Sport
While sporting competitions are held up as great and virtuous unifiers, the reality – from as far back as the ancient Greeks – is that corruption and politicisation are always lurking nearby. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Conceit, corruption and competition
Pindar has long fallen from public consciousness, in a way that Homer never has, but for a time he was the premier choral poet of Archaic Greece and a man eagerly sought by his era’s tyrants and aristocrats to lyricise their virtue.
Please, bear with me – we’ll come to modernity soon enough.
Pindar is best known for his 45 surviving victory odes to athletes – lengthy, obscure and digressive – and written in a style that was already, at the time he was writing them, becoming unfashionable. But he remains a rich historical source for early Olympic competitions and, without straining, one can find glorious resonance with our own moment in his work.
In his first Olympian ode, the subject is his great patron, King Hieron of Syracuse, who has won a horserace in the Olympic Games of 476BC. The king himself did not race – he was merely the owner of the horse – but the jockeys were never regarded then, and none of their names survive. The victor was always considered to be the owner and, as it is today, the ownership of racehorses then was a privilege reserved for the wealthiest and most aristocratically entrenched.
You might assume that Pindar’s ode to King Hieron was purely obsequious, but it was not. While likely anxious not to arouse the fury of his powerful patron – nor that of the gods – the ode is still studded with warnings about the limitations of mortal ambition. To this end, Pindar invokes the myth of Tantalus.
Lavished by the gods’ attention, the mortal Tantalus came to arrogantly assume his own divinity – not unlike, as Noel Gallagher once told me, how some roadies or sound mixers may come to think of themselves as belonging to the group of rock stars they service.
You get the idea: Tantalus was getting too big for his earthly boots. And too compromised by the gods’ flattery. To impress his friends, he stole the deities’ golden nectar to share with them. To impress the gods, he attempted to trick them into eating his own son. Tantalus thought this grisly deception was necessary after he found he had insufficient food for the banquet he’d promised in their honour. Omniscient as most were, the ruse was unsuccessful, and to his rap sheet the gods now added murder to the charge of theft.
Tantalus had forgotten his limitations; had mistaken flattery for his own divinity. He sought more commendation; he wanted so badly to be liked. And that was that. Tantalus was exiled and made to suffer by being surrounded by fresh water and luscious fruit that was forever just out of reach. Above him was suspended a great rock that would fatally fall if he agitated for the water and fruit so close to hand.
In Pindar’s ode, he seems to warn his subject of undue vanity by invoking this myth.
If the wardens of Olympus honoured any mortal
man, then Tantalus was the one. He, however
could not digest
his great good fortune, and because of his greed he won
an overwhelming punishment in the form of a massive
rock which the Father suspended above him;
in his constant eagerness to cast it away from his head
he is banished from joy.
That ode was written some 2500 years ago, but today we still know of – and make folklore from – athletes who struggle to digest their own great fortune. Those for whom fame, wealth and the endless, organised indulgence of their narcissism comes, eventually, to resemble divinity – freedom from mortal limitation.
The modern Olympics were conceived in 1889 by the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, who sought to revive the ancient competition and its supposed virtues. “For centuries athleticism, its home in Olympia, remained pure and magnificent,” he wrote in 1929. “There states and cities met in the persons of their young men, who, imbued with a sense of the moral grandeur of the games, went to them in a spirit of almost religious reverence. Around them were assembled men of letters and of the arts, ready to celebrate the victories of their energy and muscle; and these incomparable spectacles were also the delight of the populace.”
While I think Pindar’s warnings about the dangers of ego and vanity chime well now, looking to ancient history for a mirror image of today risks a crude and distortive appreciation of both.
Those ancient Greek games were very strange and not replicated anywhere else. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, had nothing like it. They were also explicitly religious in a polytheistic age when gods could be variously thought lascivious, cannibalistic and violently embittered. The Olympic games were staged in tribute to Zeus, near the site of his temple. The Pythian games were a tribute to Apollo; the Isthmian games to Poseidon. Certainly none were staged in the name of peace.
Perhaps lost on Coubertin were the following about those ancient Greek games: the line between athletic competition and violence was thin, and there were concerns that the loss of face among the defeated could only be reclaimed in murder. There were no team sports – it was individual glory that was sought and made sacred. Parochialism ruled, as representatives of various Greek city-states descended upon the competition’s host town to inflict embarrassment on rivals. The most esteemed events were the chariot races, though there was no interest in recognising the riders – who could be slaves or children. While it was often emphasised at the time, and ever since, that the reward for victory was merely honour – and the symbolically rich but materially poor crown made from olive branches – there were other compensations of olive oil and money, and no shortage of greed. Finally, there remained the recurring complaint that the Eleans – hosts of the games at Olympia – were biased toward their own.
In 1935, Coubertin gave a radio address explaining his concept of “religio athletae”. “The ancient as well as the modern Olympic Games have one most important feature in common: they are a religion,” he said. “When working on his body with the help of physical education and sport – like the sculpturer at a statue – the athlete in antiquity honoured the gods.”
He was not wrong about this ancient reverence, but his enthusiasm ignored the warnings of Pindar: that the athlete, or sponsoring aristocrat, might soon confuse themselves for gods. In narrowing his attention to the pursuit of athletic excellence, he ignored the fact that wealthy tyrants invested great money in the games in the hope of improving their fame and legitimacy. To own racehorses was a great distinction; to have one win was a mark of divine blessing. Coubertin was quiet on how victory in the games entrenched fame and power; that the pursuit of excellence was not limited in its motivation to religiosity but could be sought merely for personal distinction.
He went on: “I think I was right, therefore, when reconstituting the Olympic Games to have connected them with a religious feeling from the beginning. It is transformed and even elevated by internationalism and democracy – the features of our time – but basically it is still the same as in antiquity when it encouraged the young Greek to employ all of their strength for the highest triumph at the feet of the statue of Zeus.”
These are the words of a fanatic, convinced of his own belief in how nobility and its public reverence might be encouraged – through athletic excellence. The aesthetic grace of the best athletes will combine with our admiration for their discipline to acquire such physical eloquence, and this sublimation of international competition will help alleviate war.
The next year, 1936, Adolf Hitler hosted the Olympic Games in Berlin.
In the modern Olympics since, we have seen the global emergence of Muhammad Ali (as Cassius Clay), Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10 at the age of 14, and the United States Dream Team’s awesome assemblage in 1992 when the barrier to professional basketballers was removed. We’ve watched Cathy Freeman’s gold at home and the unbroken records of Usain Bolt.
We’ve also seen athletes hire thugs to break the legs of rivals, and Russia deploy a vast doping campaign – the whistleblowers of which remain in hiding today. Before hosting the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China embarked upon a “social cleansing” effort – the forced removal of the homeless and sex workers from its streets and the arrest of political activists.
What lessons can we take here? To write his poetry, Pindar borrowed from mythology to complicate his odes. To justify his plan, Coubertin borrowed from history to inflate a myth.
Today, the International Olympic Committee is even more removed from its ancient precedent. Instead, it relies simply upon its continued existence and popularity for its justification – and the lacework of corporate clichés. “This is our Olympic answer to all the forces that want to divide us: our values matter,” the IOC president said last year, opening the Paris Games. “In these dark times, our Olympic values matter more than ever. It is only by living our Olympic values – the values of solidarity, equality, human dignity for all – that we can manage to bring the entire world together in peace.”
But the Games justify themselves through the athletes and no more – and certainly not through the sickly pronouncements of their too-proud and compromised administrators, who long ago sounded rote and pompous as they acquiesced with dictators. Who remembers the posters, ubiquitous throughout Beijing in 2008, that read: “One World One Dream”?
I can only awkwardly rest upon a stale observation: that great pleasure, social intimacies and national excitement can be found in the appreciation of sport; just as its spectacle can be cynically milked by tyrants and the great fortunes it confers distort the hearts and minds of those who receive them.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 31, 2025 as "For the glory of sport".
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