The Original Pan-American Games? The 1937 Dallas Pan-American Olympics

Abstract

In 1937, Dallas, Texas, hosted a sporting festival that drew teams from across the Americas to a ‘Pan American Olympics’. Organized under the umbrella of the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, the games drew hundreds of athletes for track and field contests, soccer football matches, and a boxing tournament. Though historians generally consider the 1951 Buenos Aires Pan-American Games as the genesis of the Western Hemisphere’s biggest sporting carnival, the Dallas games certainly inspired even if they did not directly inaugurate the Pan-American Games movement. Directed by George Preston Marshall, the owner of a professional gridiron football franchise and an ardent leader of segregation in that sport, the Pan-American Olympics paradoxically produced an interracial set of contests that matched black, white, and Latino athletes against one another in the heart of the segregated US South. The Dallas Pan-American festival reveals the enigmatic visions of their architect, illumines the racial and national cleavages of the 1930s, and highlights the persistent dream of an Olympic-style event that would include all of the Americas.     

Paving the Olympic Dream: The Politics of the 2007 Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The making of the 2007 Pan-American Games, held in the city of Rio de Janeiro, marked the beginning of the long transformation that this city would undergo in connection to sports mega-events. This paper revisits how the 2007 Pan-American Games were largely produced under the promise that its legacies, particularly the infrastructural ones, could be effectively mobilized in order to strengthen the chances of bringing the Olympics to Brazil for the first time. Whereas this rhetoric has proven somewhat successful in helping the city to secure the right to host the 2016 Olympics, the alleged connection between both events has shown to be much more limited than its proponents had initially advertized. In reality, most of the venues constructed for the Pan-American Games had to be thoroughly renovated for the Olympics, while some of them presented structural problems and/or failed to meet the standards imposed by international sports federations.     

Historical Erasure and Cold War Inter-American Relations: The Chicago 1959 Pan-American Games

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the 1959 Chicago Pan-American Games. It is framed by the interpretive problem of why these Games have been erased from Chicago’s civic memory.     

‘The Event That Shook the Whole World Up’: Historicizing the 1983 Pan-American Games Doping Scandal

Abstract

In August of 1983 at the Pan-American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, a multi-faceted doping crisis occurred that overshadowed all other aspects of the games. This essay marks the first attempt to historicize the events surrounding this watershed moment in the fight against drug use in sport. Doping was revealed in three ways in Caracas: by the large number of positive tests that resulted in the first loss to doping of medals in the history of the Pan-American Games, by the exodus of the 12 American track and field athletes who flew home rather than be subject to testing in the sophisticated lab run by Dr Manfred Donike, and by a rash of ‘injuries’ and unexpectedly poor performances that kept athletes out of the medals and thus out of Donike’s lab. In the aftermath of the games, the United States Olympic Committee implemented new policies to ensure that Americans competing in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games would not run the risk of similar public embarrassment.     

The 1971 Pan-American Games and the Search for Colombian Modernities

Abstract

The VI Pan-American Games in Cali, Colombia were planned as a harbinger of a modern Colombia. The games featured many impressive athletic performances but failed to create the lasting impact organizers had imagined. Timing was bad. Colombia had seen a decade of economic growth after a generation of civil war. However, much of that progress was compromised beginning in the mid-1970s with the escalation of new internal wars fuelled in part by the quick growth of the cocaine sector, controlled in part by a Cali-based cartel. At the same time, games organizers did not grasp that Cali’s modernization problems were in large measure the product of growing urban social inequalities as a function of severe race and class divisions. The inability to recognize that linkage was explored in a low-budget documentary, Oiga, Vea (Listen, Look), released during the games. The film anticipated the impossible distance between grinding urban poverty and games-related projects to modernize the city. In keeping with the film’s criticism of games planners’ narratives on modernization, the manner in which the games were iconified for Colombians reflected that same distance. This is evident in projections of race and identity in games imagery and architecture.     

Cultural Ambassadorship and the Pan-American Games of the 1950s

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the early Pan-American Games, held in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Chicago. The history of the Pan-American Games demonstrates the decline of goodwill between the US and Latin American sports organizations, audiences, and journalists during the Cold War. Despite the diplomatic failures of the Pan-American Games from a US-centred perspective, they are vital to understand the history of women’s participation in sport and solidarity among Latin American delegations.     

Cuba’s Challenges Hosting the 1991 Pan-American Games and the Spectacle of the Revolution’s ‘Soft Power’

Abstract

This paper examines the confluence of global, regional, and national politics in the lead up to the 1991 Pan-American Games hosted by Cuba. Cuba’s contentious selection as host was wholly underpinned by the international politics of the time. Once selected, the preparations for the Games in Havana were surrounded by an unprecedented domestic economic crisis fueled by shifts in global politics. This paper analyzes how international politics informed the hosting of the 1991 Pan-American Games, and shaped the political challenge the Cuban government faced in hosting such an event. The Revolution’s use of sport domestically and internationally came to the forefront in its efforts as host and the results of those efforts proved to be providential given the emerging political economic contexts during and in the ensuing years after the Games.     

Una Antorcha de Esperanza: Mexico and the 1955 Pan-American Games

Abstract

While most equate Mexican Olympism with the 1968 Olympic Games, few know the drama of the event that laid its groundwork. From the creation of the Ministry of Public Education in 1921, cultural and military leaders heavily invested in sports infrastructure to help regenerate its rural masses, but by the 1940s, post-war modernizers sought the hosting of large international athletic events to boost its prestige, foment national pride, and prove to the world it was ready to springboard into modernity. This paper recounts the triumphs, betrayals, corruption, and politics of Pan-American sport and the Olympic movement in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s that culminated in the improbable success of the 1955 Mexico City Pan-American Games.     

北京奥运会对我国运动会信息管理的影响分析

奥运会在全球的巨大影响力使得其一直走在时代的前列,非常敏感地把握着科技发展的脉搏,特别是进入信息时代后,国际奥委会开始要求用科技信息技术全面地包装奥运会,信息化管理和相应的信息系统服务渗透到了盛典的每一个微小细节。在北京2008年奥运会的组织过程中,我们越来越深刻地感受到奥运会对我国体育信息化管理带来的新观念、新技术,但同时也带来了许多新问题。针对奥运会信息化管理的研究、分析成为了我国体育信息化,特别是运动会信息化管理发展的急迫要求,并将在今后很长一段时间内成为我国体育工作者的一项重要任务。本文将着重分析研究奥运会的信息化管理和服务的特点,结合本人参与奥运会信息化管理方面工作的经验,使用文献资料法、专家访谈法、比较分析法和SWOT分析法等手段,探讨奥运会对我国体育行业信息化,特别是大型运动会信息化管理带来的影响,国内运动会、体育产业的信息化管理与国际接轨的方式方法,及其奥运会后的发展方向、发展模式。     

Drug Testing,Sex Verification,and the 1967 Pan-American Games

Abstract

Despite frequent claims that invasive methods of sex verification and early procedures for doping detection were used in 1966 and 1967 at different major international sport competitions, little is known about the origins and rationales for implementing such procedures. This paper focuses on the drug testing and sex verification protocols implemented at the 1967 Pan-American Games held in Winnipeg. Specifically, it explores the conditions that led to these protocols, as well as the details of and the arguments invoked for their implementation. To do so, archival material, media coverage featured in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish newspapers and magazines across the Americas, and oral histories are analyzed and discussed. The paper demonstrates that neither the sex verification nor the drug testing protocol was mandatory for all athletes and only two very specific groups of athletes were targeted. It also demonstrates that in the case of the former, exceptions were made within the specific group targeted. The paper concludes that the rudimentary protocols applied at the 1967 Pan-American Games likely informed the IOC Medical Commission’s doping and sex-testing policies implemented at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Grenoble Winter Olympics.     

Olympic or Sacred? The Controversy over the Flame at the Inaugural 1951 Pan-American Games and Its Aftermath

In 1951, Buenos Aires hosted the inaugural Pan-American Games. On February 25 of that year, a Greek athlete carried a flame flown specially from his country onto the stadium where the event’s opening ceremonies took place and lit the cauldron. The uncertain character of the Greek flame transported to Buenos Aires alarmed many in Olympic circles. Confused and concerned, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) investigated the matter, which led to a rapid succession of policy changes seeking to regulate the use of flames in regional games. The flame flown from Greece to Buenos Aires for the 1951 Pan-American Games sparked an intense debate about the status of the Olympic flame. The IOC’s recognition of the power of the Olympic flame ritual and its preoccupation with protecting it along with other Olympic symbols and terminology reveal the contours of the organization’s ideology in this era and its relations with associated entities. The flame debate also illuminates the push by Pan-American Games’ officials for autonomy. Clearly, Olympic officials recognized early in the 1950s that the globalization of the Olympic flame ritual required regulation if the IOC was to ensure control of this and its other symbolic resources.     

论体育赛事与城市发展

探讨体育赛事与城市发展的理论逻辑,并以广州亚运会作实证分析,论证体育赛事成为城市发展的催化剂,但在不同时间、空间、主体条件下,它发挥的功能与实施效果不同。时间上从国际政治向地方治理、区域经济与社会文化演变;空间上有英国早期工业化的城市复兴、美国工业化高级阶段的城市繁荣、德国经济转型时期的城市社区共同体的形成等;行动主体上,从国家到地方,地方政府的角色从城市管理到城市管理与城市运营并重。2010年广州亚运会是珠三角区域城市群塑造的催化剂,广州在特定的经济发展阶段、特定的中国区域城市中心、特定的中央与地方关系之下,凭借产业结构转型升级、区域中心城市塑造、政府社会管理与城市经营相辅相成的运作机制而完成,相比较而言,其社会效益高于经济效益。     

Similarities and differences in constraints and constraint negotiation among Japanese sport tourists: a case of masters games participants*

ABSTRACT

The purposes of this study were to examine (a) similarities and differences in constraints to and constraint negotiation for masters games (MG) participation, and (b) the relationships among constraints, constraint negotiation, and intention to participate in the World Masters Games 2021 Kansai, across international sport tourists, domestic sport tourists, and sport excursionists. An online survey was conducted with 449 Japanese people who participated in MGs within the last three years. Our results indicated that international sport tourists experienced higher levels of psychological, physiological, interpersonal, financial, tourism, commitment, MG-specific constraints than domestic sport tourists and sport excursionists, although physiological constraints did not differ between international and domestic sport tourists. Conversely, international and domestic sport tourists utilized tourism and MG-self-adaptation negotiation strategies more than sport excursionists. Lastly, constraints to and constraint negotiation for the past MG were not related to the intention of participation in the World Masters Games 2021 Kansai across the three groups. These results suggest that this typology of sport tourists – international, domestic, and excursionist – is an effective framework to understand constraints and negotiation as well as other behaviors and experiences of Japanese sport tourists.     

Political Protection: The International Olympic Committee’s UN Diplomacy in the 1980s

Abstract

In the aftermath of a widespread boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics that challenged the legitimacy of the Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) began a vigorous but unsuccessful effort, lasting from 1982 to 1985, to convince the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution committing governments not to boycott the Games. Drawing on archives in Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, and Canada, this article brings to light this forgotten but important episode from the early years of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s presidency. The ambitious Samaranch and his limelight-seeking ally, Canadian Richard ‘Dick’ Pound, vastly overestimated the IOC’s global political capital in pushing governments to give up one of the most potent sport-related tools at their disposal. The IOC was at this time so weak that most governments failed even to respond to repeated entreaties about the proposal. The organization’s leaders never fully grasped the ironies of turning to what many observers considered the world’s most politicized body for a political measure to reduce political influence on the Olympic Games. Although the IOC has often claimed that it cannot force standards of behaviour on governments, the 1980s campaign was a sustained effort to do exactly that.     

阳光体育背景下高校运动会改革新尝试——以南京师范大学泰州学院第八届运动会为例

在阳光体育指导思想的背景下,为了使高校运动会更好地为高校体育工作服务,采用文献资料法、资料分析法、逻辑分析法、数理统计法,对南京师范大学泰州学院第八届运动会和传统高校运动会进行对比分析,得出运动会在项目的设置上以娱乐、趣味性项目为主竞技项目为辅,集体娱乐项目为主个人项目为辅的新的发展模式转变。使"淡化竞技、培养能力、健康第一"的指导思想成为当今体育课程改革的方向,改变过去运动会"金牌第一、竞技第一"的传统思想,把精神和文化融入到运动会中,使高校运动会成为广大师生喜爱的体育盛会。     

The 2012 Olympic Badminton Scandal: Match-Fixing,Code of Conduct Documents,and Women’s Sport

Abstract

At the 2012 Olympic Games, eight badminton players were disqualified from the women’s doubles tournament for intentionally losing matches in the group stage. The incident marks the largest mass disqualification of athletes from multiple countries for match-fixing at the Olympic Games in the twenty-first century. Significantly, it is also the first time that female athletes have been disqualified from a Summer Olympic Games for match-fixing not related to betting or gambling. This essay weaves together two interdependent arguments. First, it is suggested that the incident can be understood through the lens of three separate but interconnected issues: the history of match-fixing, the growth of code of conduct documents in sports, and the regulation of women’s bodies in sports. Second, it is argued that the athletes’ gender is a critical element of the incident. The primary aims of the article are to position the 2012 badminton scandal as a key moment in the history of match-fixing and to suggest that the incident is important for future research and policy creation.     

Turning the Country into an “Immense and Clamorous Stadium”: Perón,the New Argentina,and the 1951 Pan-American Games

Abstract

During the Peronist regime (1946–1955), the Argentine government encouraged and financed a wide variety of sports activities. This investment bore fruit internationally and Juan Perón tried to make political capital out of the achievements of Argentine individual athletes or national teams in international competitions. Such achievements were presented as a collective victory of Argentine society, transcending the divisions of social class, ethnic origins, place of residence, or political affiliation. Argentine participation in the London Olympics in 1948, the hosting of the world basketball championship in Buenos Aires in 1950, and above all the organization of the first Pan-American games in the Argentine in March 1951, all, served to promote patriotism and national unity at home and improve the country’s image in the international scene. This paper focuses on an analysis of a 250-page book published by the sports magazine Mundo Deportivo, sponsored by the Peronist government, on the eve of the games. Both the text and the images attest to its populist character, its quest for modernity, emphasis on social mobility, and an authoritarian way of imposing national unity. The initiative to hold such games in Argentina dated back to 1940 but it had to be postponed twice: first to 1948 because of the Second World War, and then to 1951 because of the London Olympic Games. Perón’s government wanted these games to serve as a proof of the regime’s success. To that end, the president urged the organizers to ‘spur no effort’, promising them any financial assistance they might need. A year and a half before the inaugural ceremony, held at the Racing stadium (officially named the President Perón Stadium), the organizational effort moved into high gear, and Perón supervized it personally. Argentina was indeed the big winner in this event, its athletes capturing a total of 153 medals.     

另一种声音:国际象棋对体育的冲击

国际象棋是体育项目,理论上一直未消除人们的迷惑,而首次亚运之行,更增加了许多人对棋类项目与体育关系问题的疑问。本文通过探讨国际象棋纳入体育范畴的原因、国际象棋的本质功能和体育的本质属性,试探性提出应明确“国际象棋不是体育项目”、“棋类等非体育项目可以成为体育运动会比赛项目”等观点及其意义——消除众人疑惑;规范体育范畴;更利于其他非体育的竞技性项目进入体育平台发展。     

In the Shadow of Myron: The Impact of the Discobolus on Representations of Olympic Sport from Victorian Britain to Contemporary China

Without doubt, the most famous and instantly recognisable work of art associated with the Olympic Games is Myron's Discobolus. Originally produced in bronze in the fifth century BC, the work is now known primarily through later Roman copies in marble, discovered in Italy during the eighteenth century. Whilst much has been written about the Discobolus as an exemplar of antique art, less attention has been paid to the reception of the work in the modern era. Accordingly, this article shifts attention to the impact made by Myron's work in visual culture produced during the period of the modern Olympic Games; that is from the late nineteenth century to the present day. From Victorian public sculptures, to official Olympic films and posters, and even contemporary art produced for the Beijing Games of 2008, Myron's work has continued to cast an influential shadow over art practices related to the Games themselves, as it has been adopted, adapted and transformed to signify a host of new and frequently diverse meanings. The prominent display of the work at the British Museum in London during the Games of 2012 offers testimony to the work's enduring legacy and its relevance for spectators of the present day.     

Neighborhood Physical Activity Opportunity: A Multilevel Contextual Model

Purpose: The aims of this study were to analyze the intensity of emotions (positive, negative, or ambiguous) produced when players took part in traditional games with a different social structure and to examine the explanations given by those participants for these emotional experiences. Method: Participants (N = 556) were recruited from 4 Spanish universities. After taking part in each of the games, they were asked to complete the Games and Emotions Questionnaire to indicate the intensity of their emotional experiences and to explain what, in their view, had led to the strongest emotion felt. Results: The application of a mixed-methods approach identified statistically significant differences in relation to 3 variables. These were (a) the type of emotion, (b) motor domain, and (c) type of result (win, loss, and noncompetitive). The intensity of positive emotions was higher in cooperative games and lower in individual games. Comments referring to negative emotions were more frequent as the social structure of games became more complex (minimal presence of individual games and predominance of cooperation-opposition games). Winning was associated with the highest intensity ratings of positive and ambiguous emotions, whereas being defeated produced the highest values for negative emotions. The intensity ratings for negative emotions were lower in noncompetitive games than in games where players lost. Conclusion: The results confirm that traditional games can play a key role in relation to the emotional facets of physical education.