The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these principles is to build up a strong and more valiant and, above all, more scrupulous and more generous humanity.
These liberal ideals, of course, were never really manifested, not even in the first modern games in 1896 Athens.
But the disparity between Olympic ideology and reality has only deepened since commercial imperatives took over the competition. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics established a new tradition: the enormous public subsidy of private goods in the name of sports. Since then, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has sought some kind of moral justification for its capitalist excess. [...]
But following Jules Boykoff’s theorization of the Olympics as “celebration capitalism,” let’s instead imagine celebration socialism: an internationalist event that boosts popular participation in sports, equalizes competition between nations, and actually benefits the host community.
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