Olympic Boycotts, Then and Now

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Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

Olympic Boycotts, Then and Now

October 10, 2007

By Tom deignan

THE violence and human rights violations in Myanmar have captured the public imagination in recent weeks. But they have also added to the ongoing debate about holding the 2008 Olympics in China. The Irish Catholic Development Agency recently said that Ireland should consider boycotting the 2008 Olympics because of China’s failure to stem the violence in Myanmar.

“When China was awarded the 2008 Olympics, it was with the hope and expectation that the country would open up to the world and address human-rights issues,” said one spokesman for the group.

“China hasn’t kept up its side of this moral contract that was implied by so many countries voting for it. It is in a unique position to influence the Burmese military government and put an end to the brutality against pro-democracy demonstrators. If it doesn’t act quickly then Ireland needs to consider whether it should be in Beijing next year.”

Of course, the Olympics have become so politicized that boycott movements seem to spring up every two years. But the fact that an Irish agency has become a prominent voice for boycott calls to mind one of the most notorious episodes of the 20th century, when Hitler’s Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics.

As a recently released book notes, Irish Catholic Americans played a key role in efforts to boycott those games which, in retrospect, would have been quite a noble thing to do.

Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 by David Clay Large (Norton) outlines the extensive Irish Catholic involvement in the boycott movement.

One of the most prominent figures calling for a boycott of Hitler’s games was Al Smith, the beloved former governor of New York who faced Ku Klux Klan opposition when he was the first Catholic to run for president in 1928. Another well-known Irish American who supported a boycott was James Michael Curley, the so-called rascal king governor of Massachusetts.

But perhaps the most important figure in the boycott movement was also the least well known. His name was Jeremiah T. Mahoney, a New York State Supreme Court judge who also was a former Olympic athlete. Prior to the 1936 games, Mahoney replaced Avery Brundage as president of the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU).

Initially Brundage, who remained active in the American Olympics, and Mahoney seemed to be similar in their thinking.

Responding to reports of the persecution of Jewish athletes in 1933, Brundage said, “The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed or race.”

Brundage, however, was convinced the Germans would treat Jewish athletes fairly following an inspection of German sports facilities in 1934.

In the end, Brundage would become an opponent of a boycott, arguing that politics had no place in athletics.

“The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians,” he said.

American athletes, he added, should not become involved in the ongoing “Jew-Nazi altercation.” He later argued that the whole controversy was a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.”

Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney would hear none of this. He argued that Germany had broken Olympic rules forbidding discrimination based on race and religion.

This certainly would have been important to Irish Catholics such as Mahoney, who could have recalled the way Smith’s religion was smeared less than 10 years earlier on the campaign trail.

“The boycott battle came to a head at the 1935 AAU Convention, held at the Commodore Hotel in New York City on December 6-8, 1935,” Large writes in Nazi Games. “The final showdown was bitter and full of personal animus, since the chief contenders, Brundage and Mahoney, thoroughly despised each other.”

In the end, the AAU narrowly voted against boycott, and called for yet another inspection of Germany’s facilities.

On the broader political scene, President Franklin D. Roosevelt never became involved in the boycott debate, though he had been warned that the Nazis were cleverly exploiting the Olympics.

Is modern day China equivalent to Hitler’s Germany? Probably not.

Either way, history shows it is best to have men like Jeremiah T. Mahoney around to ask hard questions such as that.

(Contact Tom at tomdeigan@verizon.net.)

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