Who says sport and politics don mix?
WAITING to fly home from the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, I spent a few hours at an exhibition at the University of Utah entitled Hitler’s Olympics. I was left with a stark impression of how the rest of the world must have been aware in 1936 of Hitler’s agenda, especially of the extent to which he already was persecuting Jews, yet by and large turned a blind eye. A boycott was proposed in the US, but thwarted by the president of the American Olympic Committee. Extraordinarily, two Jewish American sprinters were denied the chance to compete because of a misguided sense of politeness to the Nazis. Meantime, the New York Times proclaimed that the imminent Olympics would put Germany “back in the family of nations again”. The Berlin Games were a massive propaganda exercise. Even Jesse Owens’ famous harvest of medals and records, which seemingly was an affront to Hitler’s theory of Aryan supremacy, worked in his favour; it demonstrated notional tolerance. The Olympic Games are a b
