INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

• The independence of sport
As Kidd notes, for Coubertin, “the Olympic Games were not
simply to be an athletic event, but the focal point of a broadly based
social movement which, through the activity of sport and play, would
enhance human development and generally make the world a better
place” (Kidd, 1992: 2). Despite this, Kidd is not unaware of the ways
in which such aspirations have been called into question by the
increasing prominence of the sport-media complex during Olympic
Games. Kidd’s consideration of these seven aspirations, as a result,
intentionally raises as many questions as it answers, because he
recognizes that these values are not uncontested and involve obvious
and inherent contradictions with one another. Contradictions that
Morgan suggests can be resolved by separating the sports that
comprise the Olympic programme from the values that inform the
quadrennial athletic celebration. He argues that “the political ideals of
Olympism have an international resonance to them that its official
program of sports do not” (Morgan, 1994: 21).
Hockey: The Games welcome the NHL
Ice hockey has been included within the Olympic programme
from the early incarnations of winter events, 1920 at Antwerp. It was
an event dominated by Canadian senior amateur teams until the
emergence of Soviet ice hockey in the 1950s. At the same time as
international ice hockey was developing, professional hockey was
becoming entrenched within the commercial sport economy in
Canada. With its expansion to the United States in the late-1920s, the
NHL became the dominant commercial hockey organization in North
America. With the Olympic’s strict amateur ideology, these two
hockey forms evolved in relative isolation, until NHL players were
deemed eligible for Olympic play beginning with the 1998 Nagano
Games.
A number of sport scholars have explored the sociology of ice
hockey and the game’s status within Canadian culture. “Hockey acts
as both myth and allegory in Canadian culture,” note Gruneau and
Whitson. “The game,” they continue, “has become one of this
country’s most significant collective representations-a story Canadians
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