We continue the journey through Olympic history. Sometimes one gets mad, even yells, in the face of so much dirt. Okay, I'm going to calm down, although the sentences will be hard for me. Today I will leave my opinions about a current perversity, with roots that hurt in the past and have not completely gone away. From these lines and the research you must do, build up your opinions. You must be clear: although I chose you as a companion, that does not give me the right to impose my reflections on you. Listen and think.

Embracing a false anti-political position, a deceitful neutrality, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) once again stains the great party rescued by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, but now with a political decision, linked to the right, - those are the ones they have - by banning Russian and Belarusian athletes from participating in the opening parade of Paris 2024, an event where the capital of France is making up for its great failure as the venue for the Second Games (1900) and also for the second time it hosted the classic, in 1924, where excessive improvisation and other unacceptable aspects did not allow it to stand out as a venue.

Previously, the IOC sanctioned Russian athletes and supported “the mischief” of the most reactionary of the sports movement and beyond: a measure disguised in the purity of the fight against doping, it only allows the neutral participation of competitors chosen from that nation, without the flag or anthem of their country present.

It's not surprising. The history of the Games is wounded by great stains from the beginning by allowing racism, supporting the theft of muscles, privileging imperial powers, hitting the countries of the so-called third world, mocking the spirit of the classic by commercializing it more and more, with praise for a pro-Nazi official like Brundage or Samaranch, who opened the door and even the windows to businesses, without the former escaping from also being a businessman. I have come to ask for the fury with which Jesus expelled the merchants from the temple to evict the merchants from the sports temple. In the essence of politics in the social field, the economic factor vibrates, shakes, rules.

Oblivion hurts a decent man like Coubertin: he always opposed the main insults and the threat of its future expansion. In 1894 he lamented the “mercantilist spirit that threatens to invade sporting circles as sports have developed within a society that threatens to rot to the core because of the passion for money.” At the time, monopolies were in their early period. What sphere of this shipwrecked world has been saved from the corrupting lashes driven by that passion increased to the extreme?

Various unsportsmanlike and anti-Olympic blows, above all, inhumane, punished the Games from the beginning. To exist, it had to fight against concepts such as the one that became the regulations of the Amateur Athletic Club of London: “Anyone is an amateur who has never participated in an open event, accessible to all or for the money from the entrance fees to the field or similar advantages” , who has never been a teacher or instructor of exercises of this kind as a means of living at any time in his life and who is not a worker, craftsman, or day laborer.”

That vision was half defeated: it remained in force in the aristocratic minds of many of the national and international leaders of the sports movement, without those of the IOC remaining unscathed by such brutality against the participation of those from below, already hampered by the weakness of their pockets. I made it clear to you. Many of the ideas and works of the brilliant pedagogue dissatisfied many of his companions in the Olympic adventure. He proposed holding a congress related to popular sports where delegates from the main labor unions would be present; that was at the nineteenth session of the IOC held in Antwerp in 1920. The vast majority voted against. They also did not like his ideas of "sport for everyone", making it "... within the reach of the most humble...", making it "accessible to the proletarian adolescent." Nor his reflections expressed in Amsterdam in 1928 on Olympism that "must survive social revolutions. In any case there’s nothing to reject in current corporate trends. I have seen with joy the labor organizations being educated in the Olympic ideal ".

Closer: Very quickly they expelled the participants of the mutiny of the champions, the Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who protested during the awards ceremony of the 200 flats races in Mexico City in 1968 against the racism that existed in their homeland. Meanwhile, the Italian fencer Orestes Pulili only received slight criticism, behind closed doors, for performing the fascist anthem and urging his teammates to do the same to celebrate the victory in Paris 1924. The final straw: handing over the headquarters to Berlin in 1936 for the XI Games. They previously allowed the replacement of Lee Jahncke as president of the United States National Committee, due to his position and the campaign against that determination because he knew that Hitler-s followers were going to use the contest to strengthen their power and spread their ideology. In that nation they placed Avery Brundage, a reactionary element who had economic relations with those Hitler’s followers, in that position.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brundage became president of the IOC for many years, where he kept a negative position. Jahncke was expelled from the highest body of the Olympics for mixing sport with politics. I warn you, I will take you to Berlin 1936 so that you can examine the whole truth of an anti-human and anti-Olympic stigma that feeds fascism. Although you should not be surprised by the existence of that decision that violated the ideals of the great event, in addition to favoring the worst of Germans. There are quite a few examples of failures of this sort before and after. Among the first: South African athletes, only those from the white population, competed early in the great events. The discriminatory excesses of that country were at the essence of the first Olympic boycott.

New Zealand had sent a rugby team to compete in the apartheid nation at the time of the Soweto murders, which had long deserved a heavy sanction. The protests and the request for punishment against the New Zealand leaders fell on deaf ears; rather the deaf soul. The stupidity had an answer: the withdrawal of 27 countries, the vast majority from Africa, from Montreal 1976. I have for you, before returning to the tour through the history of modern Olympism without being limited by chronology. Will the IOC and the venue for this year's Games allow the Israeli delegation to participate in the opening parade? Ah, but they have invited it to the Games...

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff