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Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the first part of this season right now with a Pushkin Plus subscription. That's four whole episodes before they're released to the public. You'll be able to binge the rest of the season on August 1st with that same subscription. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or by visiting pushkin.fm slash plus. Now, on to the episode. Pushkin.
Let's begin today's episode with a poem penned in the early part of the last century called Ode to Sport. It was written by a short French aristocrat with a mouth obscuringly large mustache and a deeply idiosyncratic view of antiquity.
the creator of the modern Olympic Games, the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. "Oh sport, you are progress. To serve you a man must improve himself both physically and spiritually. You force him to abide by a greater discipline. You demand that he avoid all excess." I didn't say it was a good poem.
You teach him wise rules which allow him to exert himself with the maximum of intensity without compromising his good health. Ode to Sport is terrible, just awful. So, of course, we're going to be playing a lot of it. But the poem also matters because it's a time capsule. de Coubertin believed that the Olympics should be a kind of modern religion, embodying the aristocratic values of amateurism, no money for sport, and internationalism.
Oh, sport, you are peace. You promote happy relations between peoples, bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength which is controlled, organized, and self-disciplined.
The modern games got their start in 1896, in Athens, of course. Four years later, in Paris, they'd included the most dignified upper crust of sports, such as pigeon shooting, croquet, and not to be forgotten, the horse long jump.
But the earliest games fell short of the Baron's epic vision. Mainly, they kept happening at world's fairs. And it's hard to convey a deep connection to antiquity when you're handing out medals next to, say, a gigantic butter statue of Teddy Roosevelt riding a horse. But that all changed in 1912.
Picture the opening day of the Stockholm Olympics that year. Trumpets blared as members of the Swedish royal family paraded their way to their box. International Olympic Committee members in silk hats and frock coats processed in. Ornate facial hair abounded. Thousands of men and women, athletes, strode into the stadium to stand before the Swedish king. The Baron de Coubertin was there too. And there wasn't a butter statue in sight.
These were the first games with athletes from every continent, except for Antarctica. They introduced epic sports like the decathlon, and per the Baron's wishes, there was an arts competition. Which meant there was an Olympic gold medal for literature. Won in 1912 by a poem written under a pseudonym by the Baron himself. Ode to Sport. Yours is a prudent, well-considered audacity.
These games were a turning point, but for our purposes, they mattered not because of the athletic or artistic triumphs or the absence of carved butter. No, they mattered because of one young man in that mass of thousands of athletes standing on the field, facing the king in de Coubertin, a young man in round wire spectacles who had an appointment that day with fate. A fate that would later put him in the position to save the modern Olympics, and that would, 24 years later...
cost him his soul. A young man named Avery Brundage.
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is episode four of our series on the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Hitler's Olympics. Over the past two episodes, I introduced you to one of my all-time favorite historical figures, Charles Hitchcock Sherrill, the patrician doofus who met Hitler and told the world, hey, this guy's all right. Let's play sports with him.
But today on the show, my colleague Ben-Nadav Hafri brings us the story of the man who really made the Games happen. And not only the 1936 Games, but the Olympics as we know them today. The one, the only, Avery Brundage. We meet again. Yeah, to discuss yet another member of the International Olympic Committee. The most, he is the most complicated. Yep. The most important. Yep.
And when I say complicated, I mean that unlike Cheryl, he's not a doofus and he's not a cardboard villain. I feel like the mid-century was full of men like this.
Fiction was full of men like this. The architect in Howard Rourke, Howard Rourke, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. He's also just like an epic, epic figure. I think we have to start. We have to begin in an epic register. Yes. Honestly, it's best if he introduces himself.
Ladies and gentlemen of the press, usually I'm introduced as the last living amateur. Something like the tattooed man, you know. That's Avery Brendage, late in life, speaking to some reporters in Japan. A journalist friend of mine in Chicago, one of the most sophisticated and cynical columnists there, visited Olympia not so long ago, and I was amazed to pick up
the paper in Chicago shortly thereafter and see a headline, "Brundage may be right after all." This man was so impressed by the atmosphere at ancient Olympia that he was almost converted. I don't know how long it lasted, but for the moment he was converted to the Olympic spirit.
Conversion to the Olympic spirit was Avery Brundage's great obsession. The Olympic religion never had a better evangelist. But our series isn't only concerned with the Olympic Games. The bigger question here is, why do some people see evil for what it is when others can't or won't? Dorothy Thompson could see the dangers of Nazism because she was born to a marginalized group herself. She was a woman. Poor.
Charles Sherrill loved Hitler. He was born upper crust and only cared to stay that way. Brundage, though, looks a lot more like Thompson than Sherrill at first. He starts out as an underdog, and you're going to want to root for him. But in the end, well, we'll get there.
Avery Brundage grew up poor in Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. It was the classic gloomy first act of an American dream. Waking up in the dark to work as a paperboy, commuting seven miles each way to school. A father who leaves when he's five and dies alone. The victim, as the newspaper reads, of business reverses.
Brundage was brilliant and maybe a little haunted by failure. He was always top of his class, winning national prizes, and always passionate about sports. Crucially, sports you could play alone, like track and field. But poor kid, remember? His school didn't have sports facilities. He made his own discus out of an iron washer, he used a rock for shot put, and he practiced long jumping in an abandoned lot.
When I imagine Avery Brundage's early life, I picture him from a distance, a little boy in glasses, alone on an empty parcel of land, jumping again and again into the same hole, trying to beat himself. "Oh sport, you are joy. To the sorrowful, you can even bring salutary diversion from their distress."
He studied engineering in college, and he was a track star. Not because he was amazing at any event in particular, but because he was so relentless in training that he was pretty good at them all. Mainly, though, he did a million extracurriculars. He just wants to be in the club. Better yet, to lead the club. He's like the kid in that movie Rushmore. Yearbook board member. Fraternity member. Literary magazine editor-in-chief. Chairman of the Senior Stag Dance.
Same deal with sports. He's all about sports organizations. It's not enough for him to be on the track team. He's got to be on the governing body so he can pass a rule that students who aren't on varsity teams can't wear the school colors. So if you're a student at the University of Illinois in Brundage's time and you're not a track star, he doesn't want you wearing orange and blue.
This, I think, is a good illustration of the first rule of Avery Brundage's universe. There must be rules. Even with food. Like when he's older, he only eats one lunch every day, and it's an egg sandwich with bacon, a side of tomato, and a baked apple, which is like the most Midwestern thing I've ever heard. The world of Avery Brundage is rule-bound. And a rule-bound world is a world of tasks.
If Charles Sherrill is the classic International Olympic Committee member born at the top of the pyramid, Avery Rundage is born just a bit above the bottom. He knows it, and he knows what it's going to take to get to the top. In all of the interviews I've read with him,
He always made a point of talking about how unpopular he was. Malcolm and I have spent hours psychoanalyzing this man. There's a version of that where the person owns it, but it's not that. It's this kind of grim determination that, of course, all of the weaklings out there don't understand what I'm doing. That's why I'm who I am. That's why I'm special. I found a typewritten note from Brundage that kind of backs this up. It's in his archive, part of some ideas he had for an autobiography he never published. The
It reads,
So this sounds ridiculous, but I actually believe it. And more importantly, I don't think he realizes how unlikable this story makes him sound. But it illustrates another one of his rules. If you're the best, you'll be hated by the rest. That's just the fact.
But after college, our man discovered that the real world didn't play by his rules. He worked as a construction superintendent, which was a really bad industry for a man of principle. Right away, he was inspecting materials for an architect's new building. The first shipment of stone had major flaws. He tried to send it back, and the supplier said, better think twice. This stuff comes from the architect's nephew.
Things did not improve from there. There's a criticism of the climate which exists in the world today. And it is, as I say, a very sad commentary on our so-called civilization.
To quote from his unpublished autobiography, "...of the peculiar people occasionally thrown into power and authority."
As his biographer Alan Gutman put it, from uneasy involvement in the imperfect world, Brundage found refuge in amateur athletics. While Brundage was making his way in business, he kept up his track and field training. Discus, shot put, running. He got so good that in 1912, he got the telegram that would change his life. An invitation from the U.S. Olympic Committee.
At this point, Avery Brundage was still living with his mom. Illinois was the center of his universe. But as soon as he got that telegram, he quit his job and headed to New York. Then he climbed aboard the glamorous SS Finland with all the other athletes for 10 days of all-you-can-eat meals underneath the ornate filigreed sunroof of the dining saloon. This was more like it.
When he arrived at the Games in Stockholm in 1912, it was a world away from Chicago. In that unpublished autobiography, he wrote, It was approximately 10 o'clock in the evening, and the sun was about to set behind us.
The myriad of beautiful pine-clad islands with neat and well-cared-for homes with flower gardens, the winding channels containing scores of boats of all shapes and sizes, and the rosy glow of the setting sun presented a picture of Fairyland I shall always remember. I've read a lot of Avery Brundage, and let me tell you, "fairyland" is not the kind of word he uses. The man was in love.
It was midsummer in Stockholm, and the days were surreal and long, with only an hour or two of darkness. Flags fluttered in streets flanked by balconies bursting with flowers. Avery was swept up in a whirl of Olympic parties, banquets, balls, garden parties, concerts, receptions, and entertainments. He rubbed shoulders with royalty. For a few days, he wasn't the poor kid from corrupt Chicago anymore. He was an Olympian. Well, the dime store...
Psychological reading of this. Why do we have to say that? Can't we at least upgrade ourselves to like dollar store? Dollar general. Dollar general. Or dollar general psychoanalysis. You know, all right. He's the hick from Chicago, right? Grows up without a dad in some, you know, cold water flat somewhere in Chicago. Makes his own way in the world. He's not really, he's not worldly. When he goes to the 1912 Olympics...
I think it's the first time he's left the United States. Yeah, it is. Meanwhile, Cheryl crosses the Atlantic 82 times in the course of his life. And, you know, he, some part of him desperately wants to be, he just gets a glimpse of this, this kind of fabulous life these other people are leading. And I just think he, some part of him is just like, I want that. He wanted this perfect world of sport because of how angry he was about the corruption in the real world, the bribes and the nepotism.
The Olympic religion said, "Sports are the opposite. They're objective, they're fair, they're meritocratic." I know that sounds like a lot, but if you don't believe me, then let's consult that gold medal winning poem by the founder of the modern Olympics. "Oh sport, the perfect equity for which men strive in vain in their social institutions is your constant companion. No one can jump a centimeter higher than the height he can jump.
Obviously, I think this poem is hilarious, but it's basically the worldview that Avery Brundage adopted at the Games in 1912.
Oh sport, pleasure of the gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled, and the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops, and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.
Brundage had come from the grey clearing which writhed with the drudgery of modern existence. A radiant messenger of a past age had sent him a telegraph, beckoning him out to where the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops.
The Olympics were above money and politics. At the Games, Avery Brundage's exceptionalism, his hard work, might finally be recognized. Maybe there'd be medals, but already there was prestige, respect, access.
I want you to picture in your mind again the opening day at Stockholm. Young Avery Brundage bespectacled, glowing in the heart of modern Olympia. His world has just gotten ten times bigger. He's under the gaze of the king of Sweden. Somewhere in the stands is the Baron de Coubertin. He's caught the Olympic religion, and now he's going to run with it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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How would a simple change make your life and theirs simpler? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success. So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve.
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So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The buck's got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits. The trick, I think, to understanding Avery Brundage is imagine you're in Chicago and it's 1925 and, you know, it's the roaring 20s and you meet this guy in his penthouse apartment on, you know,
North Lake Shore Drive. And he looks out the window and he says, I built that and I built that and I built that and I built that. And you know where I grew up? And he points way, way, way off into the furthest end of Chicago in a place you can barely make out. And then you think to yourself, you know, oh my God, like he did this? You have to get yourself in that kind of place to appreciate Avery Brundage.
Early last spring, I headed to Chicago to meet up with Liz Patterson and Julia Bachrach
So I'm just getting back on the main drive, Julia. That make sense? Yes, yes. We need to head south. They're both architectural historians, and they've done a lot of work studying the buildings Avery Brundage built when he was back from those games, creating his construction empire in the 1920s and 30s. 1448 and 1540 on Lower Lakeshore. That one we just passed. Yeah. Yeah.
We pretty much just spent a day driving around Chicago. I, a New Yorker living in a shoebox, kept being like, a three-bedroom costs what? And they, every few minutes, would be like, Brundage built that? Oh, and that. And also that. Julia, I realize that we drove right by a couple of the other Brundage buildings. I think that's going to have to be okay. We're not going to see every single thing today. Avery Brundage didn't win a medal at the 1912 Olympics.
But he did find his life's calling. He glimpsed a world held up by two pillars: sport and wealth. He wanted both. So when he got back from the games, he got to work. First, the money.
Brundage took his engineering degree and built buildings for Illinois Life Insurance Company, Public Life Insurance Company. He built the Canada Dry Ginger Ale plant and the gigantic Chicago Ford Motor Company plant on the banks of the river. And he did it all by working harder and smarter than his competition.
So the concrete work, I think people were starting to use a lot of, they're called salamanders, but heaters inside to get as much out of the winter months as they could. But he found ways to position them better so that everything kept warmer and then the concrete could be poured and cured more quickly.
And Brundage was honest. When he finished a project under budget, he returned the extra money. The jobs, just like the concrete, came pouring in. He built the 23rd Street Viaduct, the glamorous Shoreland Hotel, and a huge number of luxury apartments on Lakeshore Drive, Chicago's most desirable address.
He definitely got a lot of all the work that was going on during that period. How much of Chicago was built in that period? Oh, thousands and thousands of building permits were issued in the 20s. But he was also a bit of a local celebrity. If you search him in local papers, he was definitely a known commodity in Chicago. Avery Brundage made a fortune, but the fame and the wealth were a means to an end. Brundage was trying to buy a ticket back to Olympia, to fairyland.
He became a leader in amateur sport, like de Coubertin, an evangelist for the Olympic cause, but with a harder edge. He once wrote, "...not to develop the latent possibilities of the human body is a crime, since it certainly violates the law of nature."
Once again, rules and laws. If Charles Hitchcock Sherrill is the prototypical member of the IOC, cheerfully enjoying life at the top of the pyramid, Brundage never quite has the ease of being born to privilege. He's all about striving and self-discipline, and the discipline of others to shore up his position.
By 1928, Brundage was president of the American Olympic Committee. And given everything that was to happen next, I have to believe he'd already set his sights on the International Olympic Committee, the IOC. So this is the great paradox of Brundage. So...
Here's a guy who was resolutely not of the world of the IOC. The IOC is a bunch of pampered aristocrats whose best days are behind them. He's from Chicago. He's made millions building big buildings. He has a mixture of envy and a desire to join this crowd. But at the same time, he must have contempt for them. They're everything he despises. Yes, I think he does.
I think some of it is just he understands that they have something that he lacks and he wants the psychological security of being, you know, one of the, as Coubertin calls them, trusted men. He wants to know that within a very strict hierarchy, he is at the top.
But I think the more complicated thing about him is I also believe that he probably hates these people. It's like you said, he probably knows that he can kind of eat them for lunch. I was thinking about this in the context that transition from
Cheryl to Brundage is the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. The 19th century is the world of the aristocrats who are fundamentally unimpressive at the end of the day and who are in power just by virtue of the fact that they were born into some landed gentry family. And that is the world of the IOC. He's a 20th century guy. And he is everything that is, in some ways, fantastic about the 20th century.
He's a self-made, driven, ambitious visionary who just gets stuff done. The man built half the skyline of Chicago.
He's like, there's something real here. Yeah. It's also like a faith in a meritocracy. Like you have this, like all of these structures of the meritocracy of like, well, we actually want to find the best people and elevate them. We don't just want to accept whoever's been born to the highest class. And I feel like he is, he believes that there is a pathway through his brains to power and glory. But he's also...
Maybe he's still obsessed enough with the sort of 19th century aristocratic idea where he knows these guys still have some ineffable thing that he does not, and he wants it.
Here's a man who has everything. Millions, a construction empire, gorgeous lakefront housing. But I think he's still dreaming of the IOC. The problem is he in so many ways does not fit in there. And obviously, Malcolm and I are obsessed with one of those ways in particular. Here we have a photo of the IOC in 1930. And what do we got? We got...
Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. Mustache. And beard. They all have these very luxuriant mustaches. Yeah. And Avery Brundage crucially does not have a mustache. And wouldn't. But Avery Brundage wants into the club. Mustache or not, he wants it intensely. And I think he wants it so badly, not just because he's running towards the Olympics, but because he's running away from his shame.
Shame about his origins, but also shame about what happened on the field in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912. I never actually told you about that, did I? We'll be right back.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. Brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection.
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So start protecting your identity today. Save up to 40% off your first year of LifeLock identity theft protection. Go to LifeLock.com slash metal to save 40% off. Terms apply. Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Sure, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees.
They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success. So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve.
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So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The buck's got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits. This is Michael Lewis from Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. If you have a small business or work as a freelancer, every little decision matters. So it's important to get those decisions right. Lenovo Pro has the expertise and resources to help you get them right. And it's free.
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whether you're a startup or a mature business. So to join Lenovo Pro, visit Lenovo.com. That's Lenovo.com. In later years as an Olympic evangelist, Avery Brundage was particularly fond of a quote from the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympics. Forgive me, I'm going to do his accent now.
The important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well. And no event is so full of struggle as Avery Brundage's main event in the 1912 Olympics, the decathlon. It is...
in lore the most difficult event in the Olympics right it's everyone else is doing one event the decathlete must do ten and all of the events nine of the ten events are all events that are require speed and strength right so you open with a hundred meters a sprint
You do the long jump, the shot put, the high jump, the 400 meters. That's the first day. Those are all events that suit one kind of athlete. The, you know, think about a... Like fast twitch. Yeah. The football linebacker. Yeah.
would kill those first five, right? And then day two starts. Now you wake up on day two, you're exhausted and you're sore. You've just done five times what a normal athlete does in the Olympics. So now you have to go back to the track and then you do the 110 meter hurdles. Again, speed and strength. The discus throw, speed and strength. The pole vault, speed and strength. The javelin throw, speed and strength.
We've done nine events now, and now we get to the 1,500 meters, which is not speed, and it's not strength. It's the middle distance. It requires a completely different set of...
of physical gifts, right? So all decathletes have this crisis, which is they're almost all linebacker types who are, you have to be, you got to master the first nine events. But then at the moment when you are most exhausted, at the end of the second day, you must do a sport, an event for which you are wholly unsuited, right? You got to be a distance runner. And you watch, if you watch it,
What happens is you watch them all just die before your eyes. They're exhausted. They can't do this. They hate it. They're terrified of it. And you watch these big guys lumber around the track. It's the only event in the entire Olympics where people are doing something that they're not good at. Right? The only event. That's interesting. Yeah. And in 1912, it was the most dramatic event.
July 13th, 1912. Seven days after the opening ceremony, and a 24-year-old Avery Brundage is on the field, unsmiling. The decathlon was designed to epitomize the Olympic theme, Sidious, Altius, Fortius. Swifter, higher, stronger.
Remember, Brundage had quit his job in Chicago to compete in these games. Over the past couple of weeks, he'd moved in a class of wealth and privilege he'd never even seen before. And we're fully in the realm of my speculation here, but I think he wanted in permanently. So now the competition takes on a whole different meaning, right? On the field, all those aristocrats are about to see what he was made of. Maybe he thought he'd impress them.
And maybe that all fell apart when he saw Jim Thorpe compete.
Jim Thorpe is one of the greatest athletes of all time. A tall Native American man with a singular ability in football, baseball, track and field. He was a natural choice for a decathlon, even though he wasn't even a decathlete. He was so green, he didn't even know how to throw a javelin at the qualifying rounds. And yet, in Stockholm, seven events in, he was already 579 points ahead of everyone else.
For three days, Brundage had strained to catch up to Thorpe through the pouring rain and the hot sun. And on the last day of the contest, probably in the back of his mind, he was thinking about the Olympic marathon runner who had died earlier that day from sunstroke. And out of the decathlon's 10 events, the absolute worst was up ahead. The 1500 meter. So these huge guys are running as a, I'm a 1500 meter runner.
The times they're running are absurdly slow, like absurdly slow. And they're just in such pain and agony and they can't wait to be over. And when they cross the finish line, like,
It's this moment of like, it's just relief. It doesn't even matter if you win. You cross it, you just thank God it's over. This is really interesting then because that, it's embarrassing to do the 1500. Oh, it's mortifying. And that is, and what does Avery Brundage hate above all? Is being embarrassed. Right. So Avery Brundage, if you look at the 1912 Decathlon, he
He's actually doing really well events one through eight. He's a speed and strength guy. He's like comfortably in like seventh, eighth, ninth place. He's in the thick of things. He's not going to win, but he's in the thick of things. He gets to event number nine, the javelin, and doesn't do it.
He drops out. Jim Thorpe was so far ahead of him that Avery Brundage, in front of King Gustave and the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, threw in the towel. Or he threw in the javelin. Or I mean, he didn't throw the javelin. You get it.
He quit. The question is, why would he drop out in the javelin? The javelin is not physically demanding. And the answer is, he drops out of the javelin because he's terrified of the 15 other Peters, the way they all are. He can't face it. It's haunting him. He's on event number nine, and he knows event number 10 is the thing where he will be humiliated before a stadium full of spectators.
He's exhausted. He's cold. He's tired. Whatever. All those royals he's just met over the last few days are watching him do something. They're watching and he's just like, I can't do it. And he, you know, this man who is sworn to uphold an ethic of
of competition, of putting, you know, effort and courage first and questions of your own ego second. That's the whole Olympic model of competition, right? The game is, the participation is everything, right? The spirit, he just betrays it all. He's like, F it, I can't do it. And he just sort of slinks away. And it is, it's really impossible to,
To communicate, I think, how deeply humiliating that is. Because it's your ultimate test. Everything is building towards that final moment. And he just quits. Avery Brundage is out of the race. Jim Thorpe goes on to win the gold. Jim Thorpe was so supreme, the second place finisher was more than 800 points behind. The greatest margin in Olympic decathlon history.
But for Brundage, the story doesn't end when he leaves the field. It's my judgment after studying his whole career that I think he probably was haunted by it and that it had a definite impact on how he dealt with Jim Thorpe, the greater athlete. That's David Maraniss, Washington Post editor and author of a great biography of Jim Thorpe called Path Lifted by Lightning.
We called him up to talk about Brundage and Thorpe in 1912. He clearly was jealous of Thorpe, but he also maintained throughout his career this definition of
amateurism as something that was pure and cannot be tainted in any way. So throughout the decades, he made that his mission to make sure that money didn't get involved in it, that too much nationalism wasn't involved in it, that these athletes were competing simply for the joy of sport.
Remember Brundage in Japan at the top of this episode, making that joke about being the last living amateur? Something like the tattooed man, you know. It's a joke with a deeper truth.
Brundage used to love to point out that the word amateur doesn't mean what we think it means, beginner or hobbyist. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin amatore, which means one who loves. It's ironic for such a grim guy, but he believed so intensely that sport was for the love of the game, not money. It was an Olympic principle, a rule, and we know how Brundage loved rules.
Practically speaking, it meant that athletes couldn't compete in the Olympics if they made money for their sport. That's why when Jim Thorpe was found playing basketball,
Bush League baseball for two seasons, making about a dollar a game, a sport that he didn't compete in in the Olympics. He lost his medals. Thorpe had won gold medals for the decathlon and the pentathlon in Stockholm, but he didn't get to keep them. If you look at the official report from the 1912 Olympics, everyone ranks one spot higher in the decathlon than they ought to because Thorpe got erased from the records.
Instead, there's this note at the beginning of the results list: "Mr. Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money for playing baseball. The Amateur Athletic Union regrets that it permitted Mr. Thorpe to compete in amateur contests and will do everything in its power to secure the return of prizes and the readjustment of points won by him and will immediately eliminate his records from the books."
And decades later, when Avery Brundage was in control of the Olympic movement, it was only his pleasure to enforce that rule. There were many, many attempts to get Thorpe's medals restored and Brundage constantly rejected them and was so jealous of Jim Thorpe for decades thereafter that he unjustly refused to give back Thorpe's medals after they were taken away.
So this is the crucial bit about 1912. In Stockholm, Avery Brundage discovered Olympia, a perfect land where he could have respect and access and achievement. And there, to his enduring shame, in front of everyone who mattered, he violated one of its most sacred principles. That quote from the Baron de Coubertin. Struggle over triumph. Play for the love of the game. I mean, imagine...
You know, I think if we had to kind of choose one moment in his life as being the defining one, it really is that. Because a lot of what we've been talking about, his kind of anger and his vindictiveness, it's of the sort that makes you feel like it's being powered by some deep unconscious shame. Yeah, oh yeah. And the first, you know, in this fallen world that he finds himself in, where nothing can live up to the Olympics, the first fallen person, the central fallen person is himself.
Right? Even he does not live up to the Olympic ideal. Years later, Avery Brundage wrote about that day. "I committed an inexcusable error, which I was to regret ever after. This failure to finish the competition was unforgivable." "Oh sport, you are honor." So what did Avery Brundage do with that shame? He tries to earn his way back into Olympia.
He goes home to Illinois, he trains harder than ever, he builds his empire, and he rises in the ranks of amateur sports until he's the president of the American Olympic Committee. One step below the International Olympic Committee. And then finally, in 1934, Avery Brundage got another life-changing letter from a member of the IOC. It starts innocuously enough.
grousing about Irish cyclists, trips to Rome, questions of amateurism. And then, in the last paragraph of the last page, a surprise. If there is a candidacy from the IOC for the United States, the IOC member wrote, cannot I then propose you? You are the one who knows most of the sports in the U.S., and you certainly ought to be a member of the IOC. It was a dream come true.
But at that exact moment, the very foundation of the Olympic faith that Brundage had taken as his own in Stockholm, that sport was a perfect world, removed from all the politics and corruption of the real one, was facing an existential threat. In the spring of 1933, I got a letter from my sports club. You are no longer welcome here because you're Jewish. Heil Hitler.
Soon, he would face the choice of whether to preserve their beauty and honor, their principles, the Olympic Games had to pull out of Nazi Germany. Wouldn't it be a contradiction to have his fairyland, his Olympia, there? Or maybe not. It depends how closely you read that gold medal winning poem. Oh sport, you are fecundity.
You strive directly and nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity.
Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natafafri, Tali Emlin, and Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and JL Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flaun Williams, Sarah Begir, and Jake Gorski. Ode to Sport was read by Ethan Hirschenfeld. Engineering by Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks on this episode to Karen Shikurji and Stephen Nguyen.
I'm Ben out of Haffrey. Oh, before we go, one last thing. We couldn't find a home for it in this episode, but we really need to be on the record with our takes about the portrayal of Avery Brundage in the 2016 film Race. Specifically, the question of playing him with a mustache. So you watch this movie. This movie, whoa. This movie is so bad. And we have, most importantly, Jeremy Irons as Avery Brundage. First off...
One of the most fantastically miscast. Yes. Yes. Yes. He's, yeah. What do they do in race? Jeremy Irons plays him with a mustache. It's just like, there's violence to that. And he wouldn't, Rundage wouldn't have a mustache because the mustache is the signifier of
for a certain kind of dandified elite. Yeah. And Avery Bundage is not dandified. If he had a mustache, he would call it a flavor saver. Yeah, that's right. He's like a guy from the streets of Chicago. I also think part of it about Jeremy Irons is I want to like, he's a real weirdo. And he's got these strange views about incest and gay marriage. I mean, tax-wise is an interesting one because you see...
Could a father not marry his son?
Well, there are laws against incest. It's not incest between men. I'm just saying like... The left turned into tax policy. I know. He could be Cheryl. Could a father not marry his son? Now let me throw this one to you. I just love... I think all of that weirdness is present in his portrayal of Avery Brundage, who, complicated man, but not a weird man. Not weird in that way. No, no, no, not weird in that way.
Yeah, they always like, it's funny how they get it, you know, and what's the irons version of Brundage is less interesting than the real Brundage. Absolutely. And that's the, that whenever Hollywood makes that mistake, that's where I lose patience with them.
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