The Politics of International Sport

About this Episode

Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler in 1936 Berlin. The 1942 Dynamo Kyiv soccer team which went on to defeat Hitler’s squad after being told, “If you win, you die.” Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved hands in the Black Power salute in 1968. Gay rights and Vladimir Putin’s Russia at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The role of sport in dismantling South Africa’s apartheid regime and the 2010 World Cup in putting the nation on display on the global stage. And coming up, Brazil: about to host to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics and home to tumultuous popular demonstrations. Politics and international sports seem to go hand-in-hand, but why? Join History Talk hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy as they discuss the historical dimensions of this contentious topic with experts Russell Field, Marc Horger, and Steven Conn.

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Russell Field, Marc Horger, Steven Conn , "The Politics of International Sport" , Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective
https://origins.osu.edu/historytalk/politics-international-sport?language_content_entity=en.

Transcript

Patrick Potyondy 

Welcome to History Talk, the history podcast for everyone produced by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. This is your co-host, Patrick Potyondy.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

And this is your other co-host, Leticia Wiggins. Nearly every four years, since 1930, nationally formed teams fight for the coveted World Cup, a trophy that represents the greatest accomplishment any soccer, or to most of the world, football team can achieve. As the biggest single event sporting competition in the world, a FIFA World Cup win bolsters national pride and promotes international recognition, or so it is often argued.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

And now we're fast approaching the 2014 World Cup, hosted this year by Brazil, who will also host the 2016 Olympics. In this episode of History Talk, in addition to considering the sport itself, we'd like to consider the local, national, and international impact of not only the World Cup, but also the Olympics as a pair of international sporting events, which are so often politicized and turned out to be controversial.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

And today, we have three experts joining us for this discussion. And we have two in studio and one via phone. We'll ask our phone guests to first introduce themselves.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Sure. Hi, I'm Russell Field. I'm an assistant professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba, where I teach primarily courses in the history and sociology of sport.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I'm Steven Conn, and I'm one of the editors of Origins.

 

Marc Horger 

I'm Marc Horger. I'm a senior lecturer in the history of American sport, in the kinesiology department at Ohio State.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Alright, thanks for joining us. And let's get right to it. First off, some deep background. When and why did large international sports competitions become the norm that we know of today? And Mark, we'll throw this question first to you.

 

Marc Horger 

Well, the first one, in the sense that we're talking about, would be the modern revival of the Olympics, which started in 1896. And the first one was in Athens and then they began having them every four years after that, although the first few were not really all that spectacular. 1900 was in Paris, 1904 was in St. Louis. Those games were attached to world's fairs. And the World's Fair was the more interesting and popular and the bigger thing at the time. And in particular, the one in St. Louis was...there were only a handful of non-American athletes. And one of the leaders of the Olympic movement in the United States was a guy named James Sullivan, who was the head of the American Amateur Athletic Union. And some of the American Olympic efforts early in the history of the Olympics involved Sullivan and trying to sort of turn them into these American things. So the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis were basically AAU national championships that the vast majority of which weren't really all done international. And it wasn't really until maybe 1908 London or 1912 Stockholm that the Olympics, in the sense that we know them, that they were internationally popular, internationally respected, successful, that's sort of when the tradition took in such a way that it became a permanent sort of model.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

Moving on to the economics of this all, do these sorts of events pay for themselves, historically speaking? And Russell, we'll ask you to take this question away.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Sure, historically pay for themselves is a slippery thing to try to get a hold of, because the events themselves, Mark started to unfold, have changed so much over time. Initially, they were wrapped into other events. And especially if we're talking about the Olympic Games, or at least the IOC version of the Olympic Games, those were intensely amateur events, which means athletes were self-funded, funded by their national committees. And oftentimes, the events themselves, as Mark alluded to, weren't that spectacular, and oftentimes as well, used existing facilities. So our contemporary understanding of those events as grand global spectacles intimately tied into media, intimately tied into global multinational corporate sponsors, is not necessarily...it's very much a late twentieth century phenomenon.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

So if you had to pick a single Olympic event where that shift takes place, could you point to one? Or was it more of a -

 

Dr. Russell Field 

The one most often pointed to is Los Angeles, in the 1984 Los Angeles Games. So certainly, the big, the first sort of grand spectacle, not unproblematic, but the first grand spectacle in the Olympic history is Berlin in 1936. But in terms of the commercialization of the game, Los Angeles is pointed to most often as a turning point, but it's important remember, I think two things. One is that the commercialization that blossoms so fully in Los Angeles in 1984, under the leadership of Peter Ueberroth, was the result of a shifting process that commercialization of the Games had always existed on some level, they just sort of blossomed in 1984. And even as we talk about the '84 Olympic Games as being the first organizing committee to talk openly about earning profit from the Games, even those Games took place in a stadium that was being reused, a stadium that had been used for the 1932 Olympic Games.

 

Marc Horger 

There was a trend, and I won't be able to name every stadium that, I don't think, that was built this way, but there was a trend in the United States in the 20s of building large municipal stadiums for a variety of local pride reasons, among which was the possibility that it might help the city land an Olympics, which was essentially how the LA Coliseum was built, which was sort of built simultaneously for USC, and under the assumption that LA would be interested in trying to get in the Olympics at some time.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

And so under that model, that kind of municipal-led model, do you think that helps the communities where things were costing more than the kind of commercialized -

 

Marc Horger 

Well, Russell is right to point out how a slippery slope that is because in particular, the deal with the Coliseum in LA is that, at least in the United States, a very powerful political and cultural motivating factor that gets large, expensive things built is the idea that your city is not sufficiently respected relative to other cities that you view as your peers. And that usually means you're looking half a step up at your peers. And so in LA, in the early 20s, Los Angeles believed, you know, the big sort of boosters in Los Angeles, the guys that could get things built, were simultaneously convinced that the East Coast was insufficiently respectful of West Coast greatness, and that San Francisco was insufficiently respectful of LA greatness. And building a stadium for USC football as public boosterism that might also land LA an Olympics that would cause the whole world to stare at LA and look at how awesome LA was. And at the same time that they were spending money in LA to do that, across town in Pasadena, they were building a more or less identical stadium for the Rose Bowl to play a football game in once a year. So that people on the East Coast, freezing to death on New Year's Day, would look at all of the available real estate in Los Angeles. It's so warm out here, we're playing football. It's so warm out here that we've got rose petals to waste, turning into parade floats.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

And Russell, did this sort of, kind of more local or regional competition happen on the international scene as well?

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Absolutely. And in some sense, the point that's already been made about stadiums being built, in part to attract international events but also for other events, took place in other cities, so that the London Olympics, not the most recent one, but London Olympics in 1948, took place in Wembley Stadium, which had been built in 1923, essentially, as a football stadium. So there was, especially in Europe in the Olympics were, and to a large degree remain, a very Eurocentric, at least administratively and conceptually, kind of events. In Europe, the idea of building soccer stadiums was so essential to city, sort of civic pride, and the nature of it was that the bricks and mortar were a tangible manifestation of your city's success and your team's potential success. That in many respects, the international sporting event was a nice add-on to it and existing kind of facilities.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

But you know, I'm struck as well as I look back over this, that at least in the American context, but I think also a few now looking in places like Brazil, where they're embarked on two rounds of Olympic and World Cup construction, that attracting these big international events becomes an urban renewal project by a different name. That what happens here is we use the excuse of these huge international events, to do a lot of other things for which we might not otherwise have been able to raise the money. I think that was true in Sochi, though, which I think a lot of people missed in the discussion of those Olympics that just passed. And I think the track record on that is pretty mixed. And I think if you got four economists in a room, you get five different answers about whether or not those investments wound up paying off.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

And the nature of the sport. So the World Cup, it seems like, is very popular in like Latin American countries. And I wonder almost, when we speak so much about the Olympics, is the World Cup on the international scene? Is there a difference here? And what countries are more likely to host or who gets a bid? Or I'm trying to think of -

 

Marc Horger 

I would say that the biggest difference economically, until relatively recently, was the absence of interest in in the World Cup in the United States. Certainly it, particularly when we begin talking about television, there was a stretch of time in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, for example, when Olympic IOC politics had become very complex for a variety of reasons, I'll imagine we'll talk about a little bit later. But one of them is that the biggest chunk of money into the IOC pot was the American TV contract. And while television became important to the World Cup money pile eventually as well, one of the, until 1994 at least, one of the big differences between the two is that the largest commercial marketplace in the world was the one part of the world that was not interested in the World Cup.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I also wonder, and I'm thinking also back to Russell, what you said a moment ago, whether the dynamics of international politics is in part to answer for you, the question that you raise, Letizia, because Mark's quite right. Americans, until very recently, didn't have much interest in what we properly call soccer. And as a consequence, it never got refracted through the Cold War in the way that the Olympics did. The Olympics were fun to watch precisely because it was this titanic struggle.

 

Marc Horger 

It was a Cold War show.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Exactly. So you look at those East German weightlifters and those Soviet swimmers and all that other kind of stuff, and that was the fun of it. Now that that's been gone for the better part of 20 years, the World Cup has emerged in a different place in America.

 

Marc Horger 

Although I would observe that the US-Russia hockey game this year was one of the highest rated. That it's...I'm sort of struck, that some of that has come back sort of organically. American culture has sort of already organically begun to turn Vladimir Putin into a cartoon villain figure even before the recent events in Ukraine.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah, that's right.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Yeah and Russell, I'm wondering, we've kind of touched on this kind of Cold War topic and the international relations angle, what were some of the kind of key points in the strained relationship during the Cold War? And how has it improved since or maybe if it has improved since, do you think?

 

Dr. Russell Field 

The Cold War became one but not, but by no means the only moment when nationalism was...when sport became a tool for reflecting upon the ways in which national and political kinds of interests intersect, so that the same kind of national interests that led to international sport being created in the nineteenth century were the same kind of impulses that led sport to be taken up in the post-Second World War era. So most historians point to the re-entry of the Soviet Union into the Olympic movement in the early 1950s as the moment where the Cold War and sport became intimately related to one another, because after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union had pulled out of the Olympic Movement until the early 1950s, when a change in policy dictates a return to international sport, but that there are other kinds of important nuances so that the Cold War becomes implicated throughout sport in the 1950s, 60s and certainly through into the 1980s. For obvious reasons, we focused a lot in our discussion thus far on sort of American examples, but there are lots of other ones. So where I'm sitting in the Canadian case, we look back to a hockey and ice hockey series, in 1972, in September, the same month that there's the basketball final in Munich becomes an important Cold War moment in sport for Americans and the Soviet Union. But I think one of the reasons I say that I think that the re-entry of the Soviet Union is only one point of departure for thinking about the Cold War and sport is because what's less often talked about is the Chinese relationship to sport in the Cold War. And the fact that the Chinese, for example, in the late 1950s, decide for a variety of reasons, both tensions with the West, and indeed tensions with the Soviet Union, to pull out of the Olympic movement, and begin sponsoring most prominently in 1963 in Indonesia, alternate forms of multi-sport events, alternate Olympics, that become fully involved in third world politics. So that one of the other kinds of great tensions in the Cold War period is not just East-West, first and second world tensions in the Cold War, but also how to deal with the rapidly decolonizing countries of the third world.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

So you kind of did hit on this idea of sports and national identity as being linked through these events, and when and why did this link between nation and sport begin?

 

Marc Horger 

I actually think that one of the things we sort of underestimate when we're discussing the politics of this, because we're so trained to take this for granted, is the fact that it's one of the primary exponents of nationalism, of the idea that a people are a nation that share a language and a culture and that's organic, and the world should be organized into boxes with everybody's name on them, is deeply political in ways that the vast majority of people, at least in the United States and Canada and the West, they have a hard time stepping back from and one of the ways, especially after World War II, that both the Olympics and FIFA have become political is that FIFA and the IOC and the United Nations are the three international organizations that get to decide who are or aren't countries.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Oh, that's interesting.

 

Marc Horger 

And we, as Western consumers of the Olympics on television, laugh at the two hours that Bob Costas has to find a way to say something interesting about the three guys from Togo and the two guys from Trinidad and Tobago that come through. But that two hours, for much of the rest of the world, is overwhelmingly the most important part of the Olympics. Because that's a parade of who is or isn't a country. My favorite contemporary example of this is that the, I don't even know what to call it, the semi- independent English-speaking city state of Gibraltar.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I don't know what it is, actually.

 

Marc Horger 

But it has petitioned FIFA to compete, right. And I think the population of Gibraltar is about 30,000 people.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah, I'm going to move there so can I finally make an Olympics.

 

Marc Horger 

The odds are low that they're going to be an international football powerhouse. But they would very much like that FIFA pretends that they're a nation. And Spain would very much like that FIFA not pretend that they're a nation, otherwise the Basques might ask, and San Marino might ask and on down the line.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

I think we've seen this a lot in Eastern Europe, right? With Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, all these kinds of countries?

 

Marc Horger 

Well I think yeah, we actually but I think Russia was right, that we actually, it's a little bit of our own Western blindness to not think of that primarily as a third world phenomenon.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Right.

 

Marc Horger 

It's also happening in Eastern Europe.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

And I think I would see it in two parts. And Russell, that's a really great observation. So it, beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating through that decade and into the 1970s, there was decolonization and the creation of these new nations out of the former European colonies and then they get put on display. They get their moment in the sun during the Olympics. But then I would say, you know, in the 1990s, in particular, and continuing maybe up to the very present moment, a kind of micro-nationalism that has emerged in various parts of the world so that the country of Sudan has now been partitioned into two countries. Yugoslavia dissolved into several other countries. Who knows what's going to go on in Ukraine, whether we'll wind up with two halves of a Ukrainian country. And the way that those micro-nationalisms get legitimated is by recognition. And if you don't get a UN seat, maybe you get a bid to go to the Olympics.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Yeah, I was just going to jump in there because there's a lot there. And Mark and Steve are right that sport has become one of those markers of acceptance internationally, but it's highly contested, so that there are international sporting events now for groups that feel unrepresented in international court, and that the boundaries are not clear so that in European football, UEFA, the European soccer governing body, the Faroe Islands are one of the teams that get to compete. But Greenland isn't, so why does one Danish colony get to while the other, which wants its recognition, doesn't get to compete, but what I would say, and Steve's right about this kind of micro-nationalism and even smaller, I would argue, than the idea of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, but that this is much, much older than this, that Yugoslavia didn't necessarily break into separate nations. What happened is that these ethnic groups that had been agglomerated, and by the West at one point in time, reasserted themselves and so it's much older than that. And it's not just a phenomenon of other parts of the world that when Cooper Taff forms the Olympics, and that's just one example in the 1890s, he does it through a variety of philosophical lenses, internationalism being one of them, but it's never an international peace movement, which is how he frames the Olympic Games. It's always a movement for nations, and the idea that international sport emerges and becomes conceptualized in this way at the exact same time that a variety of nationalist movements in Europe are realizing their objectives is not insignificant. That sport becomes a way, not in Sochi, but in the late nineteenth century for nations that are newly formed, all these city states that are suddenly Italy. Sport becomes literally a playing field for people to act out what Italy or some other nation means now. Yeah, so this is not a contemporary phenomenon. This has got a long history.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I wonder though, Russell, if you would agree with this. This is an observation that sort of interested me, that the Olympics also became, and I don't know about the World Cup, I suspect probably not, but the Olympics at least became a place for a while, where individuals might talk back to those notions of nationalism. So I'm thinking about 1968 with the medal ceremony that was controversial, the two Americans sprinters, the '72 Olympics, of course, with the PLO and what happened in Munich. And it seems to me, there was a sort of desultory conversation about whether certain athletes would boycott the Sochi Olympics because of the anti-gay legislation and the homophobic discrimination, but it wasn't really serious. Nobody really thought that they were going to upset the applecart here. And I wonder if you would agree with that, that the Olympics is really no longer a platform for kind of political protest statement.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

I absolutely agree with that. I think a lot of people who aren't intimately involved in sport and the Olympics see the platform as being there. But I don't think that the people who are involved necessarily want to do that. I think the athletes who dedicate their lives to competing in this way are, many of them, though by no means all, many of them are reticent to give up that opportunity and are inculcated in a subculture of not necessarily challenging that authority and risking those kinds of things. And there are lots of boundaries around keeping sport out of politics. And this goes back to the beginning of the Olympic Games, but certainly in the Cold War era that we've been talking about. The IOC president, who wasn't the only American to have ever been IOC president, Avery Brundage, just abhorred the idea that sport and politics commingled and even though they were, depending on how you defined politics, intimately related.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah. Though, you know, and I guess I would just say from my American point of view, I think this is also true in terms of American athletics as they also have become increasingly commercialized and increasingly just large economic enterprises. Once upon a time, American professional athletes, even American college athletes would take positions on controversial political issues. I'm thinking particularly of Vietnam. University of Michigan football players, you know, chartered a bus to go to an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington DC over the objection of their coach. Whereas nowadays, it's hard for me to admit you know, the best we got was that people, you know, NBA teams wore their jerseys inside out in protest of Donald Sterling. That was that, and then we moved on, because there's too much money at stake here, perhaps.

 

Marc Horger 

Just as a counterpoint, and I kind of want to say this, because I basically want to see if Russell thinks I'm onto something here. I can -

 

Dr. Russell Field 

No, I'm a litmus test.

 

Marc Horger 

Because I, just off the top of my head, I agree with everything Steve said. But none of those people didn't show up to play. And I can only think of in 1968, the protests that started that wound up Carlos and Smith with black power in the air had begun as an effort by some black American athletes to convince no black American athletes to participate in the Games. And the only, and this is why I'm interested in knowing if Russell thinks I'm right about this, that the only major athlete I can think of that didn't appear at an Olympic Games, where he almost certainly would have, for political reasons is Lew Alcindor, who should have been on the 1968 American Basketball team, now Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who I believe was the only major American athlete you obviously would have expected at the Games that didn't go to the Games, probably because of his political...and then, but he of course, played a sport where you didn't need to go to the Olympic Games to then become Kareem Abdul Jabbar and be a professionally active athlete anyway. Can you think of any other examples, Russell, along those lines?

 

Dr. Russell Field 

There are examples. And they're far more obscure than someone like Kareem Abdul Jabbar. But there were protests, for example, around, and there are lots of discussions around boycotting the Berlin Olympics in 1936, because they were being hosted by the Nazis and because of what was obviously going on in Nazi Germany and fears that Jewish German athletes wouldn't get the potential to be represented on those teams. So there was an alternate Olympic Games, had been organized for Barcelona for a variety of reasons, that never happened. But there were athletes who refuse from a variety of countries, and there were certainly two Canadian athletes I can think of, who refused to go to the Olympics that year on the Canadian team who went instead to Barcelona. So there are examples like that. The one, the most shining example, and I would agree with Steve that the 60s were a period when athletes seemed more political though and were more political and it was a more politicized time. I would also say that there's...I think we have to caution ourselves not to be too nostalgic about the 1960s in part because some of the most prominent athlete activists, and I'm thinking of someone like Dave Meggyesy in the NFL, felt enormous repercussions about any kind of, if they were to step out at all, there was great...they faced a lot of repercussions. So as Mark says, the athletes did compete. The most successful campaign for sport and politics and human rights is, I think, undoubtedly, the anti-apartheid movement where sport played an enormous role in visibly ostracizing South Africa.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Which in turn, when South Africa hosted the World Cup, it amplified the importance of that event for that nation.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Yeah.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I would also just toss out Muhammad Ali, as someone who, you know, in the prime of his career, on an international stage, boxing occupies maybe a different space here than some of the other things we're talking about.

 

Marc Horger 

But he did lose several years in his prime, yeah.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah, and it's just hard for me to imagine nowadays that you'd find an athlete at that level who would do that to their own career. And right, so that while politics is, we want to keep politics out of it, as Russell, you've already said, the politics of nationalism is part of the DNA of all of this to start with. So it's a certain kind of politics that we include and other kinds of politics that we keep out.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

So bringing us back to the present day, do we see all these different political kind of aspects, protests, so does this disappear, like is Brazil doing anything similar in this instance?

 

Marc Horger 

Certainly, there have been some protests in Brazil that have used the construction around the World Cup and the Olympics as a focus, but I'm, maybe Russell knows more about this than maybe the two of us sitting here in the studio, I'm not so sure that those protests are as much about sport as some of the other things we've been talking about, as much as those are the obvious nearby symbols of money being spent on other things that are serving as the focus of the protest. The one similar example I can think of is that, of contemporary protests that were not particularly interpreted as protests about sport, other than to the extent that they represented a security threat for tourists, there was unrest in Mexico City in 1968, surrounding the Mexico City Games, that weren't really about sport as much as that was the obvious thing to focus the protests on.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

Right, the city wasn't ready. They, I mean, I think that was part of the reason as well for the -

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

I also think that the Brazil '14, '16, sort of double whammy, it's going to raise...it's going to be a very good laboratory to test what we've talked about previously, and that is whether these huge economic infrastructure investments wind up having any kind of positive legacy in the population, which, you know, in Brazil, at any rate, a lot of this construction going on in neighborhoods that are desperately poor.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Yeah, I'd like to try to connect two strands in both what Steve just said and what Mark was talking about, I connect the idea of protests and unrest, and whether or not that's about sport, which is, I think, oftentimes a rhetorical device to save sport from protests rather than, and to cleanse sport of protest, because I think they're intimately related. But also back to this idea, that Steve mentioned earlier that we didn't really get into, which was this idea that sport and sporting events and hosting as a method of urban renewal. There have been protests around sport. There wasn't just unrest in Mexico City, there was a massacre of hundreds of students by the Mexican government, or the police force, in the government in the guise of the police force. But there have been protests around hosting events, at least since Atlanta in 1996. Sort of massive protests now going on in Brazil, they're very sizable. They're considerable. And they're around a variety of issues, around dislocation of people to build stadiums. And there's Accor, which is an NGO based in Geneva, has been tracking numbers of people displaced for the construction of sporting events, and they number in the hundreds of thousands in the time that the Accor has been tracking them. There’re tangible impacts on the ground for these kinds of projects, and the growth coalitions and the civic boosters who want to promote them and the resistance that's happening to them, so that there's the reproach in there. Now, what's interesting is that what was a first world phenomenon, so there was, when Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics four years ago, there were considerable protests in Vancouver leading up to the games on a variety of issues: environmental, economic, the rights of indigenous peoples. But now what's interesting is that as the model of regeneration of civic renewal and the investment of enormous amounts of money seems to be ringing somewhat hollow, and the case of Athens and the bankers, the Athens Olympics in 2004, and the association of that with the, in part, but by no means all, but in part the failure of the Greek economy, is that what we see now and that civic leaders, halt political leaders are now taking a stance against the idea of bidding for these events. And in consequence, events like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are now going to countries, less developed countries. So South Africa, India just hosted the Commonwealth Games. Brazil, as we've talked about, is getting the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics in 2016. And/or places much like Putin's Russia, where governments don't have the kinds of democratic accountability to worry as much about protests. So there's ways now, in which it's almost seen that we'll get around the kind of resistance, we'll get to, Beijing's another good example, governments willing to spend the mammoth amounts of money. Sochi was the most expensive games ever, that this idea of the debates around urban renewal and the rise of protests are now very much related and now impacting where games are going, so that the next World Cup, two World Cups after Brazil are in Russia and Qatar, places where that kind of protest is less likely to happen and there are already now international protest movements crowing about deaths of migrant workers around stadium construction.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

All right, well, thanks to Russell for joining us by phone and to Steve and Mark for joining us in the studio today. Thanks, guys.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Thanks so much.

 

Dr. Russell Field 

Thank you.

 

Leticia Wiggins  

This edition of the Origins podcast, History Talk, was brought to you by the Public History Initiative and the Goldberg Center in the history department at The Ohio State University. Our main editors are Steve Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley. Our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer. Our audio editors and co-hosts are Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins. Find our podcasts and more at our website, origins.osu.edu, and you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Thank you for listening.

 

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