The Spectator – on the purpose of the Olympics

When the idea of a modern Olympic Games began to be discussed, Spectator writers couldn’t really see the point. ‘Beyond a certain waste of money, there will be no harm in the new whim,’ the magazine ruled in 1894, but the notion that the competition would bind nations together didn’t seem very convincing:

Why? Is it because they will all for a few days be recalling the Greeks and their achievements, and their short-lived superiority in all the arts? They cultivated of all Europe once studied Latin; but they cut one anothers’ throats for all that with a singular unanimity of brutality.

The diplomat Harold Nicolson agreed in 1948 that the Games were not the great unifying force they’d been billed as:

As one who has devoted much of his life to the cause of international conciliation, I regret that every few years or so much money and great powers of arrangement should be devoted to organising conflict; and that many hundred young men and women should return to their homes under the belief that all umpires are corrupt and that all foreigners cheat.