MILAN — The International Olympic Committee’s decision to disqualify Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was all about messaging. Heraskevych’s message was a helmet showing photos of fellow athletes who were killed while defending their country against the Russian invasion. The IOC told him he couldn’t wear it during competition. Heraskevych stood his ground. The IOC disqualified him, and that decision was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
How interesting, then, or perhaps appropriate for anyone who believes Heraskevych got a raw deal, that the IOC is now being criticized for its own messaging.
At issue here is a T-shirt it had been hawking on its website showing a poster from the 1936 Berlin Games — specifically, imagery by an artist named Würbel (sources differ on whether his first name was Werner or Franz) that has a, shall we say, certain Aryan quality to it. That’s Aryan as in the manner in which it was appropriated by the Nazis to promote their delusional image of racial superiority.
The poster does not contain swastikas, Nazi soldiers goose-stepping their way through the streets of Berlin or Hitler speaking to the masses at Nuremberg. For the what’s-the-big-deal crowd, there’s that.
What the artwork does show is a golden god of a figure wearing a laurel wreath, standing over the Brandenburg Gate, the Olympic rings overhead. We see the figure’s right arm rising above its shoulder and out of frame. You might consider asking: Was he holding an Olympic torch or maybe doing a Nazi salute? Hard to say. Still, it made for a fine piece of propaganda for Hitler’s quest to showcase the German way.
Heraskevych’s helmet was ultimately banned because it contained a political message — as that T-shirt certainly did.
Not for nothing did the 1936 Berlin Olympics come to be known as the “Nazi Games.”
It was in Berlin in 1936 that American sprinter Jesse Owens, a Black man, won four gold medals. But the Berlin Games are also remembered for who did not run. Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller — both of them sprinters, both American, both Jewish — were told by an American assistant coach, Dean Cromwell, they were being replaced in the 4×100 meter relay by Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, the latter an African American who later would be elected to Congress. It was the day before the race when Cromwell told Glickman and Stoller they were out.
Owens and Metcalfe were great athletes, but they were not scheduled to compete in the 4×100. Teaming up with Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, they took home gold.
Many years later, Glickman, by then a celebrated New York sports broadcaster, would state that he and Stoller were kept out because of antisemitism. He directed his attacks not just at Cromwell but also at Avery Brundage, the head of the IOC at the time.
It took until 1998 before there was an Olympic acknowledgment of sorts that Stoller, who died in 1985, and Glickman were victims of antisemitism at the 1936 Berlin Games. It came in the form of being the first recipients of the Douglas MacArthur Award, created by the United States Olympic Committee and named in memory of the iconic United States Army general who was president of the USOC in 1927-28. Glickman received his award as part of an event held by the New York Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Glickman was in attendance; Stoller was honored posthumously.
While there exists no written proof that Brundage — and by extension Cromwell — kept Glickman and Stoller out of the Olympics, William J. Hybl, president of the United States Olympic Committee in 1998, was quoted at the time as saying, “I was a prosecutor. I’m used to looking at evidence. The evidence was there.”
Hybl added, “I’m really proud of what the USOC has done in this regard.”
All of which raises the question: If Glickman and Stoller were alive today, how would they react to the IOC selling T-shirts depicting that propaganda-tinged artwork from the 1936 Berlin Games? While the answer is unknowable, some remarks by Glickman contained in his obituary in The New York Times from 2001 offer some clues. After returning to Berlin in 1994 for a celebration of Owens’s four gold medals, Glickman later wrote, according to The Times, “Suddenly a wave of rage overwhelmed me. I thought I was going to pass out. I began to scream every dirty curse word, every obscenity I knew. … Being there, visualizing and reliving those moments, caused the eruption which had been gnawing at me for so long and which I thought I had expunged years ago.”
After the existence of the T-shirt featuring the 1936 Berlin Games artwork was made known, the IOC was sent hurtling into familiar territory: damage control.
“The first answer is we cannot rewrite history. The 1936 Games happened,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. “We hold up what (American sprinter) Jesse Owens did, and a number of other athletes, as a great example of upholding the Olympic spirit.”
Adams also said: “The validity of those trademarks depends on us exercising our rights. If we stop using the trademarks they can be taken by other people and potentially misused. We produce a small number of those items. The main reason is to protect our copyright so they are not misused.”
The difference, of course, is that Heraskevych isn’t selling officially licensed “Helmets of Memory” online. And the 1936 Olympics T-shirt? While it’s not known how much (if any) money the IOC will earn selling the shirt as part of its “Heritage Collection,” what matters is that there’s a price tag. And price tags don’t convey trademark protection. They convey that if you want the shirt, it’ll cost you.
The T-shirt is listed as “out of stock,” and the IOC has acknowledged it is because the limited supply has been sold. But the 1936 poster continues to lurk about, beyond the control of the IOC. An original copy of the poster is available at sothebys.com for $2,500, complimentary shipping included. The T-shirt can be found on eBay, as can knockoffs of the poster.
So let’s return to Heraskevych and his controversial helmet that shows photos of friends of his who died defending Ukraine. There’s nothing there that makes any specific statements about Russia. Just as that 1936 Berlin Games poster, which inspired a T-shirt, says nothing about Germany’s Aryan pitch.
But propaganda isn’t about beating you over the head. It’s about getting inside your head. If that was Heraskevych’s intent, he made it only as far as the starting line. If that was what the Nazis had in mind with their 1936 Olympics poster, they made it all the way to the internet.