More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, and: Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation ed. by Russel Field (review)

Almost since governments started directing public tax monies toward sport matters, the question of priority has existed. Whom to select: athletes who train and compete at high levels representing municipalities, provinces, and nations, or the masses, folks like you and me, who pursue exercise options in various "other" sport and recreation programs? It is evident that the elites have won the day. In the midst of such a situation one can often spot the litter of struggle between the voices of discontent, sometimes successful, more often unsuccessful, and their opponents. More than Just Games and Playing for Change are two recent works that deal in part with the effort by various individuals and parties to address the primary debate—the "struggle" of those who feel compromised, indeed disenfranchised, versus those whom government has favoured, indeed empowered.

Just when one believes that "everything possible" has appeared on Olympic history's most written-about event, the both "glorious and notorious" Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin, there arrives More than Just Games, a book I conclude to be the most thorough scholarly treatment available in any language on the events surrounding one country's decision to participate—or not—in those historic competitions some eighty years ago. There have been many excellent (along with some not quite so superb) examinations of participation at Berlin; most have been articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or chapters in thematic anthologies; there never has been, to my knowledge, an entire monograph on one country's grappling with the dilemma of whether to "show up or not" for the Games that the Nazis shaped and Adolf Hitler endorsed and that, in the end, Canadian athletes, like their British brethren and American neighbours, dignified with their presence.

Bruce Kidd, considered one of the foremost chroniclers and analysts of Canadian sport, and a staunch defender of athletes' rights, in The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) brushes aside in two sentences the quest to which the authors of More than Just Games devote some 200+ pages of text, plus 40 more in endnotes. Stated Kidd: "Despite considerable opposition to the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, when the British Olympic Association decided to send a team Canadian Olympic officials simply voted to do the same. There was no further discussion" (p. 71). That was "it!" Although the issue of boycotting participation in the United States receives cursory attention from Richard Mandell in The Nazi Olympics (London: Macmillan, 1971), and in Great Britain from Duff Hart-Davis in Hitler's Games (London: Harper & Row, 1986), more penetrating are the treatments by William Murray, George Eizen, and Stephen Wenn. Murray focuses on France: "France, Coubertin and the Nazi Olympics" (Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, I-1992). Eizen and Wenn explore U.S. boycott events, in Eizen's case: "Voices of Sanity: American Diplomatic Reports from the 1936 Berlin Olympiad" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 26, 1999; in Wenn's: "A Tale of Two Diplomats: GeorgeS. Messersmith and Charles H. Sherrill on Proposed Participation in the 1936 Olympics" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 16, 1989). Far more than Canada's, the U.S. boycott debate aroused widespread attention and opinion on whether "to go or not to go."

The idea for More than Just Games, and indeed its title, evolved from the exhibits More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics and Framing Bodies: Sport and Spectacle in Nazi Germany, both of which opened on October 15, 2009, at Vancouver's Holocaust Education Centre in British Columbia. The writing and research experts for the exhibit More than Just Games were the Jewish-Canadian writers Richard...