Leveling the Playing Field: Liberal Infrastructures at the Olympics

In the weeks leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, coverage was dominated by a number of controversies stemming from the city’s efforts to stage the games: threats of strike from public and private sectors and an attack on rail lines grabbed headlines. But these preliminary and somewhat routine crises were eclipsed by furor over the opening ceremony, which included a runway show featuring drag performers and others staged in the style of a feast.

The uproar began almost immediately, as an international range of critics accused organizers and the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, of mocking Christianity. From US conservatives like House Speaker Mike Johnson and actress Candace Bure, to British TERFs like Julie Bindel, to the Vatican, a wide range of commentators united against what was by contemporary standards a fairly mild invocation of religious imagery. The Vatican’s official communiqué zeroed in on the nature of the reference, specifically stating that, “[a]t a prestigious event where the whole world comes together to share common values, there should be no allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people.” The pluralism on offer at the opening ceremony was, then, the wrong sort: by mobilizing religious imagery to undermine conservative gender norms, Jolly’s show was an affront to what the Vatican’s statement disingenuously imagines to be a transreligious rainbow coalition. This coalition was, of course, more motley than any of its members might like to admit—TERFs, republican congressmen, C-list actors, and the Vatican don’t share a great deal in common beyond reactionary gender politics.

The response by Jolly and the organizers of the Paris games did not carry a conviction to match that of their opponents. Jolly was only able to muster meek and inconsistent defenses of the piece. First, at a press conference:

We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that . . . In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are a republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.

Later, in a television interview, he elaborated on the origins of the scene:

It was not my inspiration, the Christian Last Supper. . . . There is (Dionysus), who is at this table. He is there because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology, the god of wine, who is one of the jewels of France . . . the father of Sequana, the goddess who is related to the river, the Seine. The idea was to have a Pagan festival linked to the Gods of Olympus. You will never find in me a desire to mock and denigrate anyone.

If Jolly was celebrating artistic freedom and conveying the secular rights of French society, then it is hard to see how he does so without reference to Christianity. License to reference Greek mythology is not particularly contested and is probably not the “freedom of creation” that he meant for the piece to celebrate. This is not to be too hard on Jolly himself—it’s safe to assume he was backpedaling under the influence of a range of intense institutional, media-dictated, and career-related imperatives.

Rather, it is important here to note how emphatic the right’s discursive triumph was. This incident illustrated not only the right’s capacity to weaponize certain kinds of victimhood in order to instigate and then dominate discussion and controversy, but also the tightly restricted horizons of liberal antagonism. To borrow an idiom from the sporting world: liberals were here, as they seem to be everywhere at the moment, on the back foot.

In the days that followed, the IOC was slightly more resolute in comparison when reactionaries zeroed in on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Misinformation about Khelif’s biological sex circulated online in the opening weeks of the Olympics. After her defeat of Italian boxer Angela Carini, there were widespread and unverified claims that Khelif’s 2023 ban from the World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) was the result of tests showing elevated testosterone levels or chromosomal differences. Carini, a second-generation police officer, quit in the second of three rounds, proclaiming that the match-up was unfair and refusing to shake Khelif’s hand. The unverified claims about Khelif spiraled from there, promoted by the usual cast of characters, including J. K. Rowling and Elon Musk; Trump himself repeated these claims during his campaign later in the summer.[1]

The IBA was sponsored by Russian energy giant Gazprom in 2023 when it banned Khelif and another boxer after claiming they failed unidentified eligibility tests; Khelif’s defeat of a previously unbeaten Russian boxer was subsequently expunged from the record. The IBA later claimed that Khelif provided DNA evidence of XY chromosomes in the 2023 test; no proof was ever provided.

The IBA’s practices around gender testing prepared the ground for the lies about Khelif’s ban. In line with a fresh institutional schism between the IOC and the IBA, prompted by the latter’s institutionalized criminality, financial mismanagement, and ties to Russia (Gazprom had saved the IBA from financial ruin), the IOC unequivocally condemned the IBA’s testing practices. In August, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams stated in a press conference that Khelif’s ban by the IBA during the final rounds of the 2023 Championship was “not legitimate . . . [t]he tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate. . . . The testing, the method of the testing, the idea of the testing which happened kind of overnight. None of it is legitimate and this does not deserve any response.”

It would be a mistake to put these two instances—Jolly’s opening ceremony flap and Khelif’s inclusion (and eventual gold medal) in the welterweight category of women’s boxing at the games—in direct comparison with one another. Rather, it is worth asking why the commendable contempt that Adams and the IOC showed in their response to the IBA was absent from the organizers’ response to critics of the opening ceremony.

The IOC’s vigor is an extension of institutional politics: the IBA, like so many other international sport organizations, was established as an outgrowth of the early Olympics for the purpose of organizing and administering sustained international competition outside of the Games. The relationship between IBA and IOC was one of collaboration until quite recently. The former organized Olympic boxing until 2019, when it was suspended by the IOC for insufficiently reforming after the suspension of its leadership amid mounting debt and ties to organized crime and the Russian state. This small step in the impossible task of disentangling international sport from criminal enterprise (see FIFA’s 2015 crisis for a prominent example, which demonstrates that the issue is of course not limited to Russia) created an institutional gap that left multiple organizations with claims to legitimacy in the administration of women’s boxing and made it possible for Khelif to compete with the IOC’s blessing. The controversy surrounding Khelif’s participation is, from this perspective, an artifact of a splintered institutional landscape.

Indeed, the fissures in international boxing follow the contours of those geopolitics more broadly: the IBA’s ousted president, Uzbek sporting administrator and businessman Gafur Rakhimov, has long appeared on sanctions lists in the west due to his connections to organized crime in the post-Soviet sphere. The metonymic function of the Olympic athlete—both part and representative of their nation—resurfaces here at organizational and klepto-geopolitical levels.

Even if the IOC’s response to the IBA represented something of a small triumph, it nevertheless ceded important ground in the sport and gender debate. That rightward shifts in political discourse often involve “centrist” part-measures that legitimize reactionary agendas is almost so obvious as to not bear mentioning, yet it’s worth noting here that, by even implying that testosterone testing might have a valid form (which in this case the IBA did not conform to), the IOC validated testing practices like those of World Athletics, which institutes testosterone limits on athletes with congenital variations in sex characteristics.[2]

Likewise, that its advocacy in this instance was subordinate to a larger turf war over the administration of boxing further attenuated the strength of the IOC’s stance; it is difficult to imagine that, without the context of inter-institutional struggle, the organizers would have been so resolute in supporting Khelif’s participation.[3]

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When I set out in late summer to write on this topic, I had trouble figuring out exactly what to make of the Paris games. I had in mind something about the decline of liberal pluralism, assailed on all sides, facing left-wing protests on the one hand and reactionary gender politics setting the agenda on the other.

I was stuck with this question for a bit, trying to sort out its coordinates and better understand what was worth saying beyond pointing out the abiding cynicism and historical precedents of right-wing anti-trans and anti-queer campaigning. One thing that became increasingly apparent to me as I was stuck in a sort of inertia, collecting notes and fragments but unable to raise them to coherence, was how the engine of right-wing discourse, with its sheer predictability and an imagination at once meager and malign, was so profoundly boring. Yet the US presidential election and Trump’s subsequent inauguration helped bring things into focus—the triumph of Trumpian reactionary populism over a conciliatory liberalism that can only overcome its own anemia in the rare moments when its institutional authority is threatened repeats the pattern of the Olympics on a larger scale.

Among the many prongs of the Trump administration’s recently launched onslaught of executive orders and other legal and extralegal actions, Trump signed an executive order rescinding federal funding from educational institutions that allow transgender women and girls to compete. The signature photo-op (fig. 2) helpfully illustrates the instrumental position that women and girls inhabit in the institutional contest over gender politics. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Trump caring at all about women’s sports as anything other than a battleground where gender traditionalism can be buttressed and queerness assailed.[4]

The White House took this signing as an opportunity to set the tone for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles as well, issuing an executive order calling on the State Department to pressure the IOC to comply with it. Such explicit pressure is only one part of the equation: outgoing IOC president Thomas Bach indicated in December that the IOC was optimistic about working with the Trump administration on the LA games, and while the incumbent IOC president, white Zimbabwean former Olympic swimmer Kirsty Coventry, has stated that she is prepared to deal with “difficult men” like Trump, she has also repeated disproven talking points on trans athletes and promised a ban. Rather than representing a recent nadir in gender politics at the Olympics, then, the Paris games may ultimately be a prelude of worse to come. The administration’s use of visa rejections to disrupt the operations of non-compliant sectors (including, prominently, higher education) looms, like ICE’s campaign of state terrorism, over the 2028 games more generally. Recent guarantees of support from the Trump administration to Olympic officials could be read as encouraging, though it remains to be seen to what extent this support entails collaboration between organizers and the Trump administration on the latter’s gender and geopolitical projects.[5]

This troubled future course is one answer to the question of how, in a crisis of liberal universalism, the Olympics persists, grows, and adapts. Of course, the promises of liberalism are always bound up with and contingent upon the everyday business of moneymaking, which dictates, as it has dictated, the development of the games.[6] More broadly, any future compliance with gender reactionaries on the part of the IOC can be recognized as part of a longer tradition in which the supposed neutrality and universality of sporting competition is used as a justification to accommodate and interact normally with fascism, imperialism, and so on. The 1936 Olympics stand as an obvious example of this, and the sight of Israeli athletes floating down the Seine on a boat nestled comfortably between Ireland’s and Italy’s this past summer, or the US hosting the Winter Games in 2006, demonstrate that genocidal and war-criminal states, depending on their alignment, are often welcome at the games, or even do the welcoming themselves.

Ultimately, then, the aim of the IOC is the same as that of most other institutions—self-perpetuation—and the political crisis that the Olympics stage is not external to it but is instead bound up in its very fabric. From this perspective, the infrastructure of the Games encompasses both temporary athlete housing built where displaced residents once lived and a regime of medical tests meant to invent acceptable boundaries for gender. In this light, the contradictory approach to geo- and gender-political controversies is easier to recognize and comports more readily with the games’ modern and contemporary significance as an engine of local and national development.

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In September 2017, when Paris and Los Angeles were awarded the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics, respectively, then-mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti took a defensive stance in his celebratory remarks:

Bringing the Olympics back home to LA gives us the chance to imagine what our city will look like a decade from now. LA is a city where the Games are not a barrier to making progress; we know that they are an accelerating force to re-envisioning a better city and a better world in the days ahead as we welcome you back to the City of Angels.

The hazards—to municipal finances, urban geography, and political careers—of hosting the Olympics fits into a broad and familiar history of shifts in civic spending. Though the Olympics were initially publicly funded, willingness to endure those costs had collapsed by the 1970s, when the calculus for host cities changed so profoundly that Los Angeles was the only city to bid for the 1984 Olympics, prompted by the fact that its already sprawling and diverse infrastructure greatly reduced the construction and development costs of hosting the Games.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s statement in 2017 differed markedly from Garcetti’s, favoring universalism over weary conciliation: “Today I am delighted to invite you to join the great family of Parisians, a family which belongs to the world . . . at the heart of these Games, we will place young people, who represent our present, our hope and our pride.” Yet Hidalgo’s stance does not reflect a different financial orientation toward the games; like Los Angeles in 1984 and 2028, Paris in 2024 relied on existing infrastructure and a favorable financial deal from the IOC resulting from low competition for the Games.

In keeping with recent editions of the Olympics, Paris 2024 was used as an excuse to clear encampments and displace thousands, as Jules Boykoff has recently shown. The young people Hidalgo placed at the core of the Olympics—athletes from around the world—were joined there by the young people caught up in encampment sweeps. Khelif and the young Parisians (many of them migrants) displaced for the Games all found themselves subjected to the vagaries of the Olympics’ institutional imperatives. Garcetti’s and Hidalgo’s comments appropriately express two sides of this same coin: accelerated urban development and universalist idealism.

In fact, these have been conjoined at the foundation of the modern games. IOC cofounder Pierre Coubertin saw the fragmented living experiences of athletes at the first few Games—staying at hotels, sometimes not crossing paths until the starting line—as contravening the unifying and levelling spirit of the Olympics. The inauguration of the Olympic village set in motion the Olympics’ close relationship with urban redevelopment and modernization. From 1924 on, the spatial and infrastructural demands of the games ballooned. Even if the common estimates of the outlay for the notorious 1936 games are overinflated, as some have lately argued, the costs of the games did soar in both the inter- and postwar periods. The use of the Olympics to “purify” social space has a long tradition as well, so much so that it could be seen as part of the fabric of the modern Games.[7]

The unprecedented step of selecting two hosts at the same time, and thus setting the agenda of the games more than a decade in advance, was framed as an “extraordinary” opportunity to “ensur[e] the stability of the Olympic Games for the athletes of the world for the next 11 years.” We observers are left to wonder what, exactly, stability means in this context. After decades in which major sporting events have increasingly been held outside of the US and Western Europe, a return to the metropole could be seen as insurance against future geopolitical instability, even if this move did not anticipate the now-emerging possibility of tariff-motivated realignment.

That Paris and Los Angeles were positioned to maintain the legitimacy of the Olympic project is fitting: just as the 1984 Games in Los Angeles marked a pivot away from the civic model, the 1924 Paris Olympics originated many important features of the games, from media rights and broadcasting, to the closing ceremony, to Coubertin’s Olympic village.

Miles Osgood explains that, after launching in 1896, the first few Olympics games were variously marred by fiasco and delayed by the first world war. Only at the 1924 edition did the games begin to approach their current level of prestige—status that owed as much at the time to cultural competitions that included Jean Cocteau in collaboration with the Ballets Russes and counted John Singer Sargent as a medalist as it did to “star performances by the Flying Finn Paavo Nurmi, Uruguayan soccer star José Andrade, and future Hollywood Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller,” to name a few.

This modernist history of the Olympics—a European institution, constructed at a nexus of nineteenth-century political and cultural trends, which subsequently became bound up in political and economic shifts in national/urban development, cultural prestige, and mediatization—is a story wherein the interdependence of these diverse fields becomes legible. That the Olympics knits together various threads of modernity is not in itself a revelation, but nevertheless this history encourages us to think about how superficially disparate elements of the Games might be related.

In this light, the tension between gender conservatism and the future of the games as a liberal institution, which the joint selection of Paris and Los Angeles was clearly intended to buttress, becomes apparent. At the broadest level: if the liberal order that (in an earlier guise) gave rise to the Olympics and over the course of the past century served as a custodian for its growth is being challenged, then gender and sexuality are one terrain where a potential transition away from contemporary liberalism can play out. Of the recent intertwined panics around child trafficking and trans children, Max Fox writes that the “image of the child in peril is an expression of the unspeakable threat posed to familial reproduction by capitalist crisis and vice versa. Faced with this crisis, reactionaries root around for proof of the permanence of capitalist relations of production, whose reproduction relies on the family.” Similarly, the responses among gender conservatives to images of performers transgressing gender boundaries and imagined transgressions on the part of women athletes could be seen as symptomatic of reactionary anxiety around the composition of the national body mediated by a necessary reliance on athletes as national representatives.

Of course, a trans athlete triumphing as part of Team USA would stand in tension with right-wing nationalism—but more broadly, the right-wing campaign to delimit who counts and in what ways they count as part of the national body comports with an extended backlash against the late-twentieth-century expansion of rights (for women, racial and ethnic minorities, queer people, and so on). The implementation of this backlash has been uneven across time and national contexts, but as emergent fascism in the US chips away at and redeploys feminism to reactionary ends, the trend is readily legible.[8] It is no accident that the Olympics are swept up in this; as an engine of development, the Games have been and will be quite easily used toward illiberal ends.

The sporting element of the Olympics that insists upon universality and access via competition—almost the liberal ideal par excellence—is however something that reactionaries feel compelled to contest. The modern Olympics bring to life the fantasy of universalism in the magic circle of the sporting event, much as the ceremonies of the games themselves stage the fantasy of a level and ultimately equal order of nations. If the elimination of the incumbent international order is a bit beyond the capacity of the current regime (the 2026 World Cup, which will be jointly hosted by the US, Mexico, and Canada, promises to be awkward, at best), then using discourse around queer and trans representation at the Games represents low-hanging fruit. These targets are easy precisely because of the institutional weakness of a liberalism that has degraded its capacity to wield power. This, then, is one way to think about the recent conflagration around queerness and transness at the 2024 Olympics: as dramatizing the vulnerability of representation as such in Jolly’s performance while also showing that whatever power liberal institutions still feebly wield is only brought to bear in the interest of their own preservation.  It remains to be seen how this process will play out around the 2028 Games as the US drives and accelerates the dissolution of international consensus.