The first modern Olympics (Athens, 1896) were envisioned by their founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, as a way to transcend international divisions of politics and commerce through the celebration of amateur sport, based loosely on the games of Ancient Greece. Despite these ideals, however, the modern Olympics have, from the outset, been beset by shifting political rivalries and economic circumstances. For Americans as hosts and participants, the Olympics crystallized the major global issues and struggles of the twentieth century.

For their first three decades, the modern Olympics were linked to expositions, world’s fairs and other large-scale organized spectacles that emphasized the march of humankind’s progress, as well as the qualitative differences between nations. Indeed, the second and third Olympics took place in coordination with the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition and the 1904 St. Louis, MO World’s Fair respectively. Like these expositions, the Olympics celebrated the divide between the so-called civilized societies of Europe and North America, which fielded teams, and the subject peoples of the colonial world, which did not. (Loosely organized “popular” Olympics tried to overcome this division as well as that which separated elite sports from more inclusive pastimes).

By contemporary standards, the first few Olympics were relatively modest, although each Olympiad saw the inclusion of new sporting events and new national teams. While winter sports were included since the 1900 Games, in 1920, separate Winter Olympic Games were inaugurated. These events have been held in the US three times: in Lake Placid (New York) in 1932 and 1980 and in Squaw Valley (California) in 1960. The scandalridden 2002 games are scheduled for Salt Lake City, UT. Americans have not gained as many medals as in the winter games, nor do the winter games promote tourism and imagery in the same way as summer games. Nonetheless, interest has been created around political events symbolized by the US men’s hockey team’s 1980 gold medal or by the dramas of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding in 1994. Still, the Summer Olympics remain larger, more inclusive and more prestigious than the Winter Games.

The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics were the first to link the Games to local economic development, as well as civic pride on the part of the host-city and nation. They were also marked by an unprecedented amount of international mass media coverage that served to heighten the political importance of the Games. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 were particularly noteworthy in this regard, as the Nazi regime envisioned a vehicle for promoting the image not only of a resurgent Germany, but also of Aryan superiority.

These latter dreams were effectively dashed, however, by the stellar performance of Jesse Owens and other African American athletes on the US team.

The Second World War led to the cancellation of both the 1940 Olympics (Tokyo) and the 1944 Olympics (London, hosted in 1948). Following the entry of the first team from the Soviet Union in 1952, the Games became a surrogate arena for the Cold War between the “Free West,” led by the United States, and the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union.

In the 1960s, the changing scale and nature of the Games challenged some basic Olympic principles. Extensive state subsidies provided to athletes from Soviet-bloc nations were seen to undermine the basic principles of amateurism. Meanwhile, the advent of television coverage in 1960 intensified prospects for commercialization. For much of the next two decades, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), under the leadership of Avery Brundage, fought a successful rearguard action against both professionalism and commercialization.

Still, the scale and international visibility of the Olympic Games intensified their importance as symbolic arenas. Awarding of an Olympics bestowed international recognition on former pariah nations (Tokyo, Japan 1964; Munich, Germany 1972; and perhaps Barcelona, Spain 1992) and on developing nations such as Mexico (1968) and South Korea (1988). The Mexico City Games of 1968, however, became noteworthy for the military’s brutal repression of student protestors. Meanwhile, at their medal ceremony American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists in the Black Power salute, for which they were suspended from the US Olympic team and kicked out of the Olympic Village.

Global politics intensified thereafter. The 1972 Munich Games were marred by the murder of members of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian guerrillas. Many African nations boycotted the 1976 Montreal Games to protest New Zealand’s participation (their rugby team had played a tournament in South Africa). In 1980 the United States boycotted the Moscow Games in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which in turn provoked a Soviet-bloc boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

While the increasingly manifest politicization of the Games tarnished the luster of the Olympic movement, their growing scale also placed extreme financial burdens on the host-city and nation, notably Montreal’s more than $1 billion debt in 1976. Thus, Los Angeles was the only city to bid on the 1984 Games.

The Los Angeles Olympics proved noteworthy for not only the triumph of US teams in the absence of the Soviet bloc, but also for the manner in which they were staged. Prior to 1984, public entities mounted the Olympics. The Los Angeles Games were the first to use only private funds. Organizers minimized costs, eschewing new construction in favor of temporary venues and rehabilitated facilities from the 1932 Games. Raising capital through corporate sponsorships and unprecedentedly expensive television rights, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee generated a profit in excess of 1200 million.

The potential profit to be realized from the Olympics undermined the IOC’s historic resistance to commercialism; ensuing Olympiads have been marked by ever-increasing commercialism.

Both the Seoul Olympics of 1988 and the Barcelona Games of 1992 were accompanied by massive, state-financed urban redevelopment projects in their host cities. The Atlanta Olympics of 1996, however, manifested a return to extreme entrepreneurialism. Unlike Los Angeles, however, Atlanta organizers planned for significant new construction of Olympic venues, funded by private sources including the sale of television rights, commercial sponsorships, tickets and merchandise. Lacking a publicly subsidized safety net, Atlanta’s preparations were often on precarious financial footing. Atlanta’s problems with fundraising, along with criticisms of management and overcommercialization, made the IOC declare it would never again award the Olympics to a city without a significant public-sector financial commitment.

With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, that particular political dimension of the Olympics faded into history although American media coverage continues to stress national triumphs (and American stories of family, individual dedication and community support). In many ways, the commercialism of the Barcelona and Atlanta Olympics already celebrated the triumph of capitalism over socialism. Beginning in the 1980s, the IOC also began to retreat from its insistence on amateurism and allowed professional athletes to compete—critical to American dominance in basketball, for example. Hence by the end of the twentieth century, the spirit of Olympism was radically revised to embrace both professionalism and commercialism, creating a vast hypermediated spectacle exemplifying the global economy.