ABSTRACT
A year after the 1924 Paris Olympic Games, some 150,000 workers attended the first Worker Olympics, held in Frankfurt, Germany. Six years later, a year before the Los Angeles ‘official’ Olympic Games in which 1,408 athletes competed, over 100,000 worker athletes from twenty-six countries took part in the second Worker Olympics in Vienna; they were open to all, irrespective of ability, and watched by more than a quarter of a million people. Five years later, in opposition to the 1936 ‘Nazi’ Olympics in Berlin, an even grander Worker Olympics was planned for Barcelona (it never took place owing to the fascist putsch and execution of the would-be organizers of the games).
