Another Olympics – Paris 2024 – has finished. This particular Olympics has been extensively marked by social media conflagrations – whether it be the inclusion of breakdancing and the poor performance of Australian b-girl Raygun, or the manufactured controversy over the gender of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.

Both these episodes demonstrate the dangers of social media hysteria. However, I wanted to focus on a lesser publicised yet important issue – the Olympics, and sport generally, cannot be separated from geopolitics.

Politics cannot spoil the Olympics, as Louise Guillot suggested in this article in Politico magazine. Why not? Because the Olympics and political considerations have always been inseparable. Guillot, writing prior to the Olympics, wished that this nasty thing called geopolitics and its attendant squabbles did not interfere with the lofty, noble pursuit of peacefully competitive sports between nations.

Unfortunately for Guillot, geopolitical conflicts always impinge on the sporting field. Indeed, the very foundation of the Olympics as we understand them, could not help but be impacted by competing geopolitical agendas.

Baron Pierre De Coubertin, the ‘founding father’ of the modern Olympics, was given over to fantasising about the diversion of warmaking energies by conflicting states into the peaceful arena of public sporting competition. Warring nations would at least temporarily suspend their hostilities, and compete on an equal footing in the sporting fields.

Whether he was idealistic or naive I do not know. What is for certain is the De Coubertin consciously co-opted the Ancient Greek Olympics, and revived them as a pan-European project, seeking a pan-Hellenic legitimacy to the burgeoning ideological currents of European colonial nationalisms.

European powers, undertaking their own colonial adventures in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world, required a globalising cultural project as well. No empire can survive on sheer force alone. Sporting competitions, while venerating the individualistic ethos of physical achievement, can also bring colonial nations together through a veneer of peaceful respectability.

British, German and French philhellenic supporters desired to build an imagined community. No, Europe is not imaginary, but its continuity with Ancient Greek traditions of philosophy, science, mathematics and sport is a synthetic history. Greek nationalism, fighting for an independent state in the nineteenth century, not only sought to break away from the Islamic Ottoman Turkish empire, but also to participate in this emergent club of powerful European states.

The modern Olympics were a demonstration of muscular European Christianity, drawing from the example of the Greeks and Romans of ancient times. Modern European nations appropriated the legacy of Ancient Greece. Reviving the Olympics was a practical way to construct an imagined continuity with the eastern Mediterranean, and the propaganda value of such games did not go unnoticed.

Sporting nationalism manifests itself in various ways, not just through competing methods for tallying medals. The Paris 2024 Olympics, depending on how you count the medals, was the most successful one for Australia. Counting according to gold medals, Australia was fourth with 18 gold – 53 medals in total. The US and China were equal on 40 gold medals each, but the US collected 126 medals in total, compared to 91 for China.

Episodes from Olympic history provide a window into the present. Understanding the past is an endlessly fascinating pursuit, and it helps us to comprehend the hidden world of powerplays and subterfuge which impacts public life until today.

What am I talking about? The 1960 Rome Olympics. Why is that important? The Smithsonian magazine, earlier this month, published an extensive feature by Erik Ofgang, which illuminates a hitherto unseen aspect of the interplay between geopolitics and sport. Both superpowers of the Cold War were obsessed with accumulating gold medals – fair enough. However, the United States went further, and ventured into ethically questionable conduct.

In an article entitled “At the 1960 Olympics, American Athletes Recruited by the CIA Tried to Convince Their Soviet Peers to Defect”, the article matter-of-factly explains how the Olympics is a perfect opportunity for espionage and intelligence gathering. Convincing high profile Soviet athletes to defect was a prominent propaganda tactic, designed to demonstrate the ‘superiority’ of American capitalism and the alleged American commitment to individual liberty.

Let’s have a listen to the words of historian Barbara Keys from Durham University and an expert on international relations. She states that the Olympics provide a “terrific opportunity” for espionage. She continued; “You get lots of high-level people, high-level leaders, diplomats, businessmen, celebrities convening all in one place. It’s kind of a spy candy shop.”

There are no ethical qualms here, just a straightforward rationale; what’s wrong with turning the Olympics into a soft power battleground? One athlete from the 1960 Soviet team who was targeted by the athletes-turned-spies was triple jumper and sprinter Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. Ukrainian born, (Armenian father), he met athletes from the American team. They tried to convince him to defect – citing American supermarkets, cars, playboy magazine and movies as assets to be enjoyed by Soviet defectors. Ter-Ovanesyan said no.

A former CIA case officer and now academic, Doug Patteson, stated that it is naive to think that spying activities do not occur at the Olympics. The latter is not just a platform for international goodwill, but an opportunity to score geopolitics points. It seems that politics of a surreptitious and sinister kind is perfectly acceptable at the Olympics.

In fact, in the lead up to the 1960 Olympics, the CIA recruited a person for the job of encouraging defections from the Soviet teams – Mykola Lebed. Who was he? A Ukrainian ultranationalist and Nazi collaborator, he was guilty of gruesome torture and war crimes during World War 2, responsible for the killings of Jews, Russians and Poles. Deemed a useful intelligence asset in the opening years of the Cold War, he found sanctuary and employment in the United States.

Back in 1947, US army counterintelligence described Lebed as a well-known sadist. However, pathological sadism is no barrier for gainful employment by the CIA.

Given all this focus on intelligence gathering by the various colonial nations which participate in the Olympics, a question does occur. Why was intelligence gathering spectacularly unsuccessful in Munich 1972, when 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by the Black September terrorist group? Did not espionage agencies gather intelligence on the preparations for this specific attack on the Olympics?

Let’s conclude by returning to Paris 2024. A particular athlete – a wrestler to be exact – won his fifth gold medal at the Olympics. He’d won his previous four gold medals since beginning Olympic competition since making his debut in Greco-Roman wrestling at Athens 2004. In every Olympics since then, he won gold. His name is Mijain Lopez, an Afro-Caribbean competitor from Cuba.

His achievement is unparalleled, yet never received saturation publicity that accompanied the accomplishments of Phelps, or Thorpe, or Bolt. Staying loyal to Cuba, he has remained through all the trials and tribulations of that island nation against the punitive American blockade.

Resisting the shallow temptations of American mass consumerism, he decided that it is more important to be true to oneself and the background that made such achievements possible, in contrast to dissident celebrity athlete superstar Nadia Comaneci. May I venture a suggestion? Perhaps he did not want to migrate to a nation that practices the cult of violence overseas, rejoicing in the hyper-individualist pursuit of gratification that requires the suffering of others.