The Modern Olympic Games: An Access to Ontology

QUEST, 1996,48,57-66
O 1996 National Association for Physical Education in Higher Education
The Modern Olympic Games:
An Access to Ontology
Jeffrey 0. Segrave and Don Chu
The modem Olympic Games have evolved from a late 19th century curiosity
into a cultural performance of truly global magnitude. This paper attempts
to explain the remarkable popularity of the Olympics on the basis of the
cultural performance theory of anthropologist John MacAloon and the more
sociopsychological perspective of sociologist John Loy. Specifically, it is
argued that the entire Olympic performance, as well as the performances of the
athletes themselves, offer individuals the opportunity to address profoundly
important existential questions about the nature of their personal and collective selves. In other words, every 2 years the Olympics offer us a mirror,
and in it, we look at ourselves.
From any perspective, the figures associated with the Olympic Games are
quite staggering. The total worldwide audience for the 1996 Centennial Games
in Atlanta will probably exceed half of the world's population. No wonder the
television networks are falling over each other for the rights to televise the
Games; no wonder the International Olympic Committee (IOC) accepted NBC's
preemptive bid of $1.27 billion for the joint rights for the 2000 Summer Games
in Sydney, Australia, and the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City; and no
wonder Coca-Cola is prepared to pay as much as $100 million in sponsorship
to hawk its product. Participants, including athletes, officials, technicians, commentators, and others, number in the tens of thousands, and media representatives
outnumber the athletes themselves. Ticket prices range from $6 to $250 for
athletic events, and from $200 to $600 for the opening and closing ceremonies.
Who knows how much scalpers will collect? Simply put, the Olympics are the
biggest sport show in town, and everyone, for one reason or another, wants a
piece of them.
There is one main question that emerges from all this: What is the source
of the massive spectatorial appeal of the modem Olympic Games? To give at
least a partial answer to this question, we wish to present a cultural perspective
that relies mainly on the cultural performance theory of anthropologist John
MacAloon (1982, 1984) and the more sociopsychologicalperspective of sociologist John Loy (1981). Ultimately, we wish to argue that the Olympic Games
Jeffrey 0. Segrave is with the Department of Physical Education and Dance at
Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. Don Chu is with the Department of
Physical Education at California State University at Chico in Chico, CA 95929.
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58
offer us an access to ontology; that is, they are an institutionalized cultural
performance that every 2 years permits--even exhorts-us to inquire into and
reflect upon the nature of our personal and collective selves. As Kidd (1992)
notes, "At the level of ideology, they illuminate competing notions of the public
good7' (p. 154); at the individual level, we would argue, they also express
competing notions of the private self.
The Genres of Olympism
MacAloon identifies four "genres of 0lympism"-spectacle, festival, ritual, and game+ach being a cultural performance type. The order "reflects a
passage from the most diffuse and ideologically centrifugal genres to the most
concentrated and ideologically centripetal" (MacAloon, 1984, p. 242). The order
also reflects-at least in some commonsensical way-the sequence with which
we might typically become drawn to the Olympic Games, each performance type
forcing us to address increasingly significant questions about the nature of our
personal and cultural existence.
Spectacle
In the lexical sense, spectacle connotes something awesome, wonderful,
or grandiose: As a performance genre, spectacle "gives primacy to visual sensory
and symbolic codes" (MacAloon, 1984, p. 243). Not all sights are spectacles,
only those of "a certain size and grandeur," those that "appeal to the eye by
their mass, proportions, color, or other dramatic qualities" (p. 243). Spectacles
also "institutionalize the bicameral roles of actors and audience, performers and
spectators" (p. 243). Everyone is drawn into the action. For as MacAloon (1984)
notes, spectacle "is a dynamic form, demanding movement, action, change, and
exchange on the part of the human actors who are center stage, and the spectators
must be excited in turn" (p. 244).
The Olympic Games are, of course, athletic spectacle par excellence. No
other sport institution offers the visual impact of the Olympics; no other production quite captures the epic or mythic quality of sport. The Olympics are, as
MacAloon (1984) rightly notes, "irreducibly visual . . . they must be seen, and
seen in person, to be believed" (p. 245). MacAloon (1984) captures the panoramic appeal of the Olympic spectacle well:
The crowds streaming toward vast stadiums of concrete and glass, enclosing
vibrant patches of brilliant green or burnished hardwood upon which athletes and officials in richly hued uniforms parade, process, and compete; the
city transformed by banners and emblems, sidewalk art shows, impromptu
dancers, singers, clowns, and street magicians; the hawkers of souvenirs
and drinks, the scalpers of tickets, spilling over into the streets, calling
their bids in a dozen different languages; the hundreds of ushers, police,
and civic authorities attempting to keep order among the thousands of
tourists and fans milling about or congregating in bunches to exchange
gossip, rumors, names, stories, and, lately, badges and emblems; the sheer
scale and intensity of it all. (p. 245)
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59
But beyond the generic bustle of the crowd and the buzz of the streets, the
entire Olympic performance is ablaze with the spectacle of a culture. Nowhere
is this more obvious than in the opening and closing ceremonies when host cities
dress up the Olympics in the garb of their own particular culture. It is here, by
design, that cultures make a true spectacle of themselves in public, vaunting their
particular way of life with its traditions and style, in grandiose and flamboyant
fashion. And so, during the 1984 Los Angeles Games, we became witness to
the wagon trains of the west; during the 1988 Seoul Games we wondered at the
Go No-Ri game, "Korean culture and tradition in its most dramatic form," as
television announcer Dick Enberg opined; and during the 1992 Barcelona Games
we watched the tower builders of Catalonia (Los Castieres). Even at this level,
then, the most visual, we are exhorted to confront ourselves as members of
particular cultural groups, and in so doing, address questions about the nature
of our cultural existence. As MacAloon (1984) notes, "our comrades and strangers
are forced into the role of spectators to our unusual behavior" (p. 244).
Festival
While spectacle denotes no particularized style or mood, festival does.
Festival specifically connotes joy, happiness, and celebration, and the festival
genre involves both mood and program. The festive atmosphere that surrounds
the Olympics is one of its most important and appealing ingredients. In fact, we
feel betrayed and resentful when the spell is broken, as in the case of the 1972
Munich Olympics when the symmetries of harmony, balance, and time were
shattered by the intrusion of the Black September. In less dramatic terms, Moniques Berlioux, the former executive director of the Intemationai Olympic Committee, once fueled a controversy in Montreal when she complained that the
austerity of the facilities, the omnipresence of security forces, and the general
drabness of the city itself lacked an appropriately joyous air.
The Olympics are often defined and framed in terms of festival. Coubertin
himself wrote: "If anyone were to ask me the formula for 'Olympizing' oneself,
I should say to him, 'the first condition is to be joyful"' (1967, p. 57). Coubertin
also called the Games a "festival of human unity" (1967, p. 131), "the quarterly
celebration of human springtime" (1959, p. 220), and, demonstrating a remarkable insight into the dialectical relationship between the genres of spectacle and
festival, he once feared that the Games might become "only theatrical displays,
pointless spectacles" (1967, p. 131). Leni Riefenstahl, the celebrated director of
the 1936 Berlin Olympics film, called Part 1 of her almost 6-hour production,
"Festival of the People," and Part 2, "Festival of Beauty."
Moreover, the Olympic program builds the festival quality into the Games
when the formal march-by of athletes by nation-states during the opening ceremonies is replaced by the free-for-all entrance during the closing ceremonies. Lights,
song, music, dancing, costume, and fireworks convert the Olympic stadium into
a giant discotheque, and participants are exhorted, in the infamous words of
Lionel Ritchie, the artist commissioned to write and perform the theme song of
the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, to "party all night long." And here, once again,
we are drawn into communion with our selves and the nature of our social
existence, as host cities celebrate their own cultural life in their own inimical
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fashion. Few countries other than Spain could glorify the Olympic festival with
the voices of Montserrat Caballe, Joan Pons, Luciano Pavarotti, Teresa Berganza,
Placedo Domingo, and Jose Carreras.
Ritual
Ritual connotes "repetitive, proscribed, or patterned behavior," and invokes and involves religious or sacred forces, mythic and divine images. Ritual
also involves symbols working together in a system of objects, actions, and
sound. Ritual action not only marks off social or spiritual transformations, it
actually effects them (MacAloon, 1984). As MacAloon (1984) notes, "the efficacy of ritual within the ongoing process of group life is dependent upon the
ritual's capacity to place actors into direct, relatively unmediated contact with
the very ground of structure itself" (p. 251). Anthropologist Terrence Turner
(1977) argues that
the basic principle of the effectiveness of ritual action . . . is its quality as
a model or embodiment of the hierarchical relationships between a conflicted or ambiguous set of relations and some higher-level principle that
serves, at least for ritual purposes, as its generative mechanism or transcendental ground. (p. 6)
The transcendent ground of the Olympic ritual is of course the notion
of humanity, and from the very beginning Coubertin emphasized the central
importance of ritual: "It will be realized," he wrote in 1910,
that the question of the "ceremonies" is one of the most important to
settle. It is primarily through the ceremonies that the Olympiad must distinguish itself from a mere series of world championships. The Olympiad
calls for a solemnity and a ceremonial which would be quite out of keeping
were it not for the prestige which accrues to it from its titles of nobility.
(1967, p. 34)
The entire Olympic ritual operates as a complex network of rites, ceremonies, and symbols, involving flags, dress, torches, flames, hymns, choirs, insignia,
and oaths (MacAloon, 1978). MacAloon (1984) has demonstrated how the ritual
performance of the Olympics is organized around the rites of passage first recognized by Van Lennep, with the opening ceremonies serving as the rites of
separation, the games themselves and the victory ceremonial serving as the rites
of intensification, and the closing ceremonies serving as the rites of closure and
reaggregation with the normative order.
Embued with a religious motif from the very beginning, the Olympics have
consistently been described in religious and pseudoreligious terms. Coubertin
(1959) himself conceived of sport as "a religion with church, dogma, cult . . .
but especially with religious feeling" (p. 107). Olympism, specifically, he wrote,
is based on "the idea of a religion of sport, the religio athletae" (p. 218). "The
central idea" of the Olympic Games revival was that "modern athletics is a
religion, a cult, an impassioned soaring" (1959, p. 118). Like the renovator,
Avery Brundage, too, conceived of the Games in religious terms:
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61
The Olympic Movement is a twentieth century religion, a religion with
universal appeal which incorporates the basic values of other religions, a
modern exciting, virile, dynamic religion, attractive to the youth, and we
of the International Olympic Committee are its disciples. (quoted in Bulletin
du Comite International Olympique, 1964, p. 3 1)
Carl Diem called the 1936 Berlin Olympics "equal to a church festivity" (quoted
in Horrmann, 1966, p. 24), and the Olympic athlete "a disciple of the religion
of sports" (quoted in Coubertin, 1959, p. 107). In 1964, as the Olympic flame
was lit, a woman in the dress of a Greek high priestess addressed prayers to
Zeus.
The Olympics then emerged as a religious system, heavily dependent upon
a complex symbiosis of religious rituals and ceremonies and publicly described
in terms of a phiiosophico-religious doctrine. Von Kortzfleisch (1970) describes
the Olympics as a "religiously tainted secular institution or a secularized cult,"
a sort of ''secular super- religion" dependent on a "religious-secular syncretism"
(p. 235)-a conception that renders the Games appealing to both Christians and
atheists alike.
At this level, too, spectators are drawn into communion with themselves.
Symbols, of course, serve as particularly powerful lightening rods for the location
and construction of self. As Geertz (1973) writes,
Sacred symbols function to synthesizea people's ethos-the tone, character,
and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood-their
world-view-the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are,
their most comprehensive ideas of order. (p. 98)
The entire ritualized performance of the Games permits individuals to address
important existential questions about the nature of their personal and collective
selves, particularly questions about their shared humankindness, what it means
to be a member of, what MacAloon (1978) calls, "a cult of humanity" (p. 165).
As MacAloon (1984) writes,
In Olympic rituals, the symbols of generic individual and national identities
are assembled and arrayed in such a way as to model, or to attempt to
model, the shared humanity that is both the ground of the structural divisions
the symbols condense and portray as well as the ultimate goal of Olympic
ideology and practice. (p. 25 1)
Game
The final of MacAloon's four genres of cultural performance is game, and
as MacAloon points out, games and play-forms in general are perhaps the most
paradoxical of all cultural processes. Although as formal structures, "games
always involve fixed rules, predetermined roles, defined goals, and built-in criteria
for evaluating the quality of the performance," nowhere has sport become more
entrenched than in societies "typified by individual autonomy, optional and
diversified role choice, contempt for coercive norms or for the voluntary accep-
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tance of such norms, cultural pluralism, and class and status stratification"
(MacAloon, 1984, p. 254).
The affective spectrum of sport is also polarized. On the one hand it is
entertaining, fun, enjoyable and lighthearted; on the other hand, it is typically
characterized by the utmost seriousness and earnestness. On the motivational/
functional level, games are "the veritable type of free, voluntary activity" (MacAloon, 1984, p. 255), autotelic and iconic in nature; yet they have important and
profound psychological, economic, political, and social consequences. Finally,
as semantic/symbolic/communicative systems, games at one level seem absolutely
simple, yet the meaning of games is profoundly paradoxical.
In sociological terms, sport possesses both instrumental and expressive
dimensions. The instrumental dimension involves the use of sport for specifically
extrinsic purposes, as in the case of commercial/political exploitation, for example. As Brohm (1978) asserted,
if a balance sheet is drawn up of the last four or five Olympics, the sorry
conclusion must be that they form part of an economic system of waste,
uncontrolled affluence and the large display of luxury, while the rest of
the planet is sunk in famine and ignorance. The Olympics objectively form
part of imperialism's development at the expense of the third world. The
Games allow third world countries to witness, through the medium of
television, the exhibitionist displays of the bourgeois world, gorged and
wallowing in the prodigalities of the consumer spectacle. (p. 12)
In its most expressive sense, sport offers "occasional experiences of ecstasy
and a sublime release from the instrumental concerns of everyday life" (Loy,
1981, p. 274). As Curt Sachs has so effectively put it, the athlete and the spectator,
like the dancer, "gives himself over to the supreme delights of play prescribed
by custom, gives himself over to the exhilaration which carries him away from
the monotony of everyday life, from palpable reality, from the sober facts of
existence" (quoted in Halmos, 1952, p. 113). The expressive dimension involves
sport as an expression of our inner, ontological selves. It is the expressive
dimension that I am interested in here; a dimension that permits--even forces-us
to ask the fundamentally existential question, Who am I? This, I wish to argue,
is at the heart of our obsession with sport in general and the Olympic Games in
particular.
Sport as an Expressive Model
As Loy (1981) has pointed out, sports as game forms are an important
subset of a larger class of expressive models, including art, dance, folktales, and
myths. In general, expressive models serve two basic functions:
They provide a way of teaching people (particularly the young) some ways
of getting important things done; they also provide a kind of therapy,
allowing an individual who is in some cultural conflict to live for a time
in an easier fantasy world whose expressive models evade the actual world
that troubles him. (Lambert & Lambert, 1973, p. 155)
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63
Sport allows us to exist for a while in a safe world, a "cozy comer," to use
Deford's (1985) description, a world free from interference and consequence
(Henricks, 1988).
Because sport tends to occur on what Lewin (1944) once called "a plane
of unreality," it is particularly suitable as a buffered learning experience, a
context in which individuals can play with potentially harmful psychological and
emotional problems (see Roberts & Sutton-Smith, 1962). In this safe world we
can play with our most fundamental personal and cultural tensions and anxieties.
It is an idealized world-where NFL umpires mete out justice correctly 95% of
the time-but a world in which we can address basic existential questions of
personal and cultural significance, and in the process confront the nature of our
true, ontological selves. Sport, in this very powerful sense, offers us a window
into our very souls, an access to our ontology.
Sport and the Olympic Games (especially the Olympic Games) are like
stories, fairy tales in which "we appropriate living persons and turn them into
abstract members of social groups and ideal representations of that which we
wish ourselves as a people to be" (MacAloon, 1982, p. 109). Loy (1981), for
example, has argued that Olympic athletic performances provide spectators with
"identity voyages" through which individuals achieve vicarious identification
with relevant role models: "Spectators through the process of identification with
the outstanding performances of 'generalized others' can experience a degree of
'vicarious success' which serves to enhance their own 'self-esteem' and sense
of 'moral worth' " (p. 277). Athletic performances encapsulate the hopes, dreams,
experiences, and prejudices of individuals, social groups, and nation-states alike.
The history of the Olympic Games may, in the end, be viewed as the stories of
athletes whose successes have increasingly attracted the attention of a worldwide
audience and whose performances have increasingly provided spectators with a
meaningful vehicle upon which to project their own expectations and anxieties.
Olympic performances resound with core personal and cultural themes
and anxieties. As spectators, we confront important existential questions made
concrete in the performances of living athletes. In sport in general, and in the
Olympics in particular, these questions take on viscerally and emotionally powerful forms, as spectators seek answers to such existential questions as, What am
I? Who am I? Am I what I ought to be?--questions that address issues of moral
character, moral stratification, and moral superiority.
Loy (198 I), for example, has shown how extraordinary individual Olympic
athletic performances model the four attributes of moral character related to the
management of fateful events--courage, gameness, integrity, and composure.
Specifically, Loy offers downhill skier Franz Klammer's daring 1976 Olympic
performance as an example of the public display of courage; winter Olympians
Jill Kinmont's and Phil Mahre's suffering and struggle to return from injury as
examples of gameness; Paavo Nurmi and Emile Zatopek as models of integrity;
and seriously injured Japanese gymnast Shun Fujimoto's heroic performance on
both the pommel horse and rings as. the public expression of composure.
Likewise, MacAloon (1982) has argued that we construct texts out of
Olympic performances in order to tell ourselves stories about our rivals, and in
the process (and in the end), stories about ourselves. In particular, MacAloon
details Americans' reactions to the exploits of three Eastern bloc women gymnasts
during the 1976 Montreal Games-Nadia Commeneci, Ludmilla Turisheva, and
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Olga Korbet-each representing contrasting images of gender, sexuality, athletic
style, nationality, and ideology. "In this case," MacAloon (1982) notes, "we
used cultural conventions of sex to explore notions about the Soviet Union and
our relationships with 'her' " (p. 111).
Countless numbers of such performances model significant issues in the
sociomoral hierarchy of race, gender, religion, economic background, age, heritage, upbringing, ideology, and the like. When Martina Navratilova faces Chris
Evert Lloyd in tennis, for example, we are all immediately confronted with
questions about appropriate gender identity and behavior in American culture.
When Martina Navratilova confronts Jimmy Connors, the dialogue is widened.
When it occurs in the Olympic arena between athletes of different nationalities
and heritages, the dialogue is raised to the level of what MacAloon (1982) aptly
calls, an "international Rorschach test" (p. 110).
A similar process occurs at the team level. Here, teams instantiate diverse
cultural images. Nowhere is this perhaps more obvious than at the level of national
representation, as particular national teams express the values and identities of
a specific culture. During confrontations, we seek not only to measure ourselves
but also to fathom our ideological rivals. A perfect case in point occurred during
the 1980 Lake Placid Games when the USA faced off against the USSR on the
ice. The text was well transcribed by Sports Illustrated's E.M. Swift (1980):
They were our boys. Clean-cut kids from small towns, well groomed and
good-looking, who loved their folks and liked to drink a little beer. Our
boys . . . a bunch of unheralded amateurs-they were innovative and
exuberant and absolutely unafraid to succeed. (p. 31)
The Russians, on the other hand, "were ready to cut their own throats . . . but
we had to get to the point to be ready to pick up the knife and hand it to them"
(Swift, p. 37).
Such cultural showdowns occur regularly, both in the Olympic Games and
in sport in general. During the 1980s, for example, one of the most vital and
energizing of such clashes involved the rivalry between the Boston Celtics and
the Los Angeles Lakers, a rivalry that approached mythic proportions. An editorial
by Mike Barnicle (1985) of the Boston Globe demonstrates the multiple levels
upon which self-location and identification may occur-levels that include religion, race, economics, lifestyle, and appearance:
The Celtics are working stiffs. The Lakers are Management . . . None of
[the Celtics] would look out of place in the Malden Catholic Yearbook.
Awkward with chicks too. The Lakers . . . Hey, they're from "El Lay."
Pass the oil and pump that iron. Say something relevant baby . . . The
Celtics are 1958. The Lakers are 1985 . . . The Celtics are 15 Lansdowne
St. The Lakers are "The Strip" or "Little Santa Monica" or meet me on
La Cienaga. The Celtics are Gene Hackman: Bent nose, thinning hair, gap
in the teeth but get the job done smartly and professionally. The Lakers
are Ryan O'Neill: Smile like sunshine, never up before noon, nothing but
pretty, the toughest guy . . . are you ready for this? . . . Malibu . . . The
Lakers are Prince. The Celtics are Springsteen. The Lakers are options,
treatments and putting together a deal over brunch at The Bel-Air. The
ACCESS TO ONTOLOGY
65
Celtics are time-clocks, blisters and a coffee break half way through a
bang-it-out day. (p. B 16)
A similar clash enlivened a recent NCAA college basketball final between
North Carolina, the home of Dean Smith, and Michigan, the home of the "Fab
Five." As the Associated Press (1993) appropriately noted,
It's the pinstripe suits against the warm-ups. IBM versus L.L. Cool J. The
star program meeting the program of stars . . . Michigan anives with plain
dark blue warm-up shirts while the Tar Heels start to get ready wearing
an entire uniform set designed by Julian Alexander. (p. B1)
Such rhetoric, expressed in the performance of the athletes themselves,
demands that we examine ourselves as individuals and as members of a variety
of relevant social and cultural collectives, including, at the ultimate Olympic
level, the collective of humanity.
Conclusion
In the end, sport in general, and the Olympic Games in particular, are about
fathoming our sense of individual and cultural self-esteem and self-worth. As
Loy (1981) points out, "The irony of present-day society is that a large number
of individuals attempt to fulfill their needs of self-esteem and immortality through
the rites of sport rather than the rites of religion7' (p. 273). By watching the
performances of athletes, we address such questions as, Who am I? What am I?
Am I what I am supposed to be? Are we as a culture better than others? What
are we as humans? All such questions are loaded with anxieties and tensions.
We all grow up with tensions of this sort, tensions that we simply cannot escapetensions born of being American rather than English, socialist rather than capitalist, male rather than female, white rather than black, hetero- rather than
homosexual, Catholic rather than Protestant.
These tensions are reflected and refracted in a myriad of athletic performances, from the local level to the international level. In the Olympics, the
entire cultural performance-from
spectacle to game-draws us more deeply
into introspective dialogues whereby we come to diagnose our essential beings as
individuals and as members of particular social and cultural groups. As Guttmann
(1988) rightly notes, whether "the Olympics more nearly approach or more
tragically disappoint our ideals, they provide us with a dramatic indication of
who we are" (p. 443). This, we suggest, is at the heart of the appeal of the
Olympic Games. Every 2 years the Olympics offer each of us a mirror, and in
it, we look at ourselves.
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