When Coubertin wrote his 1896 story about the Greek marathoner who avoided “a very great danger” when he declined to accept the fiscal spoils of victory, the baron touched upon financial forces that would almost immediately begin building bridges across the moat protecting his religious sporting project from ignoble commerce. Only it wasn’t so much athletes taking money that would run his chaste-minded event aground on the shoals of trade. Instead, it was unwitting Olympic organizers and savvy businessmen with products to sell.
Signs of the Olympic transition away from amateur innocence began as early as 1928, when the Amsterdam Olympic organizing committee sold advertising rights to Coca-Cola. When IOC officials arrived in Holland and saw Coke signs affixed to the walls of the Olympic stadium, they were outraged by the violation of Coubertin’s rise-above-money founding values. As Olympic historians Ian Ritchie and Rob Beamish explain in their 2006 book Fastest, Highest, Strongest, for the IOC, the Coke decision “transformed Coubertin’s sacred Games into a colossal billboard that celebrated the profane world of modern commerce.”1
In spite of the IOC’s protests about commercialization, four years later at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the IOC was forced to wade into the muck of commerce and gain control of the licensing of Olympic symbols. In advance of the events, the Los Angeles organizing committee contracted Culver City’s Paul Helms Bakery to deliver bread to 40 athlete mess halls. Helms was a bread and doughnut impresario whose delivery trucks were seen all over Los Angeles’s sprawling roadways. Before the Games came to town, the baker had the foresight to register the Olympic insignia, the term “Olympic,” and the motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” in all the U.S. states plus then-territories Hawaii and the Philippines. To Helms’s delight and amazement, the IOC had not registered any of its symbols, so the trademarks were his for the taking. Helms marketed his bread by packaging loaves in the colors of 19 different Olympic nations. After the close of the Olympics, he continued to advertise his bread on billboards and radio, always prominently capitalizing on the distinctive five interlocking rings and the motto “Official Olympic Supplier.” (Today, Angelenos still drive past a neon Helms Olympic Bread sign above the Helms Bakery District shopping mall in Culver City.)
When U.S. Olympic Association president and recently appointed IOC member Avery Brundage got wind that a flour-coated L.A. baker had hitched his bread business to the amateur Olympic train, he was furious. As head of the USOA (predecessor to today’s U.S. Olympic Committee) in 1938, Brundage paper-stormed Helms with letters demanding that he cease associating his loaves, doughnuts, and angel food cake with sacred Olympic traditions. Unfortunately for the IOC, the law was on Helms’s side. Because the baker registered them first, Helms owned the rights to the Olympic symbols. He also possessed a legally binding contract with the Los Angeles Organizing Committee granting him sole rights to use the Olympic brand in his advertising.
Famously hot-headed, Brundage sued. The lawsuit dragged on for more than a decade until Helms settled in 1950 and granted many of his intellectual property rights to the rings and Olympic mottos to the IOC. Having a California baker snatch the entire stable of Olympic symbols from IOC control jolted the Olympic organizers from amateur fantasyland into commercial reality. In 1949, the IOC instructed all its national organizing committees to register the Olympic brand in their countries.2
Recall that in 1935, Coubertin admitted to Swiss radio listeners that it was difficult to confine sports to an artificially imposed moral code because the essence of sports is pushing human performance to unnatural plateaus, not seeking moral character. At the same time Coubertin was expressing his evolving views on amateurism from a Geneva studio, across the Swiss-German border, Adolph Hitler was preparing to host Germany’s first Olympic Games.
In 1936, German pride was still injured by the nation’s humiliating defeat in World War I. The unrelenting terms of 1919’s Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to disarm, relinquish territories, and formally accept responsibility for causing the global conflict. In order to establish a footing for extracting financial reparations from Germany to rebuild towns and cities—retreating German soldiers laid waste to northern France—the treaty’s so-called “War Guilt Clause” pinned all the blame for World War I on Germany. As the Berlin Olympics neared, Germans still burned with resentment, especially since their tax dollars had funded the reconstruction of Belgian and French industrial and mining centers during the very years the Great Depression carpet-bombed the German economy. Hitler fueled his rise to chancellor with populist, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish rhetoric that promised to end his countrymen’s collective mortification. The Olympics would allow Germany to reassert itself on the international stage as a winner, not a loser.
On the morning of August 1, 1936, Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate was a joyous explosion of hanging swastikas and fluttering Olympic flags. The pageantry celebrated the arrival of a lithe, square-jawed German runner named Fritz Schilgen. The last runner in an Olympic torch relay that had begun some 2,000 miles earlier in Olympia, Greece, the 30-year-old Schilgen’s entrance into Berlin marked the opening of a sporting marketing event that would show Germany was great again. As Schilgen ran past the thousands of fans lining the route into Berlin’s Olympic stadium, they admired both his good looks and his torch, a sleek work of high industrial art designed by Nazi party sculptor Walter Lemcke and milled by German arms maker Krupps. The torch flame was ignited in Greece by a mirror milled by German optics company Zeiss. The Nazis had invented this 3,000-runner relay as an Olympic marketing novelty to amplify the can-do grandeur of the Third Reich; throughout the relay, the torchbearers were shadowed by a German Opel car carrying a spare torch. In the eight short years since Coca-Cola signs had horrified IOC members in Amsterdam, first corporate and now political symbolism had engulfed Coubertin’s dream of self-effacing amateur endeavor. The Nazi Olympics demonstrated how spectacle and carefully managed symbol placements could market things, nations, and ideologies to a skeptical marketplace.
Two years before the Berlin games, historian, technology philosopher, and New Yorker writer Lewis Mumford published Technics and Civilization. Mumford’s 1934 book explores how industrialized society created a demand for professional sports. Sport that was once an unremunerated human diversion became a product in itself: entertainment. “Mass-sport is primarily a spectacle,” Mumford wrote of the transformation of sport from personal recreation to mass distraction. Industrial-era workers were so wrung by factory life that they needed to vicariously experience “difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life sense.” And watching sports had a physiological effect on the spectator. At a football game, a properly engaged fan “pounds his neighbor’s back or embraces him,” depending on how his team is progressing. Being a spectator offered “relief from the passive role of taking orders and automatically filling them,” Mumford wrote.3
Mumford also argued that we derive aesthetic pleasure from sports the way we do from art. “The spectator knows the style of his favorite contestants in the way that the painter knows the characteristic line or palette of his master,” Mumford explained.4 Fans can identify a favorite cyclist by his pedal stroke, a runner by her stride, and a soccer player by the way he kicks a ball. Mumford argued that we fill stadiums and gather around sports broadcasts because the chance-riddled exploits of sports heroes return suspense, excitement, and aesthetic pleasure to mechanized lives. At a time when the legacy of turn-of-the-20th-century scientific management guru Frederick Winslow Taylor was still working to eliminate inefficiency, randomness, and wasted time from home and factory, sport offered a place where elements of serendipity and uncertainty still enlivened our days. The bane of modern society—inefficiency brought about by uncontrolled variables—was the lifeblood of pro sports. As Mumford explained in his popular book, what industrial society took away, sports brought back. The latent monetary value in sports as spectacle grew proportionally with the industrialization and systemization of early 20th-century life. Mumford’s is a critical concept, for the social utility and financial value he saw building in popular sports was about to be unlocked by the Olympics that Coubertin originally intended to preserve amateurism.
From sleep to nutrition, training to equipment, Mumford proposed that sporting excellence demands absolute dedication to craft, to the exclusion of all other aspects of a balanced life. The sports hero “represents the summit of the amateur’s efforts, not at pleasure but at efficiency,” he wrote. And the essence of technology is to enhance these efforts. From moving pictures to perfume, sexual performance to warfare, Mumford argued that technology delivers “a greater intensification of life.” And we love to watch what’s intense. Like a management consultant analyzing a factory floor, by controlling as many variables as possible, athletes, working with their trainers and doctors, compound marginal gains that in turn allow them to break the bounds of human performance—and feed the fans’ desire for record-smashing spectacle. “Sport, which was originally a drama, becomes an exhibition,” Mumford concluded just two years before Hitler’s Olympics.5
To a degree unprecedented in sports history, the 1936 Games capitalized on Mumford’s notions of sport as show and presented Germany’s elite athletes as the acme of Nazi efficiency. The 1936 Olympics entertained by removing fans from the grimness of the seventh year of a crippling global economic depression while also selling Aryan ideology to a world that was thirsty for both scapegoats and solutions.
The 1936 Olympics were the first to be broadcast live on television and radio. Closed-circuit television viewers even saw events live. This was a miraculous collapse of time and space. Events that previously reached the world through the delayed network of newspapers and magazines, or through the visually incomplete medium of radio, now reached viewers instantly. To ensure a lasting legacy, the German Olympic Committee commissioned pioneering filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make a documentary about the games. Riefenstahl’s 3.5-hour film, Olympia, used cinematic angles and techniques that were astonishingly fresh at the time, including angles of marathon runners that seem like they were shot with a GoPro, not a creaking film camera on a truck. As historians Beamish and Ritchie explain, the 1936 Olympics were “a finely crafted aesthetic” designed to celebrate white supremacy and distribute Nazi ideology to the most remote corners of the planet.6 These Olympics both cast the template for the multibillion-dollar Olympic games we know today and profoundly challenged Coubertin’s amateur ethos.
The transformation of the 1936 Olympics into a sales vehicle also forced the United States to make ethical compromises that would foreshadow later USOC efforts to shield American athletes and Olympic sponsors from doping scandals. Two hours before the 400-meter relay track event, American Olympic authorities benched the only Jewish athletes on the track and field team, relay runners Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman.
According to Glickman, head track coach Lawson Robertson explained this stunning decision by claiming the Germans had decided to put two of their strongest sprinters on their relay squad. It has long been argued that Robertson’s excuse was a smokescreen, and that the real reason two Jews didn’t put their feet in blocks beneath Hitler’s stadium seat was that Brundage did not want to spit in the Olympic soup by embarrassing the German leader. Demonizing Jews was a fulcrum of Hitler’s rise to power. Having American Jews on a winning team would have put Brundage’s host in an uncomfortable position.7
Brundage led the IOC from 1952 to 1972 and was a member of the America First Committee, an isolationist organization that had agitated to keep the United States out of World War II and leave European Jews to their own devices to deal with Hitler. Throughout his 20 years of IOC leadership, Brundage was adamant that political concerns should be walled off from the Olympics and that the Games should not be commercialized. In spite of Brundage’s claims that he wanted the Games to remain a peaceable kingdom apart from the shilling of product or political ideology, a bitter Glickman later contended, “The decision to keep the only two Jewish athletes on the United States team out of the competition was made by American Nazis.” Before his death in 1980, Glickman told New York Times reporter Bud Greenspan that Brundage and track coach Dean Cromwell were “sympathetic to Nazis.”8
While Hitler demonstrated the Olympic capacity to deliver national propaganda (and get Americans to violate athletes’ rights in deference to Nazi sensitivities), the story of the Adidas shoe company reveals the continuing discovery of the five rings’ capacity to sell products. The shoe company’s success also illustrates how inevitable it was that Coubertin’s idealism and founding intentions would be swamped by the commercial potential inherent to his creation’s global success; defending his commitment to a manufactured fantasy of chivalric purity became practically impossible under the weight of the Olympics’ astonishing commercial potential.
Since the 1920s, German cobbler Adi Dassler had worked in a shoe business with his father and brother. In 1948, a feud split the family, and Dassler went off on his own to create a new shoe brand called Adidas. Dassler’s company competed with Puma, a brand his father and brother, Rudolf Dassler, continued to run. Adi Dassler had spent years at track meets. A keen listener, his hundreds of afternoons hanging around athletes and their trainers gave him a fine understanding of athletes’ shoe needs. The Adidas motto, “Function First,” came to represent the upstart outfit’s reputation as a company that made serious shoes for dedicated athletes. When Germany won the 1954 World Cup soccer tournament, many attributed the victory to the ingenious screw-on studs on the bottom of their Adidas shoes. When the world press attributed this national victory to a shoe brand and technical innovation, it was a signal moment in sports marketing history: Being associated with winners generated massive free publicity.
The first company to supply entire teams with shoes and give footwear to stars, Adidas took forceful steps to ensure that its brand shared the Olympic mystique that came with Coubertin’s efforts to make the Games a matter of celestial high-mindedness. The forging of that link began at the 1936 Games, where Dassler arrived in Berlin toting a suitcase full of shoes and convinced black American sprinter Jesse Owens to wear a pair of Adidas spikes.
In one of the Games’ most anticipated events, German long-jumper Carl “Lutz” Long uncorked a 7.87-meter flight. Observing from a perch in the 110,000-seat Olympic stadium, Hitler was delighted. With the “racially inferior” Owens up next, Hitler was sure his boy had both victory and the glorification of Aryan superiority in the bag. Owens stood silently on his mark. The clock drained 30 seconds. A minute. The crowd murmured, shifted in seats, spared glances at Hitler. After two full minutes of concentration, Owens launched. Like a rock from a slingshot, the black American let fly an 8.06-meter gold-medal leap. While Hitler fumed, a gracious Lutz wrapped Owens in a congratulatory hug. On the podium, Owens offered a crisp American military salute while Lutz extended his stiffened right arm in Nazi salutation. And as Hitler’s dreams of Aryan superiority crashed, Dassler’s visions of shoe domination soared. Photos of the podium ceremony streamed off presses around the world—every one showing Owens’s top-of-the-podium feet clad in Adidas.
Owens won four gold medals in Berlin. Despite the fact that his skin color excluded him from many restaurants and hotels in his home country, this son of an Alabama sharecropper became an international sensation. The cause of Hitler’s Olympic irritation turned Dassler shoes into an object of desire—Adidas were top shelf. After the Owens coup, athletes and coaches traveling through Germany would stop by the Dassler shoe factory to see a display containing Owens’s shoes.9
By the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Adidas was in a battle royal with Puma and Onitsuka, the maker of a lesser Japanese shoe called Tiger. Dassler sent his son Horst to Melbourne to ensure that his shoes got onto feet that would end up in the press. Avery Brundage had become IOC president in 1952, and in Melbourne, the American still jealously defended Coubertin’s amateur ethos. In an effort to protect them from the perils of sport for financial reward, the IOC prohibited Olympic athletes from accepting free products. As a result, athletes had to buy their own equipment or get it from their national Olympic federations. However, you could drive an Adidas delivery truck through a loophole in the rule—IOC regulations allowed athletes to select “technical equipment” needed for their sport, even if it was given to them. For Adidas, there was no equipment more technical than its Function First footwear. Every day was about to become Christmas in Melbourne.
Horst gave Adidas technical equipment to any athlete who asked. To grease the asking, Horst filled a Melbourne sporting goods store with boxes of shoes that quickly became known as Melbourne spikes. He invited entire teams to drop by and pick up free gear. It was an offer few unpaid athletes could refuse. Rival Puma had quality control problems and its shoes fell apart on the Melbourne track. Meanwhile, Tiger spent an astonishing 30 billion yen on Olympic promotions but focused on long-distance running. Although the Olympics floated along on the spirit of amateurism, that raft was riding on a rapidly rising river of sponsor money.
In the 400-meter relay, the three top runners wore Adidas, including winner Bobby Morrow, a Texas farmer’s son who left his team-supplied Wilson shoes behind because he preferred the German cleats. A finish photo put Morrow and Adidas on the cover of Life magazine. Adidas’s free shoes gambit was delivering priceless brand exposure at no more expense than Horst’s ticket to Australia and the shoes’ production cost. In spite of the efforts of Puma and Tiger to counter Adidas’s completely un-IOC-sanctioned momentum as the “Olympic” brand, athletes wearing Adidas took home 72 medals. Olympic victory became synonymous with the three Adidas stripes.
At the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, Adidas surreptitiously offered athletes cash bonuses for wearing its shoes. Although sponsorship payments were strictly banned by Brundage, whose nickname among athletes was “Slavery Avery,” Adidas had ways of getting around the IOC’s soul-saving strictures. American sprinter Henry Carr recalled transactions going down “like in the James Bond or mystery movies.” An envelope-carrying Adidas rep would visit a predetermined bathroom stall. After the representative left the toilet, the athlete would slip in, pick up the envelope, and depart a wealthier amateur. “You get an envelope that had six, seven hundred or a couple of thousand dollars in fives and tens,” Carr recalled. “You thought you were rich.” Adidas’s lavatory efforts paid handsome dividends; by the October 24 closing ceremonies, 99 athletes had medaled in Adidas shoes, far eclipsing the results turned in by Puma- and Tiger-shod contenders.10
Four years later, shoemakers like Adidas and Puma primed the marketing pump in advance of the 1968 Mexico City Games by showing up at the U.S. Olympic trials in Lake Tahoe and casually leaving envelopes full of cash in locker rooms. Olympians joked that the losers in Lake Tahoe were not the athletes who failed to qualify, but the schmucks who flew out of the Reno airport without a pocket full of shoe company cash.
Competition for Olympic eyeballs had become so fierce that in the run-up to the 1968 Games, Adidas was able to forge a blatantly illegal deal with the Mexican Olympic committee, giving the company exclusive rights to sell shoes in the Olympic Village. When Puma tried to ship a container of products to the Mexican capital, Mexican police kidnapped Puma representative Art Simburg as he walked through the Olympic Village. Simburg spent five days in jail without charges before the U.S. State Department freed the hapless salesman. Once he was out, the U.S. government was so concerned for Simburg’s safety that it kept him under guard for the remainder of the proceedings. While the Mexico City Games were still technically run in the spirit of Coubertin’s amateur ideal, events on the ground made it clear that the Olympics were making an impressive shift toward a profit-oriented value system that had little patience for quaint fiction-book principles about life and sports unburdened by fiscal striving.11
Olympic marketing attained astronomical reach on October 16, 1968, when American 200-meter-dash winner Tommie Smith and third-place finisher John Carlos mounted a Mexico City podium wearing black socks, black scarves, and black gloves. As the national anthem played, they raised clenched fists in solidarity with the oppressed at home and around the world. For Brundage, this assertion of human rights by two black Americans was an unforgivable violation of the Olympic oath. He immediately kicked the runners off the Olympic team. Brundage’s firing trigger was primed by Smith and Carlos’s earlier efforts to rally a boycott of the Games in protest of what they saw as IOC exploitation of amateur athletes while the organization itself raked in ever-increasing amounts of money. And though Smith and Carlos suffered, shoe manufacturers won. Wearing only socks in solidarity with those in the world who could not afford shoes, Smith brought a single Puma to the podium with him, where he placed it next to his feet. That single Puma shoe became an indelible element in one of the most resonant images in the history of American civil rights.
By the 1972 Munich Olympics, the notion that the Games were an amateur paradise plucked from the playing fields of Chariots of Fire was near farce. An American swimmer named Mark Spitz won seven gold medals. After Spitz won his second gold, Horst Dassler proposed that Adidas sponsor him. Horst was planning a new swimwear line called Arena. Getting Spitz to wear Adidas was a way for Arena—until then a small Spanish soccer ball company—to force its way onto the pool deck next to the dominant Australian swim gear maker Speedo. Although Spitz also agreed to a shoe deal, Horst still had a problem; swimmers wore sweatpants with wide leg bottoms so that they could quickly dress and undress poolside. The wide bottoms obscured the three-striped shoes on Spitz’s feet. But Spitz and Horst devised a solution. After Spitz won his second gold medal, he stepped onto the podium with his Adidas shoes in hand—an unusual move for swimmers most often seen barefoot or in sandals. During the “Star Spangled Banner,” Spitz dropped the shoes to his feet. Once the anthem finished, as cameras clattered and newsreels rolled, Spitz picked up his shoes and waved to the crowd.
The IOC was apoplectic. Spitz’s blatant use of the Olympic podium as a product display case was too much to overlook, especially since the money changing hands for this demonstration was not going into an IOC bank account. Spitz escaped a threatened Olympic investigation due to Adidas’s pull in Germany and because the IOC was unexpectedly confronted by a bigger terror. After his final event, Spitz, a Jew, was quickly spirited out of Germany due to concern he would be targeted by the Palestinian terrorists who had sneaked into the Olympic Village early in the morning of September 5 and killed 11.
After the Games, and after a speech in which Brundage equated the terrorist attacks with creeping pressure from commercialism—both forces that, in Brundage’s words, threatened the IOC’s efforts to keep the games “clear, pure, and honest”—Spitz retired from swimming.12 Unleashed from the constraints of Olympic amateurism, he signed a professional sponsor deal with Arena. Three years later, at the swimming world championships in Cali, Colombia, some two-thirds of the swimmers wore Arena gear. Thanks to the star power the Olympics had granted Mark Spitz, Adidas’s new swimwear line attained an industry-dominating position.13
According to the IOC, Olympic marketing programs put $2.63 billion in IOC bank accounts between 1992 and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. By the 2012 London Olympics, that number had grown to $8.05 billion, with $3.85 billon of it coming from broadcasting rights. The rest came from items like ticket sales and from licensing rights associated with each Games location, such as the $65 million British Airways paid to sponsor the 2012 Games. The Olympic Partners (TOP) program licenses global rights to corporations. For instance, Coca-Cola is the Olympic Partner in the “Non-Alcoholic Beverages” category, while McDonald’s pays for that honor in “Retail Food Services.” One of the reasons the Olympics command such gargantuan payola is that the chivalric spirit upon which Coubertin built the games still persists, providing a flattering spotlight that corporations want to shine on themselves. No matter how tenuous the connections between Coubertin’s morally restorative Games and the products and services those principles now sell, TOP is a cash cow for the IOC. TOP members pay in the neighborhood of $100 million to $200 million for the right to adorn their products and services with the five-ringed symbol of Coubertin’s Olympic fantasy.14
Back in 1934, Mumford described how professional sports give fans aesthetic pleasure and a sense of connection with something larger than themselves. He pointed out that as sports become bigger and more professional, they strive to eliminate chance, because randomness and luck—essential elements of fair play—are antithetical to the professional obligation to win at any cost. Sports for sports’ sake becomes an exhibition for commerce’s sake. “Instead of ‘Fair Play,’” he wrote, “the rule now becomes ‘Success at Any Price.’” While the Olympics were just on the cusp of realizing their massive commercial potential in 1934, Mumford saw that for sports, with their millions of dollars invested in arenas and equipment and players, the task of maintaining their profit-generating potential would become as important as in any other business or ethical concern. “Sport is always a means,” he wrote, the aim of which is to “gather a record-breaking crowd of performers and spectators” and thereby proclaim the importance of both the competition at hand and the companies that underwrite the myth of sports’ essential goodness.
As Mumford presciently noted, the informal games and races that initially arose on weekend fields and country lanes as a way for Industrial Revolution–era workers to blow off steam almost immediately became professionalized. The business maintenance of sports and the specialization of its elite athletes assumed elements of the industrial era’s “regimentation of life—for the sake of private profits or nationalistic exploit.”15 And in this marshaling of efficiencies in the interest of victory lay the impossibility of chemical purity for athletes.
In 1962, sports doctors from 14 European countries convened in Strasbourg and Madrid to discuss their nascent concerns about doping in sports. At this early gathering of sports medicine experts, the doctors frankly admitted that, regardless of what evidence might be discovered regarding harm caused by drugs, commercial forces would almost certainly see these revelations as a threat to their brand equity. At a subsequent 1963 meeting on doping in sports, Dr. Antonio Venerando, president of the Italian Federation of Sports Medicine, observed that as of late 1963, international sports federations had only paid attention to doping cases in exceptional instances, and then only “for the sake of publicity rather than with any intention of getting to the root of the evil.” As described in a 1964 Council of Europe (CoE) report on these working meetings, he added, “In some countries doping is undertaken almost officially with a view to ensuring brilliant performances and the establishment of records which can be exploited in the field of international politics regardless of the consequences to the individual athlete.”16 (Founded in 1949, the CoE is an umbrella organization of European countries that came together in the postwar years to promote a more humane version of Europe than what its denizens witnessed during the savagery of World War II.) Already in 1963, observers like Venerando knew that getting rid of doping would be a hard sell if it interfered with sports commerce or nationalistic interests. The obligations inherent to a corporation’s need to grow or a nation’s desire to expand its influence were about to radically complicate society’s conflicted, and radically changing, attitudes about the rightness or wrongness of drugs in sport.