WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #351 - Special Report, 1936: The Olimpíada Popular against the Berlin Games (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Scheduled for July 22-26, 1936, ten days before the opening of the Nazi

Games in Berlin, the Popular Olympics in Barcelona could not be held due
to Franco's coup d'état. Some of the athletes who came there, however,
stayed and took up arms to defend Spanish democracy against reactionary
and fascist forces. Although these first anti-fascist Games could not
take place, they remain a mark of the resistance in action of athletes
committed to promoting, through sport, a model of emancipatory and
democratic society.
Faced with the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin, capital of the Third
Reich, and to serve as a showcase for Nazi propaganda, an unprecedented
global boycott movement was organized, the first in the history of the
Olympic Games. The awarding of the 1931 Games to Berlin rather than
Barcelona was partly due to the fact that Pierre de Coubertin and
certain IOC leaders were "frightened" by the young Spanish Republic...
and the advent of Hitler in 1933 clearly didn't bother them that much.

In the United States and Europe, demonstrations were organized, bringing
together several hundred thousand people, petitions were launched, one
of which was signed by more than 500,000 people! A popular anti-fascist
movement was underway. The Red Sports International (IRS, an auxiliary
organization of the Comintern also called "Sportintern") created an
International Committee for the Respect of the Olympic Idea in Paris.
For its part, the Fédération sportive et gymnastnique du travail (FSGT),
born from the meeting at the end of 1934, precisely under the aegis of
the anti-fascist struggle, of the socialist and communist sports
federations, launched the slogan: "Not a penny, not a man for the Berlin
Olympics!". If, like the newspaper Sport, many were calling for "the
transfer of the Games to another country", the IOC remained firm in its
position. Worse, it awarded the 1936 Winter Games to
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Bavaria... six months after Hitler came to
power! The boycott campaign, reactivated in 1935, did not, however,
succeed in convincing the federations of the different countries not to
go to Berlin. In April 1936, an International Conference for the Respect
of the Olympic Idea was held in Paris, which acknowledged the failure of
the boycott and proposed another plan. The IRS planned to hold "popular
sports games" in several countries in the form of popular anti-fascist
demonstrations against the "Hitler Olympiad" in Berlin. The idea of an
alternative to the Olympic Games was not new; the IRS had already
organized communist Olympiads as an alternative to the Olympic Games,
the Spartakiades, the first edition of which was held in Moscow in 1928.

After the victory of the Frente Popular in the legislative elections of
January 1936, the IRS instructed its Spanish section, the Federación
cultural y deportiva obrera (FCDO), in February to "make arrangements to
organize Spanish popular games in the summer of that year, at the time
of the Hitler Olympiad in Berlin." Mainly from workers' sports
federations, an estimated 6,000 athletes from 22 countries were to
participate in these popular Olympics.

The opening ceremony, scheduled for July 19, was to see teams
representing both nation-states and stateless nations parade alongside
Jews who had fled Europe and colonized peoples from North Africa. A
whole internationalist symbol that would not see the light of day. The
nationalist uprising of July 17 and 18, a prelude to the Spanish Civil
War, prevented the Olympics from taking place. Some of the athletes took
up arms and went to the barricades with their Catalan brothers and
sisters, and a French athlete died, the first internationalist victim of
the conflict. With the military troops pushed back, it is said that the
athletes marched through the streets singing The Internationale in all
languages.

David (UCL Savoies)

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1936-L-Olimpiada-Popular-contre-les-Jeux-de-Berlin
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