The year is 1968, and a bull session is under way in a New York City hotel room among a group of distance runners in town for the Millrose Games, a top event of the indoor track season.
An insight is about to strike one of the athletes in the room, a 21-year-old half-miler from Catholic University of America named John MacAloon, an insight that will transform his passions for running and for social and cultural questions into a profession, one that will plumb the mystique and complexities of sport through the phenomenon of the Olympic Games.
It occurs when the talk turns to the odd things that can happen to your mind during a race, how you seem sometimes to be having almost an out-of-body experience, how sometimes you can find yourself in a kind of white-out, how 40,000 people in a stadium can be cheering and screaming and you hear absolutely nothing because somehow you are running in what seems a cone of total silence.
MacAloon tells of a feeling he sometimes has, a feeling that someone else is running through him.
A fellow American nods in agreement, saying how strange it feels when that happens.
Then Kip Keino, the great miler from Kenya, speaks.
“I don’t understand why you say this is strange,” he says. “Of course, someone is running through you. It is your ancestors.”
Keino’s words are revelatory to MacAloon.
“I think my vocation was born in that moment,” he says today. “It occurred to me that Americans and Africans were running the same race and having the same `experience’ but couldn’t speak about it in the same way.”
MacAloon, now 49, is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Chicago and has devoted his career as a scholar and author to studying the influence and meaning of athletics among the world’s peoples, nations, societies.
He does it by concentrating primarily on the Olympics, interviewing and getting to know the members of that community–athletes, coaches, judges, groundskeepers, local organizers, event producers, sponsors, international officials–just as other anthropologists might live and work with the inhabitants of a remote jungle or island community.
“You don’t have to go to primitive cultures to find strange ideas,” MacAloon says. “Ask yourself: Why are people running around in short pants every four years and why do so many people care?”
Good questions. He’s got more.
“Why will 3.5 billion people watch the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics on television, which will make it the largest TV audience in history? And before the Games, why do millions line the streets and roads and highways to get a glimpse of the runners carrying the Olympic torch?”
It’s not because people want to somehow tap into that 15 minutes of fame for themselves, he says, or because the media and the commercial sponsors tell us this is important.
So why do they? Why do we? For all sorts of potent and complicated reasons, he says. Reasons–some primal, some tribal, some spiritual–that will be largely unexamined by the mass media.
A near-religious ritual
Indeed, if there’s one thing MacAloon has learned over the years, it’s that there’s going to be a lot more going on in Atlanta in the next few days and weeks than you’ll get from listening to NBC and reading the sports pages.
“Our media tend to see the Olympics as a show, an entertainment spectacle,” he says. “This is especially true of the opening ceremony. But for millions of people in other countries–and also in our own–this is more than a pretty pageant, and the opening ceremony is extremely important and stirring. It is, in fact, the only collective global ritual that the world’s people have.”
In many countries, the gathering of the national teams is a validation of their standing in the world.
“There are two main measures of nationhood–membership in the UN and marching at the Olympics,” MacAloon says. “The Olympics are a centerpiece of national destiny.”
A team with the name Palestine will compete in Atlanta this year. Estonia will field its second team since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Taiwan will compete under another name–the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee–so it can participate.
“Think what the opening ceremony’s march-in means to the people from those countries and the Palestinians,” MacAloon says.
The importance of the Olympics, he continues, derives from this search for national identity and also from what he calls “a longing for the sacred.”
Our writers and TV commentators–as well as many Americans in general–often overlook or avoid these aspects, he says, because of our egalitarian traditions and our athletic dominance.
“(Alexis) de Tocqueville noted that Americans are uncomfortable with ceremony,” MacAloon says. “Public rituals suggest status, hierarchy.”
MacAloon looked at thousands of feet of videotape to see how 25 nations covered the 1992 opening ceremony. “The coverage by many countries was profoundly different from ours,” he says. “South Korea and Papua New Guinea, for example, used terms for religious rituals. If NBC treated the ceremony as a religious ritual, they’d be in trouble.”
For most countries, the opening and closing ceremonies are the most important events of the Games because these are the only occasions at which they receive a kind of equal recognition. Of the 197 nations participating, MacAloon notes, perhaps only 50 will have athletes who win medals.
The success our athletes have, he says, could distract us from the most enjoyable way to view the Olympics, which is to be aware of the emotions we feel as we watch and the themes that cause them to arise.
Myths of the Games
He lists three levels at which sport and society interact–the national, the individual and the global.
“On the first level, we’ll say, `America won the 800 meters.’ That’s a metaphor, an attempt to say we’re one society, the athlete’s body represents the social body.”
This connection is long-standing. “In 1936, when Jesse Owens won those many gold medals, it was saying, `Yes, we have racial problems, but we are all Americans when it comes to fascism,’ ” MacAloon says. “In the context of the Cold War, it was `Yes, we have difficulties with race and Vietnam, but we are all Americans when we confront Communism.’ “
At the second, or individual, level, the athlete serves as a symbol of the democratic ideal. “Our mythology is that when you’re competing, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, black or white or brown or yellow, whether you are educated or not. Everyone is equal,” he says.
The third level is global. “The world’s massive diversity and terrible inequality leave us with few symbols and performances that we can all take at least a passing interest in together,” MacAloon says. “The Olympics at its best provides this common ground for nations.”
The ideal, of course, is sometimes eclipsed by nationalism, selfishness and chauvinism.
As an athlete involved in civil rights and anti-war activities in the late ’60s, MacAloon knew firsthand the consequences of his political and moral convictions.
“Athletes have seen that it matters a lot what their politics are. In 1968, some athletes were saying, `If my politics are anti-segregation or Black Power or anti-Vietnam War, you have no right to make me into a flag-waving display.’ That’s what John Carlos and Tommy Smith were saying when they gave the Black Power salute on the victory stand at Mexico City.”
MacAloon, who took part in a boycott of a New York Athletic Club meet that same year because of its racial policies and supported the idea for a black boycott of the Olympics, was unsettled by the reaction to his activities.
“The paradox was that 100,000 young people could demonstrate in the streets, and the government could shrug it off,” he says. “But if a few athletes were politically active, on the right or the left, it was a terrible shock to the system. It still is.”
He also was confused by the attitude of the military toward his anti-war stand. “I was good enough to be invited to the 1968 Olympics trials, and like other athletes, I was approached by military officers, including a Marine Corps general.”
The Marine general said if MacAloon would sign up, he would never be assigned to Vietnam, that he would only compete in track. “The notion you could get out of the war seemed curious to me,” he says. “When I told the general that I was against the war, he said, `Don’t worry about that. No problem.’ “
That experience also was an epiphany of sorts. “From then on, I wanted to try to understand the hold that sports has on people.”
He would enroll in graduate school at the U. of C. and become a conscientious objector, serving at Billings Hospital. As he pursued his doctorate, he was drawn to the transnationalism of the Olympics as a fresh area for an anthropologist to explore.
Discovering that American libraries had little more than picture books about the Games, he paid his own way to Europe, a fertile source of Olympic history.
In 1972, MacAloon would attend the Games in Munich, which were desecrated by the violent seizure and subsequent deaths of Israeli athletes by Arab guerrillas.
Father of the Olympics
He would also begin research for a book on Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron responsible for the modern Olympic Games, which were held as early as 776 B.C. as a religious festival in honor of the Greek god Zeus and ended in A.D. 394.
“More than writing a history, I was trying to understand how he put himself in a position to feel the confluence of symbolic and social forces that led to the revival of the Olympics (in 1896),” he says.
Coubertin renounced the life of privileged indolence that was available to the aristocracy to become an educational reformer and an active member of the international peace movement.
Born in 1863, seven years before the end of the Franco-Prussian War that scarred France, Coubertin in his 20s traveled through Europe and America to see how other countries were meeting the challenge of the industrial age.
“While visiting Rugby School in England, he had a vision,” MacAloon says. “Following the dictates of Christian socialists who spoke of `muscular Christianity’ in the new age, the school stressed team sports as a means of building character and instilling Christian virtues. Coubertin was sold. He saw sport as training for democratic liberty.”
He was equally impressed by the vitality of the unique “Yankee games” in the United States, where he was bowled over by a Harvard-Yale football game that drew 50,000 spectators. There was nothing like this in Europe.
Gradually, the idea for a worldwide gathering of athletes would take shape in his imagination. The concept would be supported by scholars who saw the new Olympics as a platform for discouraging militarism and cultivating respect among nations.
“Coubertin was intelligent, politically shrewd and had a remarkable taste for symbols and rituals,” MacAloon says. “He invented the symbol of the five rings, which is the most recognized symbol in the world, after the Christian cross and the Islamic half-moon. He died a pauper (in 1937). He spent everything he had on his Olympic dream, and he was successful.”
Coubertin was convinced that sports can produce better individuals and that better individuals are the answer to creating a better world.
For MacAloon, a discovery has been that at its heart, sports is what Kip Keino suggested–an encounter with our forebears.
“All of us are products of many generations, of communities, of the social histories of our families,” MacAloon says. “As an African, Kip Keino had no difficulty articulating that. If I spoke that way, Americans would think I was either a mystic or they’d try to get me into therapy. But it’s true.”
