That One Time the Olympics Were Cool w/ James Stout

For episode 165, Elia and Aydın are joined by investigative journalist and anarchist James Stout of the It Could Happen Here podcast to talk about the 1936 anti-fascist Olympics in Barcelona and the fascists who destroyed it. There’s a reason you’ve only heard of the more notorious Berlin one, and we’re gonna get into it here.

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Further readings referenced in this episode:
James’ book, available for purchase or at your library: The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics
National Geographic piece: The brutal story of the 1936 Popular Olympics: a boycott of fascism and Hitler
‘Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff’ Episode on the Spanish Civil War: The Popular Olympics Antifascist Athletes Help Stop a Coup
The Games: A Global History of the Olympics by David Goldblatt

Where to listen:

Wherever you get your podcasts. It is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS. It is also on YouTube.

Credits:

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Maybe I have a slightly romantic view of it, but to me the Popular Olympics represented the best in antifascism, saying: We are opposed to the racial hierarchy that fascism is trying to create with its medals table; we will all play together. We are not here to prove the superiority of one race; we’re here to prove the unity of all these races against your hateful project.

Elia J. Ayoub: The Paris Olympics have been controversial from the start. They are expected to cost billions of euros, and Paris is expected to be much more congested than it currently is. Gérald Darmamin, the interior minister, who was accused by two women of sexual harassment and who has quoted the far right with his racism and transphobia, is the person responsible for putting this together. He’s also the guy who allowed football fans, during the 2022 Champions League final in France, to be assaulted with tear gas. Qualities that you want in the guy who is responsible for the Olympics.

In October 2023, France’s own financial prosecutors raided Paris 2024 Olympics headquarters on suspicion of “illegal taking of interest, favoritism, and concealment” in the award of several contracts. Lovely.In April of this year, migrants from several makeshift camps in Paris were “socially cleansed” as part of the attempt to beautify the city and remove its unwanted residents who may inconvenience tourists and athletes with their poverty.

To make things worse, France, in its obsession with controlling what racialized women get to do with their bodies, has banned French athletes who wear the hijab from the Olympics (unless they stop wearing the hijab), effectively barring many Muslim athletes from competing. Athletes fro genocidal countries such as Azerbaijan and Israel are also going to participate and represent their countries, while other governments that are also genocidal, such as the Russian and Belarusian ones, will have their athletes allowed to participate as “individual neutral athletes,” at least at the time of recording.

These are just scratching the surface, and despite all of this we are going to witness a spectacle which purports to be all about universalism, fairness, and other nice buzzwords. This is not new with the Olympics; it’s an event which has a long history of being problematic and troubling as fuck. We will be focusing on a couple events that took place in 1936: the Nazi Olympics, which you have probably heard of; and the antifascist Popular Olympics in Barcelona, which you probably have not.

Here with us to talk about all that is James Stout, author of the book The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics and one of the hosts of It Could Happen Here, part of Cool Zone Media. James, How are you?

James Stout: I’m well, thank you. I’m good. It’s Monday morning; I’m excited for another week—I just spent the week watching people having insane conspiracy theories about the attempted Donald Trump assassination, so it’s been a normal one.

I am a journalist, an anarchist, and a person who has studied antifascism, popular-frontism and the Spanish civil war for a lot of my life. I wrote the book you mentioned, which arose from my dissertation, which looked at the construction of an antifascist Catalan identity in the Spanish Second Republic, and the consequences for that in the very early part—the first month, really the first week—of the Spanish civil war. 

Because of that and my current work at Cool Zone Media, where I’m a journalist covering conflict and migration, I’m writing another book about anarchists at war, which will draw on some experiences I’ve had in Rojava, and also with the rebels in Myanmar. That will be done when it’s done, which hopefully will be soon, and will be with AK Press. 

In addition to all those things I spend a lot of time doing mutual aid at the border between the United States and Mexico, where as people may or may not be aware, we’ve seen record deaths every year in the Biden administration. Despite his change in rhetoric from the Trump administration, there hasn’t been a change in policy, really, and so my friends and I try and help make the border a little less cruel and deadly.

EA: Also joining us today is our co-host, Aydın, from Antidote Zine and From the Periphery. Aydın, want to introduce yourself?

Aydın Yıldız: Sure. Hi y’all, my name is Aydın; I am a co-editor of Antidote Zine dot com, which is an anarchist storytelling outlet. We uplift stories “from the periphery,” in a way: we transmit, translate, and transcribe different grassroots movement histories, people’s histories, and analyses about stories of resistance in places of the world that are often overlooked and by people who are often sidelined by mainstream media. We do this in a longform way—the point is to dig deep into people’s stories. We focus often on the Mediterranean circle but have been expanding a little bit more to where we’re based, in Minneapolis and Turtle Island more broadly.

Very happy to be here with you today, James. I am also personally a former athlete. I played semi-professional soccer, or football for the Europeans, and also played rugby in college. Sports have been a big and important part of my life, but also something that I have since left behind, and I find the topic of mega-events like the Olympics fascinating and extremely challenging to engage with. So I’m excited to dig into the history of that more, and point people towards other resources about it.

EA: My own personal relationship with sports is football, or soccer for the Americans—the World Cup, the EuroCup, and Copa America mostly. It’s a big deal in Lebanon, but we can get into that later.

To kick us off with a bit of a sarcastic question to both of you: how excited are you by the Paris Olympics, on a scale of “very” to “a lot”? And why?

JS: I guess I’ll go first. I’m always excited to talk about the Olympics because I spent a lot of my life studying it. I don’t think the IOC is my biggest fan, and that is a feeling that I share for them. It’s always such a troubled thing. I was an athlete too; I raced bikes in Europe, that was my job for some of my younger years. And the Olympics is this thing that you always aspire to as an athlete, and then you become aware, as you become a person, that it is extremely problematic and damaging to the communities it takes place in.

I’m always excited to see the boundaries of human performance pushed, that’s cool. But it’s also a thing that you know is bad for you. It’s like drinking; you know you’re going to feel bad afterwards in that sense. There is a better model, which we’ll talk about, and I’d rather we were doing that.

AY: I feel similarly. I haven’t watched the Olympics in years. I was very disillusioned to hear as I grew into adulthood about all the ways, surrounding the Olympics and preparing for the Olympics (and the World Cup is the same), that communities are completely fucked over by all the preparations that happen; any signs of poverty are kicked out of city centers. It’s hard to enjoy anything that has that shadow.

At the same time, watching weird people do really weird random sports that I’ve never heard of really well is fun. It’s fascinating. It’s cool to see people coming from all parts of the world to get together to do those things and do them really well. But at what cost? That just makes it really hard to engage with for me, personally, as much as I love watching sports. 

Elia, how do you feel about the upcoming Olympics?

EA: I don’t care about them. I definitely watched some of the London ones, and when I was younger I watched the ones in Beijing. I remember being mesmerized by them, but just because I was fascinated by the spectacle of what they choose to put on the stage on opening night. The Chinese one was very much We’re an ancient civilization, and the British one was like, Mister Bean. 

JS: I’m sure someone has done a dissertation on the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. I think I may have read it. Fascinating to see how we portrayed ourselves to the world.

EA: Exactly. There was something about the founding of the NHS. If they would do it now, this wouldn’t appear in their ceremony.

JS: They fucked it.

EA: And there’s 007, and the queen, and Paddington—for someone like me who grew up with a lot of UK and American TV in the background in our daily life, it was like seeing all the fictional stuff meet the real stuff. It’s interesting from that perspective.

I do follow football from time to time, more the international stuff than the clubs. In Lebanon, the World Cup is a massive cultural event. The entire country effectively shuts down. I have some fond memories based on that in terms of just personal stories, and the family home having a ridiculously gigantic Argentina flag outside, which is embarrassing.

Let’s get into the history of the Olympics. Aydın I think you were going to ask the first one.

AY: James, you’ve studied very deeply the 1936 Popular Olympics, which is something that a lot of folks listening might not know about. It’s lesser known than the other Olympics that happened around that time. These Popular Olympics were meant to take place in Barcelona—athletes from all over the world traveled there—but it didn’t end up happening, for a very important reason.

You did a two-part deep dive on this history on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff; people should check that out if they want to get the long version of this story. But for our listeners, especially with the Paris Olympics right in view, we’d love if you could give us an overview of the Popular Olympics in 1936 and the history leading up to that, and anything you feel is important to mention about how the Olympics came to be.

JS: I can do a version of a course I used to teach—as an academic, I’m given to bloviating, but I’ll try not to do that.

To understand the Olympics—I’m off now—you have to understand sport. And to understand sport you have to understand the difference between play and sport. People have played for as long as there have been people. There are proto-sports: the best example is folk football matches, which used to take place in England on saints’ days or holy days. People would take the day off, they’d inflate a giant pig’s bladder, and they’d try and kick it from one village to the next—with very few rules. People would get stabbed; people would have shields and form a phalanx to hit the ball in. Not what we expect from football today.

This is play. There are other forms of play—I want to emphasize as a British person, we don’t always stab each other when we’re playing. But this is an unruly and ungoverned form of play. When we get sport, we take play and we constrain it, within a space and within a set of rules. We have a playing field now. You can’t take a two-mile excursion to get to the other team’s church (generally you had to get it to the church in the other village). Instead, we have a playing field, and you can’t leave that. And now you can’t stab people, and now you can’t pick up the ball. We have all these different rules that we place on it, to constrain it.

To understand where that sporting impulse comes from, I think you have to understand British colonialism—which I do not have time to explain. Very few of us have enough time in our lives to explain.

EA: You can’t explain British colonialism in like ten seconds, James?

JS: Sure: it’s based in racism and stealing stuff from the colonial periphery.

In the core of the British empire, the metropole, we have these public schools (which are not actually public; you have to pay to attend them—we like to confuse people with that language). These schools exist to turn out officers for the empire, both bureaucrats and military officers. These schools create people who fit a model which is called “muscular Christianity”—strong, healthy, fit, and morally strong according to what are seen as Christian principles. Sport plays a key part in that. 

If we’re looking for a specific individual who embodies this ideology, we can look at Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of the Rugby school. People think it’s a school named after the game, but the game is named after the school. Rugby has a foundation myth, much like Rome has the twins and the wolf. This kid called William Webb Ellis, with a glorious disregard for the rules (there’s a statue of him), picked up and ran with the ball, and as such took football and created rugby. This is somewhat ludicrous; obviously people had thought of picking up balls before. But some kid with a double-barreled surname at a public school did it—whatever, this is how it tells its own history.

So sport emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a way to get people to obey the rules, keep them fit, teach them respect for authority, and to inculcate them to obey the rules in a stressful situation. Sports used to be a little more “stressful” than they are now, a little more violent. But sport constrains violence, and gives it a place to come out, especially with these contact sports. Here I’m talking about participating in sports, but we could also talk about spectating. Elias and Dunning talk about the “civilizing process” (there’s a good book if you want to read it).

This is happening in the nineteenth century, and it has a great influence on a man called Pierre de Coubertin, who is the founder of the modern Olympic movement. If we look at the architecture of that time, we see neoclassical architecture, this big fascination with returning to classical civilizations, Greece and Rome. De Coubertin is an aristocrat; he had an interesting education that wasn’t exactly conventional, he had what would be seen as a progressive education for his era. And he’s interested in returning to classical principles, and one of the things he finds is the Olympic games, the idea that people would come together across various Greek city-states. 

There’s a fictive notion of an “Olympic truce,” where they would stop fighting while the games took place—that’s not entirely true; it’s more like the people taking part in the games have safe passage to get to the games, not that everyone stops their wars. But in these Olympic games, people would come together and do various activities as a way to honor the gods. It’s very interesting to look at the Greek classical Olympic games; we see many elements of the modern Olympics—including doping; all these athletes are trying to get an edge on each other however they can.

De Coubertin takes this and uses it as a foundation myth for the modern Olympic games. The best way to see the modern Olympic games as de Coubertin founded them is as a gathering of the transnational bourgeoisie (I’m borrowing that phrase from my friend David Goldblatt, who wrote an excellent book called The Games; it’s not academic and boring, and I highly recommend it). In its early years, the Olympics are extremely tied to World’s Fairs, and World’s Fairs are extremely tied to colonialism: it’s when we get together in the colonial core to exhibit the booty that we’ve extracted from the colonial periphery. And the Olympics happen as part of this.

To give an example of how tied to colonialism the Olympics was/is: at the 1904 St Louis Olympics, they had what are called the “anthropological games,” where they just kidnapped people from colonized places, brought them to the colonial core (the metropolis), vaguely explained the events to them, and made them compete against people from the metropolis. It’s social Darwinism baked into a sports event.

There are other events too: famously, the 1904 and 1908 marathons are perhaps best described as a massive clusterfuck. At the time, people were abstaining from food and water during their marathon runs. There were incidents where people ran 25 miles, had a glass of champagne for the last mile, immediately vomited, had convulsions. In the 1908 Olympics the Italian runner entered the stadium and set off running the wrong way around the track, and collapsed several times, and was assisted by officials in standing up and pointing him in the right direction, a hundred meters from the finish. He eventually wins but is disqualified for having received outside assistance, and the gold medal is awarded to the American runner—but the queen herself awards him with his own medal and parade; he’s paraded through London as the “people’s champion.”

At this time, knowledge of endurance sports was not—it was more about “character” than physical preparation.

So the Olympics, this gathering of the transnational bourgeoisie, grows in the early part of the twentieth century. It’s also still tied to the idea of creating a colonial officer. If we’re familiar with the modern pentathlon, the events are riding a horse, fencing, running, swimming, and shooting. General Patton competed in the modern pentathlon. They have to shoot pistols at a target, that’s part of this, and I’ve read a couple sources saying they were unable to determine the size of his grouping of shots because he used such a large pistol that he eviscerated the target. Very American. Anyway, we’re creating colonial officers with these games, but it’s tied to a sort of liberal notion of colonialism, a paternalistic notion of colonialism. 

Let’s go forward to 1931. In 1931, the soft dictatorship/monarchy of [Miguel] Primo de Rivera is collapsing in Spain and the second republic is coming into being. At the exact same time this is happening, the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona. It’s worth noting that countries are not represented at the IOC; national organizing committees are represented at the IOC, and at this time most of the people on the IOC are aristocrats (a few are bourgeois, many are titled nobility). 

They are meeting at a time when Spain is doing away with its monarchy, and Barcelona is a place where churches have burned, and where there is a very prominent anarchist movement—in 1932, the subsequent year, they are declaring libertarian communism in the Llobregat and whole towns are abolishing money and declaring themselves anarchist communes. Anarchism is more present here than arguably anywhere else on Earth at this time. 

And a vote takes place on where to hold the 1936 Olympics. They still do this today; the IOC decides where to hold the games. Not everyone is able to be present in Barcelona, but most IOC members are. It’s 1931, so travel isn’t easy. They take a vote—then afterwards, they take another vote via telegram, and it seems that this second vote is the binding vote. Taking a second vote is very unusual; they say there wasn’t quorum—their justification was that there weren’t enough people for a vote to count (there were other votes which had fewer participants, though, so I’m not buying the “quorum” line). But they take this vote by telegram, and in this vote, instead of the “unstable” Spain, they opt for a stable, modern European democracy, and the one they choose is Weimar Germany.

People who are familiar with twentieth century history will realize that they done fucked up there. It’s my belief that the IOC re-voted because these aristocrats wanted to not give it to republican Spain—so they award the games to Nazi Germany. At first, when the Nazis come to power, they don’t want the games. They see it as part of a grand Jewish-liberal conspiracy, Bolshevism, bla bla bla, all the things that Nazis like to say. But over time, the people who are responsible for the Olympics (some of whom would be categorized as Jewish by the Nazis according to their ancestry or their marriage—Carl Diem, who was the mastermind of the 1936 Olympics, and to a degree the modern Olympics, was married to a Jewish lady) come to believe that they can use this Olympics to do their own fictive founding myth.

Many of the things that we see in the modern Olympics—the torch relay, the parade of nations, the Olympic medal table—come from 1936. Some of it starts in ’32, but the torch relay was a ’36 thing; coming from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany was an invention of this period, and it is deliberately drawing a link through history, through time, from one to the other, these Great Civilizing Powers. That’s a very conscious effort. 

But it won’t have escaped listeners’ attention that not everyone is welcome in Nazi Germany. By 1936, it was extremely clear that this state was deeply invested in homophobia, in violent persecution of the left, in antisemitism, in persecution of traveling peoples, and many other genocidal projects. 

The people of the world who don’t like fascism, the popular front—a specific term that comes out of the Communist International, this idea that we can’t go so hard for revolution that we piss off the liberals—they learned this from what happened in Germany in 1933. We can’t have a three-way fight right now; we can’t have communism versus liberalism versus fascism, because the liberals hate us more than they hate the fascists. This is a thing that is true; people will have seen this many times over human history, with various left groups. So they decide to push an alliance between socialists, left-liberals, and communists, and this is called the popular front.

In the spirit of the popular front, the Catalan republican left, the ERC, the party that has governed the Catalan autonomous region since 1931 virtually without break, decides—Spain also has a popular front government; we don’t have time to go into the history of the Spanish second republic, but basically if you imagine swings from left to right every two years, we’re now in a left swing, and it has a popular front government. Catalonia has a popular front government, so was aligned. France has a popular front government. And a conference takes place in Paris in April of 1936: the International Conference for the Respect of the Olympic Ideal. I don’t think that the Olympic Ideal is what they are saying it was, but I respect what they were going for, I guess. They were like, The Olympics is for everyone! We can’t give it to these bigots. We’ll do our own Olympics.

Barcelona had all the stadia in place, because it had applied for the ’36 Olympics and it had previously had a World’s Fair, so they were using the facilities from the World’s Fair. It’s worth noting as well that Catalonia had a national Olympic committee in addition to Spain’s—if you’ve spent more than one day in Catalonia, you’ll understand why. Catalans love to have independent institutions, and I understand that when Spain’s institutions were being really shitty. So the Catalans say, Yeah, we’re ready! We’ll take it, we’ll go.

So from April to July, they begin frantically organizing what becomes the Popular Olympics. You’ll sometimes see this translated as “People’s Olympics.” It was called “Olympiada Popular,” and the reason it was called that is because it’s the same word as “popular front” (when we translate “frente popular” into English we don’t translate it as “people’s front”), and the idea was to embody the popular front in these popular games. That’s why I translate it that way.

So the Popular Olympics is cobbled together over the next few months. It is something of a state project, but it also has a vaguely punk vibe to it, where they’re going around to people’s houses—I’ve seen these little pieces of paper in the archives. They’re like, How many spare beds do you have? Okay, you have two spare beds. Are they in their own room or are they in a communal room? Sweet. Can you also give people breakfast? Nice. Okay. You can accommodate two athletes and we’ll compensate you X amount per night and pay you for the food you use. They don’t have enough hotel rooms, so people are staying with people.

They work with the unions to ensure free passage on trains, so people can pass all through France on unionized trains, for free, to get the border, where they can board a unionized train or bus that gets them to Barcelona. It embodies what the Olympic ideal should be, this fictive myth of the Olympics. They go a long way in this. They are absolutely invested in it being a project for all races, genders, identities, religions, and so on. If we look at their poster art, various races of people are depicted, which is not a thing that people did casually in 1936.

They also allowed people to compete as nations, rather than states. So Catalonia, the Basque country—the exiled Jews of Europe, the Jewish Workers Sports Club, competed. The Women Students of the World competed. Colonized people competed under their identities, not the identity of their colonizer. This was obviously a big middle finger to the colonial project that the Olympics had become, and I think they knew that.

They were also extremely invested in women’s sport. If you’ve seen one picture of the Spanish civil war, it’s the lady with the Mauser standing on the roof smiling at the camera, right? She—Marina Ginestà—was a hurdler, a very good hurdler. She probably would have competed in the Popular Olympics. Another thing we see in the Popular Olympics was allowing people to compete at different levels: there were elite, provincial, and then amateur sports. You can compete as an elite athlete—and it’s worth noting that these worker-athletes were normally running faster, jumping higher, and being stronger than the athletes who competed in the Olympic games, because the Olympic games had this ethos of “amateurism.”

Amateurism is essentially a class barrier: if you get paid to do your sport, then you can’t come to the Olympic games. Amateurism comes out of England, and specifically out of this idea that it’s inappropriate for working class people to be kicking the shit out of bourgeois people. Because there would be factory teams, right? And the factory owner would just get people in and they wouldn’t have to work, they would just play football for the prestige of the factory. That is prohibited; you can’t compete if you’re a professional—that’s how the rugby union and rugby league split in England, and the Olympics is the same.

We can see this professionalism wielded as a race barrier if we look at the case of Jim Thorpe and Tom Longboat. They were Indigenous people from Turtle Island, and were excluded and in some cases disqualified after their participation, as in the case of Jim Thorpe, who was a Sac and Fox enrolled member and an incredible athlete and decathlete, and went on to have a baseball and football career. Jim Thorpe also wrote a history of the Olympics (which is a thing lots of people don’t know), and what’s really fucked is he was so invested in this Olympic ideal, and then it bit him in the ass. His correspondences were in the Olympic archive in Lausanne, and it’s really sad to see it. Incredible guy, incredible athlete.

This isn’t the case in Barcelona. There is no amateurism restriction. These are all working people. But there are also bourgeois people who are just bourgeois and antifascist; perhaps they were also Jewish and weren’t going to Germany to justify the Nazi regime. So there was this Olympiad which was very much about what they felt the Olympic ideal should be. To emphasize this, they had things like mass relay races on the first day: ten by fifty meters, and you can’t only have runners. There were wrestlers, swimmers, and gymnasts running in this massive relay race. 

It kind of had the school sports day vibe, and the idea was that the nation which has the healthiest working population will prevail, as opposed to the nation with a couple of freak athletes. A lot of the working class popular sport movement which had been built in Catalonia since 1931 was explicitly about the health of the working class, the damage that factory work did to them, and specifically things like preventing tuberculosis, creating a healthier working class. By ’36, this isn’t just about a healthier working class, it’s about a stronger working class. It’s about bringing antifascists together, while fascism is doing its spectacle in Berlin, and being like, We are strong, we are fast. If you want to fight us, you can come. Boxing was a big part of the Popular Olympics. It’s showing the muscle of antifascism, and it does this in various ways, explicitly and implicitly.

They also had, as many Olympiads did in the early twentieth century, a cultural Olympiad. Chess was a big part of the Popular Olympics. Pétanque—what do the Americans call it? Bocce. There was traditional folk dance; there was Catalan gegants, these giants made of papier mâché they used in parades and traditional ceremonies. There were castells, the human towers that Catalan is famous for. There were also bagpipers and highland dancers from Scotland; there were traditional dancers from Galicia, there were people from all over the world coming to exhibit. There was a writing event at the cultural Olympics. There’s painting.

All of these things were supposed to come together to be the largest antifascist spectacle the world has ever seen (that’s what they called it). And that’s what it was, and we can get into this more deeply: the night before the Olympics, the way I tell it is that Pau (Pablo) Casals, the father of modern cello music, composed the hymn for the Popular Olympics, and an exiled German-Jewish lyricist wrote the lyrics, and the idea was it was Catalonia meets antifascism. They were rehearsing that the day before when someone busts in and says, Hey, there’s been an uprising. Casals decides to finish the rehearsal; they play “Ode to Joy,” and then they all leave and go to their homes and don’t see each other again, maybe ever. Many of them die.

Twenty thousand people had shown up for the Popular Olympics. It would have been a huge spectacle. Many of them have come because they are antifascists, and when they see the Spanish military in the streets fighting the Spanish people—there’s a famous Orwell quote, “When I see a real flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I never have to ask myself what side I’m on.” These guys have that same reaction. 

A lot of them don’t share language, but they’ve been there for a week. You can read it in their diaries; I’ve written about the American team extensively, I can link you to some pieces. Their coaches have trouble keeping them out of the nightclubs and bars, because there’s a real feeling of revolution in Barcelona in 1936. There’s a real feeling of the people in command, even before the coup—because everyone knows the coup is coming, and they’re not afraid. They’re prepared.

So when the coup comes, the people go into the streets and they start crowbarring up paving stones, like the ones you can see in the Rambla today, and they start making barricades. These Popular Olympians—we see Charley Burley, a biracial boxer from Pittsburgh, supposed to be one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, doesn’t want to go to Berlin, he declines. He wants to go to Barcelona. He’s there; he doesn’t speak Spanish, but he goes down and starts building barricades with the Spanish people. You can see others of them, like Bernie Danchik, a Jewish gymnast—he keeps popping out onto his balcony to check out what’s going on, and keeps getting shot at because people think he’s a sniper, so in the end they pop out saying, We’re Americans! and no one shot them after that.  

Before we had the International Brigade, we had centuria: groups of a hundred people. These centuria sometimes got together in columns, the Durruti column being the most famous example. These international groups within the different columns, the international centuria, are formed, often, of Popular Olympians, people who had no intention of joining a war when they came. But they came as antifascists and they stayed as antifascists. I trace some of their legacies in the book; some were socialists, some were liberals, some were communists, some were anarchist—all of them hated fascism, so when they see the army come into the streets of Barcelona, and they see the people defeat the army in the streets, it’s an amazing spectacle.

In one example, there were news workers rolling out huge, several-meter-wide rolls of the paper they print newspapers on, and using these as a rolling barricade. They were hiding behind them, firing from behind them, and then rolling them forward firing from behind them. It’s this incredible spectacle of the people at arms. And many of the Popular Olympians elect to stay. Some go home—Al Chakin was a community college lecturer and a former athlete who busted his body so much he couldn’t compete anymore, and was also an antifascist, and he went home but couldn’t deal with being away, so he went back. He gave speeches, he raised money, but he didn’t feel like he was doing enough so he went back. He died in a retreat later.

Many, many of these Popular Olympians die, because international troops were often used as shock troops in the Spanish civil war.

That is the hopefully-not-too-lengthy link from British folk football to the 1936 Popular Olympics.

EA: That was brilliant, thanks James.

You have a quote in your National Geographic piece: “In a few short hours, antifascism went from an idea to an action to a resounding victory in the Catalan capital. The coup was defeated—for the moment—but there would be no Popular Olympics. The Spanish civil war had begun.”

I’d guess you’ve spent some time thinking about big what-ifs in history, like what if the Popular Olympics had gone ahead? What if, also, it was as popular or more popular than the more infamous Olympics in Berlin?

What are some of the things that could have been possible? Because they were effectively crushed in that moment, in many ways.

JS: If you look at the popular Olympians, the ones who survived the Second World War—they spend their whole lives advocating for getting rid of Franco by any means necessary. It gave us a popular-frontism that wasn’t basically Soviet Communism exported. So many of the people were sent by communist parties, so many of them struggled so deeply with the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact—some of them leave; some of them remain but are deeply troubled by it. There was an option for an antifascism there which was rooted in basic decency, respect for other people, and a repudiation of everything fascism stands for, without stanning for another totalitarian regime or being a tool for it.

That, I think, dies in 1937 in Barcelona, when the Republic sends its troops to fight against its own people, against the anarchists who have unionized the telephone exchange among other things—the anarchists and the POUM, who are non-Stalinist Marxists. It dies with the anarchists that the Spanish military intelligence service arrests, tortures, and kills throughout the civil war. The SIM spends more time going after anarchists than it does going after actual fascists. 

I think there is a potential for something there. If the Spanish civil war had happened a few months later, and this spectacle had occurred, the possibility of the “democracies” in the colonial core intervening—it’s there. Even if they had just stopped their companies selling oil—if Texaco had not sold oil to the Francoists, the Spanish civil war would have been a very different affair. Or if we had actually kept the non-intervention pact and stopped Germany and Italy intervening.

But at first, in the weeks before the Popular Olympics, we see France hosting these big fundraisers in stadiums in Paris, and we see this massive solidarity. The French are the most numerous volunteers in the Spanish civil war who were non-Spanish. But if the French popular front had built those links even stronger through the Popular Olympics, and then intervened in Spain, then we’d see a very different future. 

Because we see everything that’s going to happen in the Second World War happening in Spain. The Nazis develop all their tactics: we see the bombing of Guernica, but also these eighty-eight millimeter guns they had, that they used in all kinds of ways, like direct fire—they honed all that in Spain. 

You can read about it. It’s interesting to see the anarchists in the Durruti column being like, Huh, they’re using these guns, they’re not arcing their artillery up and angling it down, they’re just using it like a rifle, pointing it and shooting it! And then they start doing the same thing.

The move from First World War tactics, weapons, and technology to that of the Second World War happens in Spain. It starts at the battle of Jarama, with trench warfare and going over the top and everyone getting shot, and it ends with maneuver warfare, with tanks, with airplanes, with combined-arms warfare. 

So if the democratic powers had supported Spain—the United States came relatively close to boycotting the Berlin Olympics and going to Spain. Even after their national Olympic committee elected to go to Berlin, the organizers in Spain were so invested in the struggle of Black people for equality in the United States being an antifascist struggle that they were willing to pay for Black folks to come over from the United States and compete, and it’s in all their materials: Yeah, we’re working really hard to unite with Black folks in the US, bring them over here, and make them part of this project.

It presents a vision of a better world, not just a better Olympiad—a better way of us relating to each other. I’ve always wanted to speak to a Popular Olympian. The last Popular Olympian died in an old folks’ home two years ago; I wasn’t able to visit because of COVID, which is a real bummer. He was an Esperantist, which is another amazing thing that we’ve completely lost now. Now, anarchists just cancel each other on Twitter, but back then they were trying to learn Esperanto so that we could all talk to one another; it would break down these barriers between the working people of the world. 

He was an Esperantist translator at the Popular Olympics, with the idea that it would be a bridge language, so anyone could go through an Esperantist and get a translation through two steps. He died an Esperantist; he practiced Esperanto his whole life. That was how I was able to reach out, though Esperantist circles. 

It’s deeply sad that we lost that dream in that moment, and who knows how it would have played out, of course, but at that moment it presented a really appealing vision of a different world.

AY: It’s clear you could go on for hours with these anecdotes and histories; I really appreciate you outlining the long and rich history for us here. I was curious—given what you’ve already told us about the very problematic history of the Olympics and the direct links between what they came up with in Berlin and what we’re still seeing today as the central elements of the ceremony; that’s a really fascinating and illuminating demonstration of what the history of these games still are today, I’d never heard that the torch bearing is something that literally comes out of Nazi Germany. I think it’s really important for people to understand the symbolism there.

On the flipside, the vision of the Popular Olympics—if only it could have happened. It sounds so amazing, and so beautiful; I wish something like that would happen today as well. I’m curious if you could share your thoughts: given that the Paris Olympics are happening soon and will be taking up a lot of space in what people are hearing about, and given how the legacy of that problematic history continues into today—should we still be doing this? Is there any redeeming quality to the Olympics as they are? Is there hope or reason to do it differently? Should we try reviving an antifascist Olympics? Or is it something we should be boycotting, and just stop altogether?

JS: It’s a powerful ideal. In a way, the World Cup has taken over, as Elia was saying, as the global sporting event. But it’s still a powerful ideal that anyone from anywhere can come together and compete, and we can see who’s fastest—but hopefully also learn that we share more than we differ on.

As I look at the Olympics now—George Orwell said sport is war without the shooting. That’s what we’re doing at the Olympics. When we tabulate the states and which state has overcome the other states in the medal table, it’s really hard not to see eugenic elements there; it’s really hard not to see inter-state conflict in there. Despite their strange rules on the size of logos and stuff, the Olympics is entirely about capitalism. Every major corporation you can think of has a stake in the Olympics now, from Coca-cola to Samsung, and the absolutely insane trademark enforcement that comes with it. It’s extremely problematic. 

Every four years I’ll have friends at the Olympics, and I can see their goal, to see how great they can be. And it’s also been a platform for amazing things; we don’t have to go back that far, to 1968: Smith and Carlos on the podium doing the raised fist. It’s a global platform, and there are not that many times when the whole world is watching the same thing anymore. So that does give a chance. 

I had a lot of conversations with friends before Beijing (that was when I was more actively competing) about what it meant to go to Beijing, both in terms of the statements that you could make as a person who might not be entirely aligned with the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party, and in terms of the long term consequences on your lungs because the pollution there is so bad—and what that meant for people who have to live their entire lives there, while you just race your bike.

So it’s not something I would say I support, but it’s something I can understand, certainly from the athletes’ perspective. But I think there is real benefit in trying to revive some of these popular sporting traditions. They explicitly sought, in Catalonia, as a popular front project from 1931 to 1936, to empower women and to bring people of different classes and ethnicities together. 

Sport still offers that. Sometimes I like to go to the Y—I’ll go to the Y with friends, and it’s one of the most diverse spaces that they have entered. They have certain types of jobs and they live in certain neighborhoods and are generally better off than me, and enjoy a more bourgeois existence; they don’t encounter diverse spaces, and sport allows us to play together and be on the same team. That’s really important. And in a world where we interact via little tiny micro-interactions on social media a lot, getting together and playing together has so much benefit.

Maybe I have a slightly romantic view of it, but to me it represented the best in antifascism—not just as a project against things, but as a project for things, saying: We are opposed to the racial hierarchy that fascism is trying to create with its medals table; we will all play together. We are not here to prove the superiority of one race; we’re here to prove the unity of all these races against your hateful project. We refute the idea that women are incapable of running more than two hundred meters (which is what they could run in 1936 in Berlin); we will let them run further if they want to. 

We want young working class people to swim, because it’s a huge problem that working class children drown! This isn’t just about who can be the best; it’s about making working people healthy, strong, and united.

I think—we still have a giant problem with people drowning in this country! Specifically people who are from less privileged socio-economic groups. We’re nearly a hundred years after anarchists started teaching children to swim, and we still don’t execute that. And I think we shouldn’t cede the terrain of sport to nationalism, to fascism, to those ideologies of the state. It’s fun, but it’s also powerful.

Recently I was in north and east Syria, and I was playing football with some little kids. My fixer was filtering fuel for her vehicle, because the quality of the fuel isn’t very good there and it will destroy your engine. So I was outside with some kids playing football, and it’s one of the few things—my Arabic is shit, my Kurmanji is extremely basic. I learned Kurmanji from some dude walking around the market and pointing at things and screaming nouns at me until I could repeat them. So football was the only thing I shared with those kids, and we had a meaningful connection.

I’ve had my ass kicked by eight-year-olds at football on every continent apart from Antarctica. It’s a powerful coming-together that we don’t get anywhere else, really. Its a shared terrain, and we should contest it. We shouldn’t cede it, I think. And that’s up to people who aren’t me to decide what that means and how we do it, but I don’t think we should just cede that terrain, because it’s powerful and it’s a way of coming together that we ought not to ignore—even if we’re not people who enjoy sports ourselves.

And it doesn’t have to be sports, right? You can do chess. You can do all these things that represent unity that we sometimes lack.

AY: The piece you were talking about with all the logistics they were arranging around the Popular Olympics, the way they were going around asking people if they had a spare room—that piece of care, and making sure that Black athletes from the US could make it over to Spain—all of those pieces show possibility for gathering which is really important, and being together and celebrating together. I really appreciate this take, that we don’t just have to give sports to the fascists and to the empire; it can be a really powerful way to be together and to find joy and play and unity.

That doesn’t even necessarily have to be an anarchist or antifascist project; like you were saying earlier, Elia, this is something you can share with family members who you might not otherwise have things to talk about with. That’s such a beautiful and unifying factor of sports. I want us to be able to reclaim that and not let hem just have it. So thank you for all that.

EA: The reason I mention the example of my father-in-law—I used to think that certain topics of conversation are beneath us, or not important, or whatever. Sport sometimes gets that reputation. After reading a bazillion book by bell hooks and company, I do strongly believe that “meeting people where they are” is not like me debasing myself, me the high-profile academic or whatever the fuck, but understanding that this is how praxis can work. This is how my activism would work—I have been in situations where it can be an icebreaker; it can be something in common. 

As James pointed out, the Olympics and the World Cup are among the very few times when a lot of human beings are sitting down in front of the TV or going to the fanzones (which are dynamics in and of themselves) to watch something, and they have their focus on something for a period of time, and that can be very transformative, that can be very powerful. 

It can also be the exact opposite; it can be transformative in a negative sense. It can be a way for corporations to sportswash; it can be all of those things and much worse, obviously. The most recent Euro Cup was sponsored by the Qatar tourism agency, “Visit Qatar dot com” was written everywhere on all of the matches. And previous ones have been sponsored by the Azerbaijani state oil company. The Africa Cup, if I’m not mistaken, is still sponsored entirely by the French petroleum company Total.

Those folks—powerful folks, lobbyists, corporations, governments—have understood that this is a very useful platform for them. There’s a reason why Bahrain is so into Formula One, and it’s not because the average Bahraini suddenly woke up one day and was into cars. There was a political calculation by the government. There are other examples, but that’s one I worked on for a report some years ago.

I did a podcast with Musa Okwonga and Justin Salhani and Fabien Goa before the World Cup and after the World Cup. Before the World Cup we talked about all the problems associated with it; the one after was partly about that as well but also reflecting on what it meant, and what things Qatar got away with and what they didn’t. To paraphrase both of you, I don’t think the solution is to cede ground. I still have difficulties watching any football match is a big international event, because there’s so much corruption at every stage of the process: before the match, the advertisers on the match, what is chosen—even when they choose to stop. 

I’ve noticed that more and more: if there’s a goal, and it’s a particularly important goal, and they invite you to rewatch it after the match, they will first introduce a few ads, because they know that you’re going to sit around and watch it. All these things, in my opinion, have been ruining the game more and more. It doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s a way to enjoy or participate in it. There are football clubs that do that, and there are Ultras; there are football clubs that have that exact culture, an activist culture. St. Pauli comes to mind (although there’s some problematic stuff), and others.

It’s important to recognize it for what it is: it is a battleground, for many historical reasons, and it is worth participating in it if that’s something people feel is worth their time.

We are going to wrap up slowly—we could do this for hours, and there’s so much more that we can say, but it’s okay. Any closing thoughts? James and Aydın as well, tell folks where they can follow you online, upcoming projects, whatever you want to share.

JS: Yesterday was the Euro final, for those of us who follow football/soccer. I thought it was a pretty good example, seeing these two, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams—Yamal does this thing where he does his phone extension to represent the very impoverished area of Catalonia where he comes from; this is a good example of how it’s hard to deny someone’s talent, and that allows them sometimes to use this as a terrain to contest. That’s something we should support.

But yeah, if you want to follow me online, I have a Twitter and a Patreon; you can find everything on James Stout dot net. I don’t make any money if someone buys my book; it’s an academic book and it’s insanely expensive. If you want to read it, go to the library and ask for it. I would like it if you did that, and it shouldn’t cost you any money that way, and then more libraries will have it and more people can read it. Which is why we write books in the first place. All the information about that is on my website as well.

Go outside and play with people, I promise you it will improve your mood. Go and play football with some kids. Go for a run, go for a walk, it’s something we should embrace and we should not cede that terrain. We shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it. It’s part of humanity. People have played for as long as there have been people.

I should plug the podcast I work for, I always forget. I work for It Could Happen Here, a podcast on the Cool Zone Media network. If you’re only going to listen to one episode, I would love it if you would listen to our series called “Myanmar: Building the Revolution,” where we went to Burma and met young guerillas who are fighting for freedom from a very oppressive fascist project there. The world doesn’t pay enough attention to them, and their cause means a great deal to me.

AY: Thanks, James. No closing thoughts for me; I shared all the reflections I had. Go listen to all of the other podcast episodes that James has done about this if you want to learn more, and read James’s book, it’s great.

I am not followable personally online, but if anyone wants to follow Antidote Zine, we are on Mastodon, you can find us on there, or visit our website Antidote Zine dot com. We also do transcripts for The Fire These Times so if you are a transcript nerd and like to sit and listen to people talk and take all of the ums and ers out of the conversation, that is something you can hit us up about. There’s more information on our website.

Thank you for the lovely conversation, I appreciate you having me here for it as well.

EA: Yeah! Thank you both for this.

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