ABSTRACT
If the original aspirations of the Coubertin Olympics were taken seriously as guiding principles, what would the games look like? This paper, published in 1990, grew out of my work with the Olympic Academy of Canada and Toronto’s bid for the 1996 Olympics, but it was prepared as an intervention in the debates about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the wake of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s disqualification for steroids from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. While some argued that the use of steroids by Johnson and his teammates was an isolated case, limited to a single club led by a rogue coach, others contended that the practice was far more widespread and systemic. I felt that it was a consequence of the ideology of excellence and the unrelenting pursuit of the podium advocated by states such as Canada, the sports media complex, and the leadership of the Olympic Movement, structured by the financial incentives they created. Under such circumstances, systemic change was extremely difficult to undertake, let alone contemplate. The first step, I argued, was to imagine another approach, one that recaptured the intercultural aspirations of Pierre de Coubertin and applied them to the different conditions of the late twentieth century. This paper constituted one such attempt. It proposes that the Games be renovated as a festival of competition, intercultural exchange and service.
