I mean, we're seeing it again with the promises around Paris and the ability to use sort of the waterways inParis and that not happening and any sort of timely thing. And I think it actually, one of the things that I think is hard for people to understand is that the way that they always sort of talk about these programs and push them as, like, look, we're going to have spending we otherwise wouldn't have.
And that appeals to me. I'm an old fashioned keynesian leftist, right. I have economic degrees.
But the truth is that what ends up happening is they sort of skimp so much so that athletes have, like, literally cardboard beds. So they skip on the things that would affect, help regular people and sort of, you know, and like, would sort of do things like clean up sort of waterways, which they could do with the money they're spending. And instead, all of the, this is like one of the many ways that the promises of what will get spent, what they do is they try to do as little as possible on, for things that affect, that help people or help athletes and spend as much as possible on the things that protect or make money for the rich people who are really the beneficiaries of the modern sort of game.
So you're not, you're going to have a huge militarization because not only does that immediately, immediately sort of protect some of the very people who are, who are sort of getting rich from this process, but it also keeps in place the sort of controls that they want to have happen society sort of spirals out, as they collect more and more money from us. Same thing. So that's what happens, right? Like, that's, the greenwashing is like, I think it's important.
They could have done the things they promised in London. They certainly spent enough money to do the sort of environmental things that would have had lasting effects on the communities. And where they placed the London Olympics were in places that London and the english government have just left to poor people to just like, fend for yourselves.
Poor people, we do not care about you. And they could have made lasting investments that they promised in the lead up to it, to the sort of environmental care, environmental cleanup. They always make those promises.
And the reason they never follow through is because that's not what the games are for. They're to make rich people richer and so I just wanted to like, say that's a really cause to me, that's like a really important thing. It's like they could do these things.
It's not like they can't. Right. It reminds me as well as one of the issues when it comes to the greenwashing of the bids outcome of the Olympics is how much of the environmental kind of steps they take just end up being like buying carbon offsets or things like that, where you spend money to say, like, okay, we're doing all of this polluting activity now, but don't worry, we're buying some indulgences.
So it's entirely fine what we're doing. Even though the world of carbon offsets is right with bad data, false promises, expropriation of land, that you're not actually making the event itself more sustainable in the end. Absolutely.
In fact, the Oakland Institute calls what you're talking about carbon colonialism. A lot of these projects are, are in places like Uganda, for example,where land is then taken over away from local communities and used for these carbon offset projects. So it actually leads to displacement of locals in some cases as well.
Those carbon offset programs which are used in the Olympic sphere are something quite dubious in general. So something to keep an eye on, no question. Yeah.
And Jordan, everything you're talking about is really going to lead to our next topic of corruption. Right? Because that's the bottom line of what you're saying is really the beneficiaries are unfortunately just a few. And Jules, if you want to go ahead and talk about that, that would be amazing.
Absolutely. I mean, Jordan's exactly right. There's a lot of money that is swishing through the Olympic system.
The only problem is it tends to swish upwards into pockets that are already quite full. I mean, you could call this trickle up economics. And if you look at the Boston bid, for instance, who was the big booster club for that? It was John Fish, the construction tycoon, who was Boston 2024 chairman.
It was the New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft. It was Karen Kaplan, the well connected advertising exec. And they were supported by elected officials, you know, Democrats, even like Elizabeth Warren, people like, of course, Marty Walsh, who was behind the bid.
So, I mean, these are powerful entities. And what happens with the Olympics is because there's so much money swishing through these various systems and because so much of it oftentimes is unregulated, not normal money, it falls prey to corruption. I mean, we've seen with the Olympics in Tokyo, it was, it was just totally riven with corruption.
And right now, as we move toward the Paris Olympics, there are four open corruption investigations in terms of bribery and the money shuffle there. Of course, we're not going to find out any kind of results on that before the Olympics. The point is that there is corruption that is endemic to the Olympic Games and that is one of the big problems that you sidestep when you decided not to have them in Boston.
Whoo. Dodged a bullet. I would love for us to talk a little bit about the athletes.
I mean, hey, this is why we all chimed while we all tune in, we want to see these totally amazing people who are the best in the world and have spent their lives really perfecting their sport and their bodies. You know, this is what we think that the Olympics is about. Talk to us a little bit about the athletes and how they are or are not the beneficiaries of everything that goes on in the Olympics.
Absolutely. So you're right that the Olympians are what make the Olympics special. That's why we tune in.
To watch the Olympics is not to watch some member of the IOC snoozing in the fifth row of the badminton competition. Right. But the fact of the matter is, if you're a member of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, you can make more money than an Olympian participating in the game.
So let me put it this way. At the last us Olympics, if you won a gold medal and you were from the United States, you earned $37,500. You know, hey,now, I'd take that kind of money.
But for all those years of training and everything, you get 37.5. If you're a member of the International Olympic Committee's executive board and you show up to the Olympics and you fall asleep in the fifth row of the badminton competition, you can get $900 a day in per diem only.
That's not to mention the five star hotels that you stay in. That's not to mention the delicious food that's handed to you by your butler on a tray. They Get $900 a day in per diem.
They could make more than Olympians just by sitting around attending meetings and attending events. So the bigger picture is that a really interesting study came out from Toronto metropolitan University. It compared Olympic athletes and the percentage of Olympic revenues that they got compared to athletes from other leagues like the National Football League or the National Hockey League, or the National Basketball Association, or the English Premier League of football or soccer.
And what they found was in those other professional leagues, athletes received between 45 and 60% of the revenues. 45 and 60%. You want to guess what Olympians get? What percentage of the revenues Olympians get compared to the 45% to 60%? Do you want to guess? You can't.
I'm going to guess. It's like, 30%. It's going to be something even worse.
25. 25. I'll go for 25.
Ten. 4.1%. 4.1%.
So I think it suffices to say that athletes are not getting their fair share of the money pie when it comes to the Olympic Games. Now, the International Olympic Committee will tell you, oh, we give money. And it sort of trickles down to the athletes.
But athletes are not satisfied. And athletes have been organizing in many ways in different sports. And that's also interesting.
Maybe going into these Paris Olympics is that you're going to see athletes who are more animated about the unfairness bricked into the Olympic Project and also who might be willing to stand up on the medal stand or elsewhere to stand up for their beliefs. We're kind of living in this moment of athlete empowerment, and so it wouldn't surprise me at all to see an athlete stand up. And I know Jordan has some interesting thoughts, though,that I think are really important on, like, the difference between LeBron James for Team USA and, like, a smaller sport athlete.
Yeah. Cause I think. I think whenever we think about these athletes, we think about the people who are the best.
Right. The NBA sends their players. We think about some of the runners, right.
These premier events that happen that get a lot of the. A lot of the press, and then they get ad. And then they, you know, they have deals to try to make.
Some of the fact that they are doing all. Spending all this time trying to be athletes to try to make up the difference. But, like, we don't think about the person who's, like, the 12th best in the world, right.
Who make these people make the games, right? These are from country. They're from. Not necessarily the US.
They're struggling to get by. And the US women's polo team, which I watched, I love that. I don't watch polo otherwise, but I'm like, this is a great time to get up with my water polo.
They had to have flavor Flav come in and pay for their team. That's wonderful. It's a wonderful story about flavor Flav, but it's also ridiculous.
Like, that should not be a games that have. That generate so much money and make so much money for people should not have athletes having to beg rich people to help them, like, fund their things. And I think, you know, these are amazing humans.
Like, these aren't just, you know, people who are like, you know, these are people who spend years, day after day, never missing a day to improve a millisecond to get marginally better, right? They are. I just think, you know, they are doing amazing things. I love watching the Olympics.
I love seeing these amazing human, sort of, like, people who spend so much energy to just do this, like, to achieve this big human thing for them and whatever it is, like, whatever. Spark bagman. I mean, I.
They'd kill me. A bad man, right? Like, they're the worst person at the Olympics would destroy you. You at Batman, right? Like, these are just amazing athletes who have dedicated themselves to this, to doing this thing.
And they generate a ton of revenue, not just in the US, in China, in India, right? Whatever. You know, there are sports that don't come into our landscape, that are prime time for whatever country that that country cares about, that sport. Handball.
Right? Like, these sports are generating income, but the people, the athletes who are doing all the things benefit almost nothing from them. And That is, I just think that's really important to have that juxtaposition, because it's a lot of the systems we're seeing today, which is that, like, a lot of,you know, the people who generate the income aren't seeing the benefits from these. And all of the money is just going straight upwards to make people richer and richer and richer.
Right? It's like the Uber drivers, it's the. It's professors at universities. It's all of these broken systems we have where we're just seeing people who actually make these things happen, not getting to benefit from them.
And I think it's really important when we see something like, I think the pinnacle of some human chess is in some ways, the pinnacle of humanity.These are also, in their own ways, pinnacles of humanity. I love seeing, I mean, who among us doesn't love to see simone biles do the amazing thing she does? But there's a person who's going to finish last in that competition who can fly in the air and should be. And should be. And should be rewarded for that. And, you know, I think my grandfather would talk a lot about this from also the perspective of just,like, how tough it was, how many injuries there were.
He would talk. He did. Jules, I know you played in the soccer.
He would be like, don't. You know, when I was a little kid, he's like, don't play soccer. People are crazy.
Like, just the injuries that they would get in the day to day of the kicking of the shins, the ankles swelling up back then, the goalkeepers getting totally run into. We've protected goalkeepers a little bit more if you don't follow up. But all of those things.
And I just think about those people putting their bodies on the line like that and then having to sleep on cardboard, being dictated to about what they should do to have fun, and then not getting any of those income benefit from it, and having to take minimum wage jobs, part time jobs, barely getting by while so much revenue is being generated. It's just totally. It's just backwards.
It is backwards. It's not just so the athletes don't get stuff, the city doesn't get stuff like the regular people are not benefiting. And boy, the developers, the advertisers, I mean, you talked about the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and a little bit about sort of that they get paid when they're on the Olympic committee.
Talk a little bit about their, the politics of the Olympic committee and their role in all this. Sure. I think if you want to understand the InternationalOlympic Committee, at first it's helpful to just figure out where they get their money from.
And so 61% of the International Olympic Committee's revenues come from television broadcasters, 61%. Another 30% come from corporate sponsors, what they prefer to call worldwide partners. So if nine, more than nine out of every $10 that's rolling into your coffers come from places like NBC or from places like Alibaba, you're going to act accordingly.
And let me just say this. In addition to everything that Jordan was just pointing out, is that if you've ever wondered, like, why do they host the Summer Olympics in July and August, like the hottest months of the year? And the answer is the money shuffle and the International Olympic Committee, because NBC gives around 25-30% of the IOC's revenues and the NBC has no interest in competing with us american football colleges or professionals in the fall. And so they plunk those games in the hottest summer months and the athletes got to deal with it.
In fact, at the Tokyo Olympics, which you'll remember were postponed one year because of COVID July and August in Tokyo is just brutal. It's not only hot, but it's also humid. And you'll remember that the International Olympic Committee–talk about the politics of the International Olympic Committee. They were saying publicly, everybody's going to be safe, we're going to create anOlympic bubble. All the athletes will not get Covid.
Everything's going to be just great. The public's going to be fine. Well, for starters, more than 800 people got Covid inside of the so called Olympic Bubble, so there was definitely not a lot of safety happening.
Two, the IOC was saying all this publicly about how athletes were going to be so safe. At the same time they were sending out a waiver, which athlete bound for Tokyo leaked to me and I in turn leaked to the japanese press. The waiver said this.
It said, athlete, if you die of coronavirus at the Olympics or you die of heat exhaustion, they knew it was going to be hot. You cannot sue theInternational Olympic Committee or local olympic organizers. So the IOC, they talk a big game in public about how they're all about the athletes.
1st 1st but wow, when you read those kind of waivers, it sure looks like the athletes come in last. Yuch. Whoo.
Terrible. They're locking in money to cover people. Wow, that's bonkers.
I did not know that. Yeah. Jordan, Anna, why don't you do a mid roll real quick, and then we should talk about the corporatism and the sort of fascist overlay these things.
So I have been so caught up in listening to Jules Boykoff. What an incredible expert, man. The number of stories you can tell from differentOlympics and all the numbers and statistics, it is truly amazing.
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We are still talking about the Olympics. And I think as a final, as a final topic, I was utterly intrigued by this idea of alternatives to the Olympics and this question of enhanced games. It was truly horrifying to me, and I would love to hear you talk about that.
And before we do that really quickly, I do think it's important to talk a little bit about the sort of like, loss of the sort of fascist overlay on communities that happened to. And then we should talk about the enhanced. Yeah.
So I just want to say really quickly, because the other piece that I think is important when thinking about why to why it's great that Boston doesn't have the Olympics coming is just the way in which, one of the things that I actually learned, I think, from your book, is that they suspend rules, often of localities and just so that there's his own rules for the games and that, and that just like, and like, they just like the, like the lack of just control and people having, say and communities and how that just sort of, and how that not only comes onto the games, but how the games, because of the way they're financed, because of the way they're done, because of the militarization, increasingly are also just following fascist governments that also, like, it's harder and harder for them to find democracies willing to sign up to this terrible deal. And so I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that because I think that's another piece that's hard for people to get sort of from the outside. Absolutely.
So if you listen to members of the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, by the way, the world governing body for soccer. Yeah, they sometimes say the quiet part that you're referring to out loud, they say, you know what? It's preferable for us to work with authoritarians. You don't have all these pesky questions about democracy and people wanting to know basic things.
You know, it's easier. And you think about some of the most recent Olympics. There was the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
2008 Olympics in Beijing, 2014 in Sochi, Russia. Ahead of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the bidders in China promised that if we're given theOlympics, it'll create this democratic heyday in our country. Well, obviously, that never happened.
In fact, people from Human Rights Watch have argued that those 2008 Olympics were actually a catalyst for the intensification of repression and the crushing of democratic movements in the country. But it's kind of easy for me to sit back and waggle a finger at China or Russia. One thing I Think a lot of folks don't consider is that not only do the Olympics not help authoritarian countries become more democratic, but they definitely help democratic countries become much more authoritarian through the passage of those laws that you're talking about.
Jordan. Every single country that has an Olympics passes one of these Olympic laws. The Olympic law in France is the very one that contained the green light for the AI powered video surveillance.
And so France will be a more authoritarian country in the wake of the Olympic Games. Last point on this, the International Olympic Committee itself has become much more authoritarian in recent years under its current president, Tomas Bache. Back in the day, all hundred or so members of theInternational Olympic Committee would get to vote on who hosted the Olympics.
Now, after all of the criticism that's come in because of the things that we've been talking about today, the International Olympic Committee instead has decided that they're going to set up two little small commissions of about ten people, one for the Summer Olympics, one for the WinterOlympics, and they'll essentially decide who gets the Olympics. And if you can lock in a country eleven years in advance, let's just do it. If you can get the government to sign on the dotted line, we're just going to lock them in whenever we can.
For starters, ten people controlling the fate of the Olympics and the rest of the International Olympic Committee is a rubber stamp that should raise alarm bells. In terms of corruption, you only have to bribe ten people now, at least before you had to, in theory, bribe more than that. The point is just that the International Olympic Committee itself has become a much more authoritarian organization.
And unfortunately, even though it oversees the largest sport infrastructure in the world, is probably the least accountable sports organization in the world as well. Oof, scary stuff. Oh, and I go, I was just going to say, authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and now even in sports.
Jonathan, just going to have two quick things there. One, the bidding process just always reminds me of the race to bottom that you see in cities when they're trying to bid for some new company to set up their, set up their headquarters in the city. And then each city is trying to prioritize things that are in the direct contradiction of the best interests of the people living in the city, but in the best interest of the corporate executives.
One other thing regarding that, and I think I've already forgotten my other points, so we can go on to other ones. I'll come back to it if I remember.Jump in if you remember.
I was hoping that we could end with the enhanced games telling us a little bit about that horrifying possibility. Sure. Well, every time that theInternational Olympic Committee hits kind of a trough of weakness and public pushback, alternatives to the Olympics have risen up and show themselves to be viable alternatives.
And so in the 1920s and thirties, it must be said that the International Olympic Committee in the early days was a full throttle sexist, racist and classist organization. The guy who set it up, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, this plucky french he was just a straight up sexist. He thought, if you are a woman, the only thing you should be doing in regards to the Olympics is placing the laurels on the heads of the victorious men champions, reproducing baby boys that could maybe one day become Olympians.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin said about Africa that if they were allowed in the Olympics, it might help assuage the thousand jealousies of the whiteman that they had talked about orientals, quote unquote, being inferior. I mean, these were some real cretinous people. And in that cretanist sort of activity they were involved with, there were alternatives, like the women's Olympics, that popped up.
Out of their exclusion was born ingenuity. And over the course of the 1920s and thirties, they had these alternative Olympics, widely attended, super popular, did really well, and it showed that women were perfectly capable of running. I mean, back in the day, Baron Pierre de Coubertin and his ilk thought that if a woman rode a bicycle, they would get this strange malady called bicycle face, where you would sort of like harden up your face and your uterus could be in danger and stuff like that.
They're obviously, this was like the best medical doctors of the time, by the way. Anyways, bicycle face is not real, let me just tell your audience right there. But it was meant as a control mechanism.
So when you fast forward to today, and you see also a somewhat weakened IOC International Olympic Committee in the public eye, they're getting flak, not just from people like us here in this podcast, but for people around the world. And one of the alternatives that has popped up is this thing called the enhanced games. And so the folks running the enhanced games, there's a young, strapping gentleman, very intelligent guy named Aaron D'Souza, and he's supported by billionaire Peter Thiel. So they have lots of money to throw at this project. And they would totally agree with the critiques that we laid out on the table today. But theiranswer is, therefore, we need to open the barn doors of doping so that athletes can enhance themselves in whatever way possible.
It would be supervised by doctors, they're clear to point out, but they think that this could lead to even greater heights of human achievement. And My understanding is that they will be there. They'll have some people there this summer trying to make a splash in Paris.
I think they're aiming for their first enhanced games to be in 2025, so we can sort of stay tuned for that. They're not going to do the full slate ofOlympic sports, but they are going to include big ones like swimming, gymnastics, track and field. And they're also going to include mma or, like,mixed martial arts fighting, which sounds kind of scary to me.
All these doped up people in an octagon kill each other. Yeah. So that's something to keep an eye out for.
I'm looking forward to them having one where they actually put AI, smash it into the very Sci-Fi dystopia feel. But it also, again, speaks to the way,like, especially like, the Peter Thiel involvement of the way in that type of, like, that world of physical enhancement and the world of, like, fascistic politics really often do align because of how much of, like, this kind of fundamental rejection of any type of human weakness that tends to go, that that tends to fuel both of them and a desire to, like, somehow, like, somehow exceed kind of supersede and kind of surpass kind of beyond that Bonkerstown.
That's totally bonkers town. And you think this will probably happen? You think this is actually going to happen? Oh, yeah. I'm pretty confident that they will have an enhanced games in 2025.
I mean, they have tens of millions of dollars to work with. They are going to pay athletes better. Apropos of our previous conversation, they say that the top ten or so athletes in each one of these sports will make at least $100,000.
That's a lot more than you can get by participating in the Olympics. So, you know, they're doing some things that address some of the issues that we've been raising today. But I'm yet to be convinced on the safety side.
But, you know, maybe they'll pull more evidence for us to look at on that front. Yep. And we didn't get a chance today because we've run out of time.
But we can also talk about the way in which the current Olympics feeds into some real awful gender essentialism. There's a great podcast that just came out called tested, about women who have been kicked out of competing despite their birth because of dubious sex, sort of eugenics style limiting people. And so I think that there's a lot to do.
The interesting thing about the Olympics is there's just because it's just this sort of fulcrum of humanity and, like, human like expansiveness, it's also becomes a place where we see a lot of these extremes playing themselves out. The sort of 4% is still shocking to me. Sort of the extreme of upward money going upward corruption, fascism, militarization.
Right. Like, all of those things, it just seems to capture all of them, even as we see again who among us. I wake up thankful that I live in a time thatSimone Biles competes.
You can both appreciate that. And I think, I really appreciate your work and coming on because I also started to appreciate, but we shouldn't beblind because we appreciate that, in fact, because we appreciate that we should be critical of these things to set up better systems for everybody involved. Right.
And Jonathan, any final thoughts on the fact that we don't have the Olympics here in Boston? No, I'm just always happy whenever I think about the fact of like just kind of the alternate timeline where the past few years we have been prepping to have an Olympics and how much of a nightmare that would have been in so many ways for Boston. Also, whenever I think of, like, all, like the mess of national politics of that intersecting with anOlympics, like, there's no, nothing good would have come. I mean, I just think, I remember quickly my other point of the, like the wild way in terms of the expansion of the security state in Paris when they just, when France just had an election where there was a real risk of the National Front taking,taking control their legislative body, and why it's such a dangerous thing to do to create expansive surveillance powers that people can often justified by saying, oh, I'm so benevolent.
And these will be only for the very short term. They never are. And they will always get in the wrong hands and even in the good hands.
And there is no such thing as good hands for certain things. That's right. I'm just grateful that we aren't.
I mean, the fact that our housing crisis is as bad as it is now, I can't imagine with the gentrification and displacement that would come with theOlympics like that being even more intense seems crazy to me. And Jules Boykoff, thank you so much. You're such an expert.
What a joy it has been to have you on our show. Well, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Thanks. And thank you to all our listeners. We look forward to chatting with you all next week.