The first odd modern Olympics in history will be staged by the summer of 2021. This is the situation after Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, admitted that the deadline could not be met due to the global coronavirus pandemic . The IOC, the international Olympic committee, inevitably supported the decision, confirming however that the label will continue to be Tokyo 2020.
It says badly to Japan that in 1940 what should have been the first home edition due to the outbreak was canceled. of the world conflict . He says badly even 80 years later. Yet the Olympics, the one reinvented by Baron de Coubertin, has gone through crises, wars, boycotts, risked, at the beginning of his adventure, what is cynically called “cot death” after chaotic and circus editions and ended up giving up in front of a sneaky enemy as all invisible opponents, the most dangerous.
The time machine leads to more than a century ago when only an art deco poster remained of the Berlin Olympics. In that 1916, one of the most frightening battles of attrition in history was underway: it cost more than a million French and German deaths.. In 1920 the shooting was entrusted to a martyr city, Antwerp. The countries that had joined the alliance of Central Empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey) were excluded on the precise indication of de Coubertin. It is unthinkable to think of the presence of a very young Soviet Union, struggling with bloody internal conflicts.
The 1936 edition was entrusted to Berlin, two years before Adolf Hitler took power. The project of opposing the Games to a People’s Olympics or Workers’ Olympics ran out of steam in the face of the first outbreaks of the civil war that would have bloodied Spain after Franco’s “pronouncement”. The Berlin IOC congress awards the 1940 Games to Tokyo: the presence of Japanese troops in China has led to an open conflict since 1938. Helsinki briefly replaced the Japanese capital but the Winter War between Finland and the USSR swept away the Games. A theoretical attribution to London, for 1944, produced, the only testimony, the issue of three Swiss postage stamps representing the Olympic Apollo.
London had its second Games, after those of 1908, in the austere post-war atmosphere. The Vae Victis already pronounced in 1920 was repeated: Germany and Japan were not invited. Italy was saved thanks to the co-belligerence of the last two years of the conflict . 1956 marks the beginning of the era of boycotts: Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon desert Melbourne to protest the capture of the Suez Canal by Franco-British troops and shortly after are joined by Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands after the invasion of Hungary by the Red Army. The highly restrictive rules on the import of animals into Australia force the organization of equestrian Olympics in Stockholm.
The seasons leading up to Tokyo 1964 are crossed by global tensions that also involve sport: South Africa is banned from the international community for its apartheid policy and Indonesia refuses to welcome athletes from Israel and Taiwan to the 1962 Asian Games. first step in the boycott of the Asian country at the ’64 Games, in the company of North Korea.
The massacre of Piazza delle Tre Culture in Mexico City and that of the Olympic Village and the military airport north of Munich marked the most dramatic and bloody moments in the history of the Games and the birth of the slogan casually coined by Avery Brundage: ” The Games must go on “. They went on in ’76, after the boycott of 22 African countries for the rugby associations that New Zealand continued to have with South Africa banned. They went on after the boycott that the Western bloc (with different positions and modalities) declared against the USSR which had invaded Afghanistan, transforming the Moscow Games into the least popular (80 countries) after Melbourne. And they experienced the last harsh mutilation four years later, when the revenge of the socialist bloc (Romania aside) was blown to Los Angeles: the absent countries were 14 but they represented 58% of the titles awarded to Montreal.
The latest boycott of some importance was in 1988: North Korea avoided sending athletes to Seoul and was imitated by Cuba, Ethiopia and Nicaraguto. Barcelona 1992 was hailed as a new dawn and the 200 countries that reached Sydney 2000 helped create the light of a full day.
The 23 edition of the Olympics will therefore be Tokyo 2020 + 1, odd year. Going up the current of time, a precedent emerged, another edition held in an odd year. It is 369 AD and we know the name of one of the winners, the Armenian Varazdat, who triumphs in boxing with his bare hands. A barbarian “exclaimed” with disgust the Hellenists. He would later become king of Armenia.
Source: Fidal