Penn State Professor Asserts That Olympic Games
Illustrate That Sports Are The National Language
August 18, 2000
University Park, PA--American intellectuals once dreamed that playing fields might replace battlefields, that sport would be a powerful tool for social change, and that a moral equivalent of war might spring from new understandings of sport.

That's according to Mark Dyreson, assistant professor of Kinesiology in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development. He's author of the book, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience, which explores how our single-minded fascination with sports came to be. He locates the invasion of sport at the heart of American culture at the turn of the century.

"It was then that social reformers and political leaders believed that sport could revitalize the 'republican experiment,' that a new sense of national identity could forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order," notes Dyreson. "It was believed that sport would serve to link America's thinking classes with the experiences of the masses."

Nowhere, Dyreson asserts in his book, was this better exemplified than in American accounts of the Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912.

"More than any other event or institution, the creation of the modern Olympics in 1896 produced one of modern civilization's most important national spectacles. At center stage in these spectacles, America's athletic missionaries performed Olympian feats and the American media lionized their deeds," explains Dyreson, who has published widely on the topic of sport history and American culture.

"The re-created modern Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912 sparked more discussions about the nature and purpose of sport and its relation to American civilization than did any other athletic event or institution."

Dyreson points out that American sport was defined by a critical mass of thinkers as a moral equivalent for war.

"Debates over the politics and the meanings of sport engaged an intellectual class that before World War I exercised considerable power in the United States," says Dyreson. "These intellectuals took sport seriously. They considered it to be a tool for social change. Then came the Great War."

The war destroyed any chance that the Olympics would be held in Berlin in 1916. It also changed American understanding of sport. Participation in World War I would quickly mute the growing belief within both popular and intellectual cultures that sport could serve as a moral equivalent for armed combat.

"From the 1920s to the present, few American thinkers have taken the idea of sport as a political instrument seriously. Instead, they have consistently 'exposed' sport as a misguided amusement, wasted energy, or the mindless expression of mass culture," says Dyreson. "After 1920 sport no longer seemed such a powerful tool for social change."