cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

for the first Games, Greece, is also decisive: the discourse of Hellenic
excellence was still alive in 1896, when the Games took place in Athens,
despite the country’s economic collapse and political upheavals (Guttmann,
1988: 437; Gallant, 2002: 51). The involvement of nationalism and politics in
the Olympics is as enduring as the institution itself. We can note a few
notorious cases: American complaints about biased British Judges in the
Olympic elections of 1908; the resignation of an IOC British member when,
after the outbreak of the Great War, the German members of the Committee
were not ousted (Leiper, 1988: 332); the refusal of Canada to allow
Taiwanese athletes enter the country for the 1976 Olympics as competitors of
the ‘Republic of China’ (Berlioux, 1976).
The classicist-Orientalist discourse of Hellenic superiority influenced the
Olympic Charter, de Coubertin’s foundational document of the Games. The
document describes Olympism as ‘a philosophy of life’ that advocates the
merging of culture, sports and education. More significantly, Olympism ‘seeks
to create [...] respect for universal fundamental ethical principles’ (IOC, 1995
in Toohey and Veal, 1999: 51). The appeal to a universal norm of ethics is, in
effect, the universalisation of certain norms that derive from an imaginary
Hellenic civilisation - the ‘establishment of a peaceful society concerned with
the preservation of human dignity’, to quote the Olympic Chart again. This
may sound mere rhetoric, but it has an impact on political reality. The very
words of the Charter are manipulated in contemporary Greek political
discourse for internal and external consumption. The latter will become the