The Olympics Are 'Celebration Capitalism' with a Colonialist Core
This is an extended version of an Instagram Post published here.
Are the Olympics “at the service of the harmonious development of humankind,” as the games’ charter says? Or are they a rapacious global brand with a capitalist-colonialist core? We wish it were the former and all athletes, viewers, and the public could enjoy the benefits and playfulness of sports. However, celebration capitalism, coined by Jules Boykoff, better describes this mega event.
- The enduring racist legacy of the games
Let's start at the very beginning, with the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin. He designed the Olympic rings we see everywhere in 1913. The official Olympics website describes him as a visionary genius. He was paid glowing tributes in the opening ceremony in Paris on July 26, 2024. Pierre de Coubertin was a French aristocrat turned reformer. He also happened to be racist, misogynist, ableist, and fat-phobic. Hitler recommended him for the Nobel Prize.
"From the very first days, I was a fanatical colonialist,” he said. "Races have different values, and to the white race of superior essence, all others must pledge allegiance." De Coubertin believed that the Olympic Games should be reserved for men. "A female Olympiad would be uninteresting, unattractive...." - The French hijab ban on athletes is racist
Hosts France has a bad track record when it comes to racist Islamophobia, and they are nowhere close to changing that. Unapologetically, France imposed a racist & sexist hijab ban on athletes as per its supposedly “secular laws” that require officials not to reveal their religious affiliations. The same laws didn’t prevent Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo from attending a Catholic mass at Paris’ Madeleine church for the Olympic truce. This Greek Olympic tradition declares a pause in war during the games.
If Hidalgo wants to attend mass, she should. However, Muslim athletes should also be able to wear hijabs if they want to. That would be secularism. As for the truce, it holds no meaning since France's war on the people of the global majority continues on many fronts, as it exerts its capitalist-colonialist power both within its borders and beyond.
At the opening ceremony, as athletes of all countries passed in boats on the river Seine, the Algerian delegation tossed red roses to honour victims of the colonial 1961 massacre. French police had arrested 12,000 Algerians, killed dozens, and thrown their bodies into the Seine. - Anti-colonial feminism or tokenism?
On the one hand, France made a sexist decision at the Olympics, telling Muslim women athletes what they could wear or not, and on the other, it paid tribute to ten French women as 'Heroines of French History' at the opening ceremony.
The statues of the women emerged one by one to the French national anthem sung by Black Opera singer Axelle Saint-Cirel holding the French flag. French anti-colonial feminists like Gisèle Halimi, a Tunisian-born lawyer and activist renowned for her fight for abortion rights, and Paulette Nardal, the founder of the Negritude movement for the empowerment of Black people, were featured.
However, living feminists of colour in France are routinely silenced and marginalised. Promoting historical figures to come across as progressive but undermining those battling against racism in the present is racist hypocrisy. - Encouraging genocidal settler-colonisers
Israel was invited to participate in the games. The fact that they are waging a genocidal war, which recently killed or injured 400 Palestinian athletes and coaches, didn't disqualify them. Their Whiteness gives them immunity, and settler-coloniser violence against an Arab population doesn't qualify as war.
On the other hand, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned Russian athletes as it is at war with Ukraine. The solidarity with the Ukrainians stems from the idea that "they are civilised, and they look like us. - Militarisation and the games
The French police, known for their institutionalised racism, have received a boost with heightened “security measures” for the Olympics. Marginalised groups, particularly young Black and Arab men, are facing increased risk of amplified racist policing and repression.
Paris is being surveilled by 45,000 police/gendarmes (10x the usual), a 10,000-strong machine-gun military squad, helicopters with sharpshooters, AI, dogs, drones, QR codes, fighter jets, metal fence barriers, and more. - Surveillance nightmare
France changed its law to allow surveillance. In a public letter, 38 civil society organisations said this was a serious threat to civic freedoms as "evidence has shown that the use of surveillance technologies creates a state of permanent monitoring, profiling, and tracking that disproportionately harms marginalised people."
AI and other kinds of surreptitious surveillance will likely continue after the games, as has been the case in other Olympic cities, normalising privacy breaches. Saccage 2024, a group opposing the Olympics, told Associated Press, “Is it reasonable to offer one month of ‘festivities’ to the most well-off tourists at the cost of a long-term securitization legacy for all residents of the city and the country?” - Social cleansing of cities as an Olympian tradition
Following the standard practice of all Olympic cities, ahead of the games, Parisian authorities harassed and evicted the most vulnerable city dwellers—migrants, homeless people, Roma people, and sex workers.
More than eighty non-profits under the umbrella group Le Revers de la médaille ("The Other Side of the Medal") issued a report revealing "social cleansing" that started taking place for the game, targeting people living on the streets, in precarious housing or dependent on public space to live and work. - Who gets the medals and the glory?
By design, the Olympics reinforce the idea that White, wealthy nations are superior. The Eurocentric concept of sports creates cultural and economic disparities. The "losers'' are those who live with the consequences of global inequalities, while the "winners" are nations that historically benefited from colonisation and continued imperialism. They win the most Olympic medals with the largest delegations; their athletes are generally more privileged and can access the most advanced sports infrastructure and the time and training needed to get an edge. - Large-scale Greenwashing
In a recent article, Boykoff wrote, "[t]he Olympics are a sustainability nightmare." Scholars have concluded that the IOC is one of the largest culprits of greenwashing in the sporting world. Many of its sponsors are involved in large-scale greenwashing. Environmental watchdogs have slammed Paris for lack of transparency and confused communication regarding their efforts to lower the games' carbon footprint. - Who profits from the Olympics?
The Olympic games are the largest and costliest spectacle in the world. Sports-related costs are 12 billion dollars, and non-sports expenses are several times higher. Yet the average Olympic athlete remains poor, and workers are exploited. However, the IOC, a private entity, earns billions. Though it claims to put back money into athletes, this is widely known as untrue. The IOC is a powerful and unaccountable entity. Giant corporations, the prime beneficiaries of capitalism, showcase their brands in the world’s biggest spectacle.
According to former Olympian and author Jules Boykoff, the Olympics should be labelled celebration capitalism, a massively lopsided public-private partnership in favour of private entities. Deliberate misinformation about the cost and cost overruns are common during the Olympics, misleading the public that ends up paying.