Olympic Games:<br> Festival and (media) ritual of modernity

Baron Pierre de Coubertin developed the Olympic Games as a reaction to the crisis experiences of the fin de siècle - as a response to modernity. When the Summer Games begin tomorrow in London, we will see just how contemporary his project still is. An essay by Thomas Alkemeyer.

It is only in times of crisis that religion, art and aesthetics come into their own as media for creating meaning. This was also the case in Europe at the end of the 19th century, when the French baron Pierre de Coubertin aestheticised modern competitive sport in the Olympic Games and elevated it to a "religion of muscle". Formally, the model of competitive sport is characterised by equal opportunities, competition, outbidding and the comparability of measurable performances. In just a few decades, it achieved hegemony over older forms of exercise culture such as gymnastics and gymnastics and, launched by the Olympic ceremonial, began a rapid international triumphal march.

The Olympic Games as a charismatic endeavour

Coubertin designed the Olympic Games as a civil-religious response to the crisis experiences of the fin de siècle: Similar to a religion, they were intended to show a meaning to life, offer people a tangible fusion with this meaning and aesthetically combat and romantically contain what contemporaries perceived as the negative "excesses" of capitalist modernity - its materialism, its confusion, its disruption - by combining modern utopias of progress with stagings of a rapturously glorified antiquity. This project had a charismatic character. Charismatics are not free-floating existences, not "great men", but "markers" who seismographically register collective moods, give them their voice and publicly respond to social problems with new ideas. Coubertin succeeded in launching a cultural institution with the Olympic Games, in which experiences of insecurity and decline were answered with vivid images of advancement.

Crisis scenarios

A widespread criticism of civilisation in both Germany and France considered modern society to be "sick". Coubertin offered it a supposedly particularly effective "remedy": sport. With the Olympic Games, he created a pedagogy based on modern sport as an instrument for solving the crisis. He argued that the "future of civilisation" was based "neither on political nor economic foundations" but solely on educational ones.

This bio-political idea of renewing society through physical training was anything but unconditional. Educational concern for the body played a prominent role in a polyphonic network of reform strategies that responded to the visions of doom of the fin de siècle. Alongside medicine, ethics and eugenics, which he explicitly mentioned, Coubertin described physical education as an excellent "antidote" to all kinds of "undesirable developments": it was an excellent "creator of moral and national strength".

However, Coubertin only advocated one particular form of physical education: the pedagogy of athletic competition based on the English model. He sharply distinguished this from the paramilitary organised German gymnastics and the rationally operated Swedish functional gymnastics: for Coubertin, the collective exercises of gymnastics corresponded with repression, coercion and state heteronomy, i.e. with a discipline that inhibited individual performance. In English competitive sport, on the other hand, he saw self-determination, personal initiative and individual agility as embodying modern guiding values and characteristics.

The Olympic Games as a romantic celebration of modernity

In current cultural criticism of spectacle sport, it is often complained that sport and the Olympic Games have degenerated into pawns of the mass media. However, this criticism forgets that Coubertin had already explicitly conceived the Games as a promotional event for his pedagogy of sport. In addition, the Games were also intended to develop an independent "educational value" (Coubertin): The hope of healing society through sport was combined with the expectation of being able to contribute to its consolidation through a cultic celebration.

This presupposed that the Olympic idea would not be left in the status of an abstract intellectual edifice, but would be transformed into a concrete "philosophical and historical doctrine" (Coubertin), which was able to exert a practical influence on people's feelings and ideas, fantasies and values through its "cultus": in the space of the Olympic Games, which was removed from everyday life, the "isolated individuals" (Karl Marx) in the market society were to reconnect with a generally binding order. However, participation in this order was not only to be achieved through the intellect, but above all through the senses. In order to remedy the deficits in the sensory experience of modern politics and morality, Coubertin conceived the Olympic Games as a Gesamtkunstwerk in the spirit of Richard Wagner. As in Bayreuth, the staging of the Olympics was to bring together a wide-ranging palette of aesthetic and symbolic forms borrowed from history: classical architecture, sculpture, painting and literature, groups of people arranged into "living pictures", symphonic music, the symbols and rituals of the Olympic ceremonial - all arranged around the sporting competitions at the centre of the event.

Coubertin's truly ground-breaking idea was therefore to charge a modern set of values "authentically" embodied in the medium of competitive sport with artificial charisma and great emotions: His Olympic Games are a romantically transfigured "modernity en miniature" (Thomas Etzemüller). They form a stage that combines the acting function of the theatre with celebration and ritual. The fleeting aesthetics of sport in particular are able to touch the audience with great urgency and temporarily connect them with one another: they can join in the excitement, shout and gesticulate excitedly.

The Olympic Games as a global media ritual

And this is still true today: alongside the football World Cup, the Olympic Games are one of the few major collective representations in which "global society" can temporarily form an image of itself and reassure itself of its imaginary unity. Using all available technical and audiovisual means, with large screens, stadium loudspeakers and stadium architectures hermetically sealed off from the outside world, not only the sensory-affective involvement of the spectators in the stadium is increased, but also the participation of a global audience beyond the stadium boundaries. Live broadcasts with spectacular image constructions - zoom, slow motion, travelling cameras, etc. - create a "remote presence" (Jo Reichertz) that in a certain sense brings the viewer in front of the screen closer to the action than the stadium audience. A hyper-reality of show sport is created (Hortleder & Gebauer), in which the athletes are not only elevated to the status of heroes and removed from the audience's world of experience, but are also brought closer to them as "life-warm figures" (Georg Simmel) in the intimate perspectives of the personality cameras.

Extensive training, medical-pharmacological body manipulation and media technology inflate the athletes into visual superhumans; at the same time, zooming camera lenses endow them with human features again. Efforts are directed towards giving the athletes a special intensity of emotional expression and, especially the female athletes, sex appeal. The aim is to satisfy the audience's desire to watch and increase their willingness to share in the excitement and suffering. Viewers around the world can see everything on their screens in such detail and in razor-sharp focus as if they were standing right next to it. The result is images that are sometimes astonishingly moving: the history of spectator sport is also a history of efforts to increase the "connection density" and affective energies of popular culture through spectacularisation.

It is often claimed that the passions triggered by sport not only transcend the boundaries between individual bodies, but also the dividing lines between "cultures", genders and milieus. However, the viability of such claims is questionable. The integrative power of sport is also socially and culturally limited. Olympic sport celebrates the modern Western mission statements of competition and limitless self-transgression. Like all ideals, these also produce their exclusions and devaluations of competing value systems and world views. But even where these once valid guiding values lose credibility, for example because their (self-)destructive aspects - as in doping - become just as obvious as their anachronism (as in the desperate clinging to the system of bisexuality, which recognises no in-between), the Olympic sports model will have to change and adapt to new realities. Otherwise, it will not only lose its appeal, but may also end up in the dung heap of history.