Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The Popular Olympics were scheduled to begin on the 19th of July 1936 with a concert conducted by Pau Casals of a song written by an exiled Jewish German composer. That day in Barcelona went down in history for other reasons, as the Spanish Civil War. This paper will examine the Popular Olympics as an important tool in the construction and display of the Popular Front in Inter-war Europe. The games were planned and hosted in Barcelona but funded by governments in Paris and Madrid and civil society groups as far away as San Francisco and Switzerland. They were distinct from the earlier Workers’ Sport movement and, just like the Popular Front, aimed to increase the appeal of the left to bourgeois groups excluded by fascism in order to build a robust anti-fascist movement. This paper will discuss the funding of the games, those who would have participated, and the events which were set to take place in order to establish their importance in the understanding of the history of the Olympic Games and the Popular Front. The example of the Popular Olympics shows the power of the Olympic ideology m even when the IOC moves away from its stated universalism.