ABSTRACT
With the 1970s growth of critical sport scholarship in universities around the world, it was not long before scholars began to turn their attention to the Olympic Games. In 1984, British sociologists Alan Tomlinson and Garry Whannel sought to produce an inexpensive, easy-to-read paperback that would bring the insights from this scholarship to the broad public in the months immediately before the Los Angeles Games. They collaborated with Pluto Press, an independent left-wing publishing house. This article was written for that collection. It was intended to dispel the widely held beliefs in the trans-historical continuities between the games of antiquity and those of the modern period, and to introduce the recent, revisionist, social history. I argued that equating both ancient and modern, as the International Olympic Committee often did, distorted the nature of both classical and modern games and the complex, uneven, and contingent process of human history. I also argued that the myth of trans-historical games also helped obscure the explicitly political origins of both ancient and modern games, and the extent to which the organization of, participation in, and communication of sport – even the sport forms themselves – contribute to and are shaped by the political process. At the time, I was chair of the Canadian Olympic Association’s Olympic Academy of Canada and distributed this article to participants. I felt that it takes nothing away from the modern Olympic Games and the humanitarian ambitions of the Olympic Movement to ask that they be understood completely on their own terms, in the economic, political, and social contexts of the world today.
