Creating the Global World of Sports: Universalism, Commercialization, and the Body

Sport has always been a global world of its own. Early on, international organizations like the International Olympic Committee propagated the universalist idea of creating an arena of culture and exchange based on peaceful competition. This arena would be accessible to any nation, race and religion around the globe. In the second half of 20^th century, more and more athletes from non-Western countries began to join and challenge the homogeneous “Olympic family”. As a result, the Olympics became a field in which different concepts of universalism, nationalism and modernity competed with each other and contributed to the establishment of a global community (though not always a harmonious one). The rapid commercialization of the Olympic movement accompanied by the prominent role of sports in the media and in advertisement provided a catalyst for this process. It brought forth a realm of images in which the athletes’ bodies became agents of cultural and ethnic difference and Westernized popular culture. With a few exceptions, the history of the Olympic movement has been interpreted as the continuous dissemination of the Westernized ideal of Olympic universalism and Western sports, its commercialization as part of the history of Western capitalism. My paper challenges this position by asking how different national sports federations and athletes from non-Western countries have contributed to shaping the Olympic ideal and how they have influenced the presumably Western notions of body and sport in general. The aim is to develop a new theoretical framework that allows us to write a global history of sports as a story of cultural entanglements between different nations, ethnicities and sports cultures.