July 18, 2024 • 42 mins
The cheerleader-in-chief for the American Olympic movement was a brilliant, self-made Chicago tycoon named Avery Brundage. Brundage did more to ensure the success of the Berlin Games than anyone except Hitler. But what exactly were his motivations? We meet the man behind the curtain and witness his secret shame.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Pushkin. Let's begin today's episode with a poem penned in
the early part of the last century called Ode to Sport.
It was written by a short French aristocrat with a
(00:25):
mouth obscuringly large mustache and a deeply idiosyncratic view of antiquity,
the creator of the modern Olympic Games, the Baron Pierre
de Coubertain.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Oh Sport, you are progress. To serve you, a man
must improve himself, both physically and spiritually. You force him
to abide by a greater discipline. You demand that he
avoid all excess.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I didn't say it was a good poem.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You teach him wise rules which allow him to exert
himself with the maximum of intensity without compromising his good health.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Ot to sport is terrible, just awful. So of course
we're going to be playing a lot of it. But
the palm also matters, because it's a time capsule. De
kouper Tank believed that the Olympics should be a kind
of modern religion, embodying the aristocratic values of amateurism, no
money for sport and internationalism.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Oh Sport, you are peace. You promote happy relations between peoples,
bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength
which is controlled, organized and self disciplined.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
The Martin Games got their start in eighteen ninety six
in Athens. Of course, four years later in Paris, they'd
included the most dignified upper crust of sports, such as
pigeon shooting, croquet, and not to be forgotten, the horse
long jump. But the earliest games fell short of the
Baron's epic vision. Mainly they kept happening at world's fares,
(02:06):
and it's hard to convey a deep connection to antiquity
when you're handing out medals next to, say, the gigantic
butter statue of Teddy Roosevelt riding a horse. But that
all changed in nineteen twelve. Picture the opening day of
the Stockholm Olympics. That year. Trumpets blared as members of
(02:30):
the Swedish royal family paraded their way to their box.
International Olympic Committee members in silk hats and frock coats
processed in ornate facial hair abounded. Thousands of men and
women athletes strode into the stadium to stand before the
Swedish King. The Baron de Kubertan was there too, and
(02:51):
there wasn't a butter statue in sight. These were the
first games with athletes from every continent except for Antarctica,
introduced epic sports like the decathlon, and per the Baron's wishes,
there was an arts competition, which meant there was an
Olympic gold medal for literature, one in nineteen twelve by
a poem written under a pseudonym by the Baron himself,
(03:15):
ode to sport.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yours is a prudent, well considered audacity.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
These games were a turning point. But for our purposes
they mattered not because of the athletic or artistic triumphs,
or the absence of carved butter. No, they mattered because
of one young man in that mass of thousands of athletes,
standing on the field, facing the King into kober Tan,
a young man in round wire spectacles who had an
appointment that day with faith, a fate that would later
(03:46):
put him in the position to save the modern Olympics,
and that would twenty four years later cost him his soul,
a young man named Avery Brundage.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is episode four of our series
on the Berlin Olympics in nineteen thirty six Hitler's Olympics.
Over the past two episodes, I introduced you to one
of my all time favorite historical figures, Charles Hitchcock Cheryl,
(04:24):
the patrician dufus who met Hitler and told the world, Hey,
this guy's all right, let's play sports with him. But today,
in the show by Colleague bend A, daph Haffrey brings
us the story of the man who really made the
games happen, and not only the nineteen thirty six Games,
but the Olympics as we know them today. The one,
(04:44):
the only Avery Brundage.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We meet again, Yeah, to discuss yet another member of
the International Olympic Committee.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
The most he is the most complet the most important,
and when I say complicated, I mean that unlike Cheryl,
he's not a dufus and he's not a cardboard villain.
I feel like the mid century was full of men
(05:17):
like this. Fiction was full of men like this. The
architect in in Coward Runtad and I RAN's the Fountainhead.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He's also just like an epic epic figure. I think
we have to start, we have to begin in an
epic register. Yes, honestly, it's best if he introduces himself, ladies.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
And gentlemen of the press. Usually I'm introduced as the
last living amateur, something like the tattooed man.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You know, that's every brandage late in life. Speaking to
some reporters in Japan, a.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Journalist friend of mine in Chicago, one of the most
sophisticated and cynical columnists there, visited Olympia not so long ago,
and I was amazed to pick up the paper in
Chicago shortly thereafter and see a headline Brundage may be right.
(06:16):
After all, this man was so impressed by the atmosphere
at ancient Olympia that he was almost converted. I don't
know how long it lasted, but for the moment he
was converted to the Olympic spirit.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Conversion to the Olympic Spirit was Avery, Brundage's great obsession.
The Olympic religion never had a better evangelist. But our
series isn't only concerned with the Olympic Games. The bigger
question here is why do some people see evil for
what it is when others can't or won't. Dorothy Thompson
could see the dangers of Nazism because she was born
(06:59):
to a marginalized group herself. She was a woman poor
Charles Cheryl loved Hitler. He was born upper crust and
only cared to stay that way. Brundage, though, looks a
lot more like Thompson than Cheryl. At first. He starts
out as an underdog, and you're gonna want to root
for him, but in the end, well, we'll get there.
(07:24):
Avery Brundage grew up poor in Chicago around the turn
of the twentieth century. It was the classic gloomy first
act of an American dream, waking up in the dark
to work as a paper boy, commuting seven miles each
way to school. Father who leaves when he's five and
dies alone, the victim as the newspaper reads of business reverses.
(07:45):
Brundage was brilliant and maybe a little haunted by failure.
He was always top of his class, winning national prizes,
and always passionate about sports. Crucially sports you could play alone,
like track and field. But poor kid remembers his school
didn't have sports facilities. He made his own discus out
of an iron washer, he used a rock for shot put,
(08:07):
and he practiced long jumping in an abandoned lot. When
I imagine Avery Brandage's early life. I picture him from
a distance, a little boy in glasses, alone on an
empty parcel of land, jumping again and again into the
same hole, trying to beat himself.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Oh, sport, you are joy to the sorrowful. You can
even bring salutary diversion from their distress.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
He studied engineering in college, and he was a track star.
Not because he was amazing at any event in particular,
but because he was so relentless in training that he
was pretty good at them all. Mainly though he did
a million extracurriculars, he just wants to be in the club,
better yet to lead the club. He's like the kid
in that movie Rushmore yearbook board member, fraternity member, literary
(08:56):
magazine editor in chief, chairman of the sea, your stag dance.
Same deal with sports. He's all about sports organizations. It's
not enough for him to be on the track team.
He's got to be on the governing body so he
can pass the rule that students who aren't on varsity
teams can't wear the school of colors. So if you're
a student at the University of Illinois in Brundage's time,
(09:19):
and you're not a track star. He doesn't want you
wearing orange and blue. This, I think is a good
illustration of the first rule of Avery Brundage's universe. There
must be rules, even with food. Like when he's older,
he only eats one lunch every day, and it's an
egg sandwich with bacon, a side of tomato, and a
baked apple, which is like the most Midwestern thing I've
(09:41):
ever heard. The world of Avery Brandage is rule bound,
and a rule bound world is a world of task.
If Charles Cheryl is the classic International Olympic Committee member
born at the top of the pyramid, Avery Brundage is
born just a bit above the bottom. He knows it,
and he knows what it's going to take to get
to the top.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
In all of the interviews I've read with him, he
always made a point of talking about how unpopular he was.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Malcolm and I have spent hours psychoanalyzing this man.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
There's a version of that where the person owns it.
But it's not that it's this kind of grim determination that,
of course all of the weaklings out there don't understand
what I'm doing. That's why I'm who I am, That's
why I'm special.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I found a typewritten note from Brendage that kind of
backs this up. It's in his archive, part of some
ideas he had for an autobiography he never published. He
reads one summer vacation, when in college, had a political
job in an office containing two hundred or three hundred appointees.
Became very unpopular because, in order to keep busy, I
did not only all my own work, but all the
(10:45):
work of the score of others. The boss began to
think that if I stayed there much longer, there would
be no work left. When I took a day off
to go to the ballpark because I had nothing to do,
I got fired. So this sounds ridiculu us, but I
actually believe it. And more importantly, I don't think he
realizes how unlikable this story makes him sound. But it
(11:08):
illustrates another one of his rules. If you're the best,
you'll be hated by the rest. That's just the fact.
But after college, our man discovered that the real world
didn't play by his rules. He worked as a construction superintendent,
which was a really bad industry for a man of principle.
Right away, he was inspecting materials for an architect's new building,
(11:30):
the first shipment of stone had major flaws. He tried
to send it back and the supplier said, better think twice.
This stuff comes from their architect's nephew. Things did not
improve from there.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
It was a criticism of the climate which exists in
the world today, and it is, as I say, a
very sad commentary on our so called civilization.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
To quote from his unpublished autobiography, Like most young men
who think about it, I was disturbed by the gross
social and economic injustices in the imperfect world in which
we live, and all the inequity, trouble and misery caused
by the cupidity, the ignorance, and the stupidity of the
peculiar people occasionally thrown into power and authority, as his
(12:14):
biographer Alan Gutman put it, from uneasy involvement in the
imperfect world, Brundage found refuge in amateur athletics. While Brundage
was making his way in business, he kept up his
track and field training, discus shot put running. He got
so good that in nineteen twelve he got the telegram
(12:37):
that would change his life, an invitation from the US
Olympic Committee.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
I was a member of the United States team in
nineteen twelve.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
At this point, Avery Brundage was still living with his mom.
Illinois was the center of his universe. But as soon
as he got that telegram, he quit his job and
headed to New York. Then he climbed aboard the glamorous
SS Finland with all the other athletes for ten days
of all you can eat meals underneath the ornate, filigreed
sunroof of the dining saloon. This was more like it
(13:14):
when he arrived at the Games in Stockholm in nineteen twelve.
It was a world away from Chicago. In that unpublished autobiography,
he wrote, I shall never forget. As the steamer picked
its way cautiously through the alluring archipelago to the anchorage,
it was approximately ten o'clock in the evening, and the
sun was about to set behind us. The myriad of
(13:37):
beautiful pine clad islands with neat and well cared for
homes with flower gardens, the winding channels containing scores of
boats of all shapes and sizes, and the rosy glow
of the setting sun presented a picture of fairyland. I
shall always remember. I've read a lot of Avery Brundage,
(13:59):
and let me tell you, fairyland is not the kind
of word he uses. The man was in love. It
was midsummer in Stockholm, and the days were surreal and long,
with only an hour or two of darkness. Flags fluttered
in streets, flanked by balconies bursting with flowers. Avery was
swept up in a whirl of Olympic parties, banquets, balls,
(14:21):
garden parties, concerts, receptions and entertainments. He rubbed shoulders with
royalty for a few days. He wasn't the poor kid
from corrupt Chicago anymore. He was an Olympian.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, the dime store psychological reading of this.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Can't we at least upgrade ourselves to like dollar dollar
store dollars our dollar general psychoanalysis? You know, all right,
he is.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
He's the hic from Chicago, right, grows up without a
dad in some you know, cold water flat somewhere in Chicago,
makes his own way in the world. He's not really,
he's not worldly. When he goes to the nineteen twelve Olympic,
I think it's the first time he's left the United States. Yeah,
Cheryl crosses the Atlantic eighty two times in the course
(15:07):
of his life, and you know, he some part of
him desperately wants to be He just gets a glimpse
of this, this kind of the fabulous life these other
people are leading, and I just think he some part
of just like I want that.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He wanted this perfect world of sport because of how
angry he was about the corruption in the real world,
for bribes and the nepotism. The Olympic religion said, sports
are the opposite. They're objective, they're fair, they're meritocratic. And
I know it sounds like a lot, but if you
don't believe me, then let's consult that gold medal winning
poem by the founder of the modern Olympics.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh sport, The perfect equity for which men strive in
vain in their social institutions is your constant companion. No
one can jump a centimeter higher than the height he
can jump, nor run a minute longer than the length
he can run. The limits of his success are determined
(16:08):
solely by his own physical and moral strength.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Obviously, I think this poem is hilarious, but it's basically
the worldview that Avery Brandage adopted at the Games in
nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh Sport Pleasure of the Gods essence of life. You
appeared suddenly in the midst of the.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
Gray clearing, which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence,
like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind
still smiled.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops, and
flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Brandage had come from the gray clearing, which writh with
the drudgery of modern existence. A radiant messenger of a
past age has send him a telegraph, beckoning him out
to where the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops.
The Olympics were above money in politics. At the Games,
(17:12):
Avery Brundage's exceptionalism, his hard work might finally be recognized.
Maybe there'd be medals, but already there was prestige, respect access.
I want you to picture in your mind again the
opening day at Stockholm, young Avery Brandage, bespectacled, glowing in
the heart of modern Olympia. His world has just gotten
(17:35):
ten times bigger. He's under the gaze of the King
of Sweden. Somewhere in the stands is the Baron to
Cooper ten He's caught the Olympic religion, and now he's
going to run with it.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
The trick I think to understanding every bondage is imagine
you're in you're in Chicago and it's nineteen twenty five,
and you know, it's the Roaring twenties, and you meet
this guy in his penthouse apartment on you know, you know,
it's Lakeshore Drive, and he looks out the window and
(18:20):
he says, I built that, and I built that, and
I built that, and I built that, and you know
where I grew up And he points way way way
off into the furthest end of Chicago in a place
you can barely make out. And then you think to yourself,
you know, oh my god, like he did this. You
have to get yourself in that kind of place to
(18:42):
appreciate every bondage.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Early last spring, I headed to Chicago to meet up
with Liz Patterson and Julia Backrock.
Speaker 6 (18:50):
So I'm just getting back on the main drive. You
that makes sense, Yes, yes, we need to head south.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
So they're both architectural historians, and they've done a lot
of work studying the buildings Avery Brundage built when he
was back from those games, creating his construction empire in
the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
Fourteen forty eight and fifteen forty at Lower Lake Shore Rio.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
We won.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
We just passed. Yeah, we pretty much just spent a
day driving around Chicago. I a New Yorker living in
a shoe box, kept being like a three bedroom costs what,
and they every few minutes would be like Brundage built that, Oh,
and that, and also that.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Julia I realized that we drove right by a couple
of the other Brandage building's in there. I think that's
gonna have to be okay, Yeah, rather.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Every down Avery Brandage didn't win a medal at the
nineteen twelve Olympics, but he did find his life's calling.
He glimpsed the world held up by two pillars sport
and wealth. He wanted both, so when he got back
from the Games, he got to work first the money.
(20:00):
Took his engineering decree and built buildings for Illinois Life
Insurance Company Public Life Insurance Company. He built the Canada
dry ginger Ale plant and the gigantic Chicago Ford Motor
Company plant on the banks of the River. And he
did it all by working harder and smarter than his competition.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
So the concrete work I think people were starting to
use a lot of they're called salamanders, but heaters inside
to get as much out of the winter months as
they could. But he found ways to position them better
so that everything kept warmer, and then the concrete could
(20:39):
be poured and cured more quickly.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And Brndage was honest. When he finished a project under budget,
he returned the extra money the jobs just like the
concrete came pouring in. He built the twenty third Street Viaduct,
the glamorous Shoreland Hotel, and a huge number of luxury
apartments on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago's most desirable address.
Speaker 6 (21:04):
He definitely got a lot of all the work that
was going on during that period.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
How much of Chicago was built in that period.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Oh, thousands and thousands of building permits were issued in
the twenties.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But he was also a bit of a local celebrity
if you search him in local papers.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
He was definitely a known commodity in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Every Rundage made of fortune, but the fame and the
wealth were a means to an end. Rundage was trying
to buy a ticket back to Olympia, to Fairyland. He
became a leader in amateur sport, like to Kubertin, an
evangelist for the Olympic cause, but with a harder edge.
He once wrote, not to develop the latent possibilities of
(21:45):
the human body as a crime, since it certainly violates
the law of nature. Once again, rules and laws. If
Charles Hitchcock Cheryl is the prototypical member of the IOC,
cheerfully enjoying life at the top of the pyramid, I
just never quite has the ease of being born to privilege.
He's all about striving and self discipline and the discipline
(22:07):
of others to shore up his position. By nineteen twenty eight,
Brundage was president of the American Olympic Committee, and given
everything that was to happen next, I have to believe
he'd already set his sights on the International Olympic Committee,
the IOC.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So this is the great paradox of Brundage. So here's
a guy who was resolutely not of the world of
the IOC. The OC is a bunch of pampered aristocrats
whose best days are behind them. He's from Chicago, He's
made millions building big buildings. He has a mixture of
(22:48):
envy and a desire to join this crowd, but at
the same time he must have contempt for them everything
he aspises.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yes, I think he does. I think some of it
is a some of it is just he understands that
they have something that he lacks, and he wants the
psychological security of being, you know, one of the as
kuber Tack calls them, trusted men. He wants to know
that within a very strict hierarchy he is at the top.
(23:16):
But I think the more complicated thing about him is
I also believe that he probably hates these people. It's like,
like you said, he probably knows that he can kind
of eat them for lunch.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
I was thinking about this in the context the transition
from Ryl to Brundage is a transition from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century. The nineteenth century is the you know,
the world of the aristocrats who are fundamentally unimpressive at
the end of the day, and who who you know,
are in power just by virtue of the fact that
they were born into some landed gentry family. And that
(23:47):
is the world of the IOC. He's like, he's the
twentieth century guy. He is and he is everything that
is in some ways fantastic about the twentieth century. It's
a self made, driven, ambitious visionary who just gets stuff done.
The man built half the Scotland of Chicago. But he's like,
(24:08):
there's something real here.
Speaker 7 (24:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's also like a faith in a meritocracy, like you
have this, like all of these structures of the meritocracy
of like, well, we actually want to find the best
people and elevate them. We don't just want to accept
whoever's been born to the highest class. And I feel
like he is. He believes that there's a pathway through
his brains to power and glory. But he's also maybe
(24:31):
he's still obsessed enough with the sort of nineteenth century
aristocratic idea where he knows these guys still have some
ineffable thing that he does not, and he wants it.
Here's a man who has everything, millions, a construction empire,
gorgeous lake front housing, but I think he's still dreaming
of the IOC. The problem is he, in so many
(24:54):
ways does not fit in there. And obviously Malcolm and
I are obsessed with one of those ways. In particular,
here we have a photo of the IOC in nineteen
thirty and what do we got we got mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache,
(25:15):
be and beard. They all have these very luxuriant mustaches.
And Avery Brandage crucially does not.
Speaker 7 (25:21):
Have the mustache, and wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
But Avery Brandage wants into the club, mustache or not.
He wants it intensely, and I think he wants it
so badly, not just because he's running towards the Olympics,
but because he's running away from his shame, shame about
his origins, but also shame about what happened on the
field in the Stockholm Olympics in nineteen twelve. I never
(25:46):
actually told you about that, did I. We'll be right
back In later years. An Olympic evangelist, Avery Brendage was
particularly fond of a quote from the Baron Pierre de
coubertin the French Founder of the modern Olympics. Forgive me,
(26:09):
I'm gonna do his accent now. The important thing in
life is not triumph, but the struggle. The inessential thing
is not to have conquered, but to have thought well.
And no event is so full of struggle as Avery
Brandage's main event in the nineteen twelve Olympics the decathlon.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It is in lore, the most difficult event in the Olympics, right,
It's everyone else is doing one event. The decathlete must
do ten at all of the events. Nine of the
ten events are all events that are require speed and strength. Right,
So you open with one hundred meters a sprint, You
(26:51):
do the long jump, the shop quote, the high jump,
the forward of meters. That's the first day. Those are
all events that suit one kind of athlete, the you know,
think about a fast twitch yeah, the football linebacker. We
kill those first five, right, and then day two starts.
Now you wake up on day two, you're exhausted and
you're sore. You've just done five times what a normal
(27:14):
athlete does in the Olympics. So now you have to
go back to the track, and then you do the
one hundred and ten meter hurdles again speed and strength.
The discus throw speed and strength, the pole vault speed
and strength, the javelin throws speed and strength. We've done
nine events now, and now we get to the fifteen
hundred meters, which is not speed and it's not strength.
(27:37):
It's middle distance. It requires a completely different set of
physical gifts. Right, So all decathletes have this crisis, which
is they're almost all linebacker types. Who are you have
to be? You got to master the first nine events,
but then at the moment when you are most exhausted,
at the end of the second day, you must do
(27:58):
a sport, an event for which you are wholly unsuited. Right,
You've got to be a distance runner. And you watch,
if you watch it, what happens is you watch them
all just die before your eyes. They're exhausted, they can't
do this, they hate it, they're terrified of it. And
you watch them lump, these big guys lumber around the track.
(28:18):
It's the only event in the entire Olympics where people
are doing something that they're not good at, right, the only.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Event that's interesting. Yeah, And in nineteen twelve it was
the most dramatic event.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
King Gustav of Sweden officiates at the opening of the
newly built Olympic Stadium in Stockholm. It is the sixth
revival of the modern Olympic Games.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
July thirteenth, nineteen twelve, seven days after the opening ceremony,
and a twenty four year old Avery Brandage is on
the field unsmiling.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
But decathlon was designed to epitomize the Olympic theme Sidius altius, fortius, swifter, stronger.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Remember, Brundage had quit his job in Chicago to compete
in these games. Over the past couple of weeks. He'd
moved in a class of wealth and privilege he'd never
even seen before, and were fully in the realm of
my speculation here, But I think he wanted in permanently.
So now the competition takes on a whole different meaning.
Right on the field, all those aristocrats are about to
(29:25):
see what he was made of. Maybe he thought he'd
impress them, and maybe that all fell apart when he
saw Jim Thorpe compete. Jim Thorpe is one of the
greatest athletes of all time. A tall, Native American man
with a singular ability in football, baseball, track and field.
He was a natural choice for a decathlon, even though
(29:47):
he wasn't even intocathlete. He was so green he didn't
even know how to throw a javelin at the qualifying rounds,
and yet in Stockholm, seven events in, he was already
five hundred and seventy nine points ahead of everyone else.
For three days, Brundage had strained to catch up to
Thorpe through the pouring rain, in the hot sun, and
(30:09):
on the last day of the contest, probably in the
back of his mind he was thinking about the Olympic
marathon runner who had died earlier that day from sunstroke.
And out of the decathlon's ten events, the absolute worst
was up ahead the fifteen hundred meter.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
So these huge guys are running as I'm a fifteen
nine meter runner, the times they are running are they're
absurdly slow, like absurdly slow, and they're just in such
pain and agony and they can't wait to be over.
And when they crossed the finish line, like it's this
moment of like just it's just relief. It doesn't even
matter if you win, you cross it, you just thank
(30:45):
god it's over.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
This is really interesting then, because that it's it's embarrassing
to do the fifteen hundred Oh, it's modifying and that
is and what does Avery Brundage date above all.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Is being embarrassed, right, Soage, if you look at the
nineteen twelve De Catalon, he's actually doing really well events
one through eight. He's a speed and strength guy. He's
like comfortably in like seventh, eighth, ninth, place. He's in
the thick of things. He's not gonna win, but he's
in the thick of things. He gets to event number nine,
(31:17):
the javelin doesn't do it. He drops out.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Jim Thorpe was so far ahead of him that Avery
Brandage in front of King Gustave and the Baron Pierre
de Coubertin threw in the towel, or he threw in
the javelin, or I mean he didn't throw the javelin.
You get it.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
He quit now.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
He question is why did you drop out in the javelin?
The javelin is not physically demanding, and the answer is
he drops out of the javelin because he's terrified of
the fifty note of Peters, the way they all are.
He can't face it. It's haunting him. He's on event
number nine and he knows Event number ten is the
thing where he will be humiliated before a stadium full
of spectators. He's exhausted, he's cold, he's tired whatever.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
All those royals he's just met over the last something.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
They're watching and he he's just like, I can't do it.
And he you know, this man who has sworn to
uphold an ethic of competition of putting you know, uh,
effort and courage first and questions of your own ego second.
That's the Olympus, The whole Olympic model of competition, right,
(32:26):
the game is that the participation is everything right, the spirit.
He just betrays it all. He's like, effort, I can't
do it, and and he just sort of SLINKs away,
and it's it is It's really impossible to communicate. I
think how deeply humiliating that is. Because it's your it's
your ultimate test. Everything is building towards that final moment,
(32:50):
and he just he just quits.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Avery Rendage is out of the race. Jim Thorpe goes
on to win the gold.
Speaker 8 (32:58):
Jim Thorpe was so pre the second place finisher was
more than eight hundred points behind the greatest margin in
Olympic the Catalan history.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
But for Brandage, the story doesn't end when he leaves
the field.
Speaker 9 (33:13):
It's my judgment, after studying his whole career, that I
think he probably was haunted by it and that it
had a definite impact on how he dealt with Jim
Thorpe the greater athlete.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
That's David Marinis, Washington Post editor and author of a
great biography of Jim Thorpe called Path Lit by Lightning.
We called him up to talk about Brandage and Thorpe
in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 9 (33:36):
He clearly was jealous of Thorpe, but he also maintained
throughout his career this definition of amateurism as something that
was pure and cannot be tainted in any way. So
from them throughout the decades, he made that his mission
to make sure that the money didn't get involved in
(33:59):
it too much, nationalism wasn't involved in it, that these
athletes were competing simply for the joy of sport.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Remember Brundage in Japan at the top of this episode
making that joke about being the last living amateur.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Something like the tattooed man.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
You know all that it's a joke with a deeper truth.
Brundage used to love to point out that the word
amateur doesn't mean what we think it means beginner or hobbyist. Etymologically,
it derives from the Latin amatore, which means one who loves.
It's ironic for such a grim guy, but he believed
so intensely that sport was for the love of the game,
(34:38):
not money. It was an Olympic principal a rule, and
we know how Brundage loved rules. Practically speaking, it meant
that athletes couldn't compete in the Olympics if they made
money for their sport.
Speaker 9 (34:50):
That's why when Jim tharb was found playing bush league
baseball for two seasons, making about a dollar a game,
the sport that he didn't compete in the Olympics, he
lost his medals.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Thorpe had won gold medals for the decathlon and the
pentathlon in Stockholm, but he didn't get to keep them.
If you look at the official report from the nineteen
twelve Olympics, everyone ranks one spot higher in the decathlon
than they ought to because Thorpe got erased from the records. Instead,
there's this note at the beginning of the results list.
Mister Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing
(35:29):
the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money
for playing baseball. The Amateur Athletic Union regrets that it
permitted mister Thorpe to compete in amateur contests and will
do everything in its power to secure the return of
prizes and the readjustment of points won by him and
will immediately eliminate his records from the books. And decades later,
(35:52):
when avery Brandage was in control of the Olympic movement,
it was only his pleasure to enforce that role.
Speaker 9 (35:58):
There were many many attempt to get Thorpe's metals restored,
and Brundage constantly rejected them and was so jealous of
Jim Thorpe for decades thereafter that he unjustly refused to
give back Thorpe's medals after they were taken away.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So this is the crucial bit about nineteen twelve in Stockholm,
avery Brandage discovered Olympia a perfect land where he could
have respect and access and achievement, and there, to his
enduring shame, in front of everyone who mattered, he violated
one of its most sacred principles. That quote from the
Baron de Koper teh struggle over triumph play for the
(36:39):
love of the game.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
I mean imagine, you know, I think if we had
to kind of choose one moment in his life as
being the defining one, it really is that because a
lot of what we've been talking about, his kind of
anger and his vindictiveness, it does it's of the sort
that makes you feel like it's being powered by some deep,
unconscious shame. Oh yeah, And the first you know, in
(37:03):
this fallen world that he finds himself in where nothing
can live up to the Olympics, the first fallen person,
the central fallen person, is himself, right, even he does
not live up to the Olympic ideal.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Years later, Avery branded wrote about that day, I committed
an inexcusable error which I was to regret. Ever, after
this failure to finish the competition was unforgivable.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Oh sport, you are all the.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
So what did Avery Brendan do with that shame? He
tries to earn his way back into Olympia. He goes
home to Illinois, He trains harder than ever, he builds
his empire, and he rises in the ranks of amateur
sports until he's the president of the American Olympic Committee,
one step below the International Olympic Committee. And then, finally,
(38:00):
in nineteen thirty four, Avery Brundage got another life changing
letter from a member of the IOC. It starts innocuously enough,
grousing about Irish cyclists trips to Rome, questions of amateurism
and then in the last paragraph of the last page,
a surprise, if there is a candidacy from the IOC
(38:24):
for the United States, the IOC member wrote, cannot I
then propose you? You are the one who knows most
of the sports in the US, and you certainly ought
to be a member of the IOC. It was a
dream come true. But at that exact moment, the very
foundation of the Olympic faith that Brundage had taken as
(38:46):
his own in Stockholm, that sport was a perfect world,
removed from all the politics and corruption of the real one,
was facing an existential threat.
Speaker 10 (38:55):
In the spring of nineteen thirty three, I had a
letter from my sports club. You are no longer welcome
here because you're Jewish Heil Hitler.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Soon he would face the choice of whether to preserve
their beauty and honor their principles. The Olympic Games had
to pull out of Nazi Germany. Wouldn't it be a
contradiction to have his fairyland, his Olympia there? Or maybe not?
It depends how closely you read that gold medal winning.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Poem, Oh sport, you are fecundity. You strive directly and
nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and
correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Revisionist History is produced by me Ben Matta Haffrey, Tolly Emlin,
and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
checking by Arthur Gomperts and J. L. Goldfine. Original scoring
by Luis Gara, Mastering by Flawn Williams, Sarah Briguer and
Jake Gorski. Ode to Sport was read by Ethan Herschenfeld.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(40:24):
Special thanks on this episode to Karen Chakerji and Stephen
when I'm Ben, mattap Haffrey. Oh, before we go, one
last thing. We couldn't find a home for it in
(40:44):
this episode, but we really need to be on the
record with our takes about the portrayal of Avery Brandage
in the twenty sixteen film Race, specifically the question of
playing him with a mustache.
Speaker 7 (40:56):
So you watch this movie, this movie, WHOA, This movie
is so bad and we have most most importantly Jeremy
Irons as Avery Broontage first off, but.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
One of the most fantastically miscasts. Yes, yes, yes he's Yeah,
what do they do in in race? Jeremy Irons plays
him with a mustache.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
It's just like, it's just there's violence to them. And
he wouldn't Rundage wouldn't have a mustache because the mustache
is the signifier for a certain kind of dandified elite. Yeah,
and every Bondage is not dandified.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
If he had a mustache, he would call it a
flavor saver.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
He's like a guy from the streets of Chicago.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
This.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
I also think part of it about Jeremy Irons is
I want to like, he's a real weirdo and he's
got these strange views about incest and gay marriage.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
I mean, taxwise is an interesting one because you see,
could a father not marry his son?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Will are laws against incest?
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It's not incest between men.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
I'm just saying the left turn into tax policy.
Speaker 7 (42:06):
He could be, he could be, he could be Sheryl
not married.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I just love I think all of that weirdness is
present in his portrayal of Avery Brandage. Complicated man, but
not a weird man.
Speaker 7 (42:23):
Not weird man.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
No, no, no, not weird in that way. Yeah. They always
like it's funny how they get it, you know, and
what's the Irons version of brandage is less interesting in
the real brandage. And that's the that whenever Hollywood makes
that mistake, that's where I lose patience with them.
Pushkin. Let's begin today's episode with a poem penned in
the early part of the last century called Ode to Sport.
It was written by a short French aristocrat with a
(00:25):
mouth obscuringly large mustache and a deeply idiosyncratic view of antiquity,
the creator of the modern Olympic Games, the Baron Pierre
de Coubertain.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Oh Sport, you are progress. To serve you, a man
must improve himself, both physically and spiritually. You force him
to abide by a greater discipline. You demand that he
avoid all excess.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I didn't say it was a good poem.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You teach him wise rules which allow him to exert
himself with the maximum of intensity without compromising his good health.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Ot to sport is terrible, just awful. So of course
we're going to be playing a lot of it. But
the palm also matters, because it's a time capsule. De
kouper Tank believed that the Olympics should be a kind
of modern religion, embodying the aristocratic values of amateurism, no
money for sport and internationalism.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Oh Sport, you are peace. You promote happy relations between peoples,
bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength
which is controlled, organized and self disciplined.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
The Martin Games got their start in eighteen ninety six
in Athens. Of course, four years later in Paris, they'd
included the most dignified upper crust of sports, such as
pigeon shooting, croquet, and not to be forgotten, the horse
long jump. But the earliest games fell short of the
Baron's epic vision. Mainly they kept happening at world's fares,
(02:06):
and it's hard to convey a deep connection to antiquity
when you're handing out medals next to, say, the gigantic
butter statue of Teddy Roosevelt riding a horse. But that
all changed in nineteen twelve. Picture the opening day of
the Stockholm Olympics. That year. Trumpets blared as members of
(02:30):
the Swedish royal family paraded their way to their box.
International Olympic Committee members in silk hats and frock coats
processed in ornate facial hair abounded. Thousands of men and
women athletes strode into the stadium to stand before the
Swedish King. The Baron de Kubertan was there too, and
(02:51):
there wasn't a butter statue in sight. These were the
first games with athletes from every continent except for Antarctica,
introduced epic sports like the decathlon, and per the Baron's wishes,
there was an arts competition, which meant there was an
Olympic gold medal for literature, one in nineteen twelve by
a poem written under a pseudonym by the Baron himself,
(03:15):
ode to sport.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yours is a prudent, well considered audacity.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
These games were a turning point. But for our purposes
they mattered not because of the athletic or artistic triumphs,
or the absence of carved butter. No, they mattered because
of one young man in that mass of thousands of athletes,
standing on the field, facing the King into kober Tan,
a young man in round wire spectacles who had an
appointment that day with faith, a fate that would later
(03:46):
put him in the position to save the modern Olympics,
and that would twenty four years later cost him his soul,
a young man named Avery Brundage.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is episode four of our series
on the Berlin Olympics in nineteen thirty six Hitler's Olympics.
Over the past two episodes, I introduced you to one
of my all time favorite historical figures, Charles Hitchcock Cheryl,
(04:24):
the patrician dufus who met Hitler and told the world, Hey,
this guy's all right, let's play sports with him. But today,
in the show by Colleague bend A, daph Haffrey brings
us the story of the man who really made the
games happen, and not only the nineteen thirty six Games,
but the Olympics as we know them today. The one,
(04:44):
the only Avery Brundage.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We meet again, Yeah, to discuss yet another member of
the International Olympic Committee.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
The most he is the most complet the most important,
and when I say complicated, I mean that unlike Cheryl,
he's not a dufus and he's not a cardboard villain.
I feel like the mid century was full of men
(05:17):
like this. Fiction was full of men like this. The
architect in in Coward Runtad and I RAN's the Fountainhead.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He's also just like an epic epic figure. I think
we have to start, we have to begin in an
epic register. Yes, honestly, it's best if he introduces himself, ladies.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
And gentlemen of the press. Usually I'm introduced as the
last living amateur, something like the tattooed man.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You know, that's every brandage late in life. Speaking to
some reporters in Japan, a.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Journalist friend of mine in Chicago, one of the most
sophisticated and cynical columnists there, visited Olympia not so long ago,
and I was amazed to pick up the paper in
Chicago shortly thereafter and see a headline Brundage may be right.
(06:16):
After all, this man was so impressed by the atmosphere
at ancient Olympia that he was almost converted. I don't
know how long it lasted, but for the moment he
was converted to the Olympic spirit.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Conversion to the Olympic Spirit was Avery, Brundage's great obsession.
The Olympic religion never had a better evangelist. But our
series isn't only concerned with the Olympic Games. The bigger
question here is why do some people see evil for
what it is when others can't or won't. Dorothy Thompson
could see the dangers of Nazism because she was born
(06:59):
to a marginalized group herself. She was a woman poor
Charles Cheryl loved Hitler. He was born upper crust and
only cared to stay that way. Brundage, though, looks a
lot more like Thompson than Cheryl. At first. He starts
out as an underdog, and you're gonna want to root
for him, but in the end, well, we'll get there.
(07:24):
Avery Brundage grew up poor in Chicago around the turn
of the twentieth century. It was the classic gloomy first
act of an American dream, waking up in the dark
to work as a paper boy, commuting seven miles each
way to school. Father who leaves when he's five and
dies alone, the victim as the newspaper reads of business reverses.
(07:45):
Brundage was brilliant and maybe a little haunted by failure.
He was always top of his class, winning national prizes,
and always passionate about sports. Crucially sports you could play alone,
like track and field. But poor kid remembers his school
didn't have sports facilities. He made his own discus out
of an iron washer, he used a rock for shot put,
(08:07):
and he practiced long jumping in an abandoned lot. When
I imagine Avery Brandage's early life. I picture him from
a distance, a little boy in glasses, alone on an
empty parcel of land, jumping again and again into the
same hole, trying to beat himself.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Oh, sport, you are joy to the sorrowful. You can
even bring salutary diversion from their distress.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
He studied engineering in college, and he was a track star.
Not because he was amazing at any event in particular,
but because he was so relentless in training that he
was pretty good at them all. Mainly though he did
a million extracurriculars, he just wants to be in the club,
better yet to lead the club. He's like the kid
in that movie Rushmore yearbook board member, fraternity member, literary
(08:56):
magazine editor in chief, chairman of the sea, your stag dance.
Same deal with sports. He's all about sports organizations. It's
not enough for him to be on the track team.
He's got to be on the governing body so he
can pass the rule that students who aren't on varsity
teams can't wear the school of colors. So if you're
a student at the University of Illinois in Brundage's time,
(09:19):
and you're not a track star. He doesn't want you
wearing orange and blue. This, I think is a good
illustration of the first rule of Avery Brundage's universe. There
must be rules, even with food. Like when he's older,
he only eats one lunch every day, and it's an
egg sandwich with bacon, a side of tomato, and a
baked apple, which is like the most Midwestern thing I've
(09:41):
ever heard. The world of Avery Brandage is rule bound,
and a rule bound world is a world of task.
If Charles Cheryl is the classic International Olympic Committee member
born at the top of the pyramid, Avery Brundage is
born just a bit above the bottom. He knows it,
and he knows what it's going to take to get
to the top.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
In all of the interviews I've read with him, he
always made a point of talking about how unpopular he was.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Malcolm and I have spent hours psychoanalyzing this man.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
There's a version of that where the person owns it.
But it's not that it's this kind of grim determination that,
of course all of the weaklings out there don't understand
what I'm doing. That's why I'm who I am, That's
why I'm special.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I found a typewritten note from Brendage that kind of
backs this up. It's in his archive, part of some
ideas he had for an autobiography he never published. He
reads one summer vacation, when in college, had a political
job in an office containing two hundred or three hundred appointees.
Became very unpopular because, in order to keep busy, I
did not only all my own work, but all the
(10:45):
work of the score of others. The boss began to
think that if I stayed there much longer, there would
be no work left. When I took a day off
to go to the ballpark because I had nothing to do,
I got fired. So this sounds ridiculu us, but I
actually believe it. And more importantly, I don't think he
realizes how unlikable this story makes him sound. But it
(11:08):
illustrates another one of his rules. If you're the best,
you'll be hated by the rest. That's just the fact.
But after college, our man discovered that the real world
didn't play by his rules. He worked as a construction superintendent,
which was a really bad industry for a man of principle.
Right away, he was inspecting materials for an architect's new building,
(11:30):
the first shipment of stone had major flaws. He tried
to send it back and the supplier said, better think twice.
This stuff comes from their architect's nephew. Things did not
improve from there.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
It was a criticism of the climate which exists in
the world today, and it is, as I say, a
very sad commentary on our so called civilization.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
To quote from his unpublished autobiography, Like most young men
who think about it, I was disturbed by the gross
social and economic injustices in the imperfect world in which
we live, and all the inequity, trouble and misery caused
by the cupidity, the ignorance, and the stupidity of the
peculiar people occasionally thrown into power and authority, as his
(12:14):
biographer Alan Gutman put it, from uneasy involvement in the
imperfect world, Brundage found refuge in amateur athletics. While Brundage
was making his way in business, he kept up his
track and field training, discus shot put running. He got
so good that in nineteen twelve he got the telegram
(12:37):
that would change his life, an invitation from the US
Olympic Committee.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
I was a member of the United States team in
nineteen twelve.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
At this point, Avery Brundage was still living with his mom.
Illinois was the center of his universe. But as soon
as he got that telegram, he quit his job and
headed to New York. Then he climbed aboard the glamorous
SS Finland with all the other athletes for ten days
of all you can eat meals underneath the ornate, filigreed
sunroof of the dining saloon. This was more like it
(13:14):
when he arrived at the Games in Stockholm in nineteen twelve.
It was a world away from Chicago. In that unpublished autobiography,
he wrote, I shall never forget. As the steamer picked
its way cautiously through the alluring archipelago to the anchorage,
it was approximately ten o'clock in the evening, and the
sun was about to set behind us. The myriad of
(13:37):
beautiful pine clad islands with neat and well cared for
homes with flower gardens, the winding channels containing scores of
boats of all shapes and sizes, and the rosy glow
of the setting sun presented a picture of fairyland. I
shall always remember. I've read a lot of Avery Brundage,
(13:59):
and let me tell you, fairyland is not the kind
of word he uses. The man was in love. It
was midsummer in Stockholm, and the days were surreal and long,
with only an hour or two of darkness. Flags fluttered
in streets, flanked by balconies bursting with flowers. Avery was
swept up in a whirl of Olympic parties, banquets, balls,
(14:21):
garden parties, concerts, receptions and entertainments. He rubbed shoulders with
royalty for a few days. He wasn't the poor kid
from corrupt Chicago anymore. He was an Olympian.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, the dime store psychological reading of this.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Can't we at least upgrade ourselves to like dollar dollar
store dollars our dollar general psychoanalysis? You know, all right,
he is.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
He's the hic from Chicago, right, grows up without a
dad in some you know, cold water flat somewhere in Chicago,
makes his own way in the world. He's not really,
he's not worldly. When he goes to the nineteen twelve Olympic,
I think it's the first time he's left the United States. Yeah,
Cheryl crosses the Atlantic eighty two times in the course
(15:07):
of his life, and you know, he some part of
him desperately wants to be He just gets a glimpse
of this, this kind of the fabulous life these other
people are leading, and I just think he some part
of just like I want that.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He wanted this perfect world of sport because of how
angry he was about the corruption in the real world,
for bribes and the nepotism. The Olympic religion said, sports
are the opposite. They're objective, they're fair, they're meritocratic. And
I know it sounds like a lot, but if you
don't believe me, then let's consult that gold medal winning
poem by the founder of the modern Olympics.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh sport, The perfect equity for which men strive in
vain in their social institutions is your constant companion. No
one can jump a centimeter higher than the height he
can jump, nor run a minute longer than the length
he can run. The limits of his success are determined
(16:08):
solely by his own physical and moral strength.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Obviously, I think this poem is hilarious, but it's basically
the worldview that Avery Brandage adopted at the Games in
nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh Sport Pleasure of the Gods essence of life. You
appeared suddenly in the midst of the.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
Gray clearing, which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence,
like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind
still smiled.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops, and
flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Brandage had come from the gray clearing, which writh with
the drudgery of modern existence. A radiant messenger of a
past age has send him a telegraph, beckoning him out
to where the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops.
The Olympics were above money in politics. At the Games,
(17:12):
Avery Brundage's exceptionalism, his hard work might finally be recognized.
Maybe there'd be medals, but already there was prestige, respect access.
I want you to picture in your mind again the
opening day at Stockholm, young Avery Brandage, bespectacled, glowing in
the heart of modern Olympia. His world has just gotten
(17:35):
ten times bigger. He's under the gaze of the King
of Sweden. Somewhere in the stands is the Baron to
Cooper ten He's caught the Olympic religion, and now he's
going to run with it.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
The trick I think to understanding every bondage is imagine
you're in you're in Chicago and it's nineteen twenty five,
and you know, it's the Roaring twenties, and you meet
this guy in his penthouse apartment on you know, you know,
it's Lakeshore Drive, and he looks out the window and
(18:20):
he says, I built that, and I built that, and
I built that, and I built that, and you know
where I grew up And he points way way way
off into the furthest end of Chicago in a place
you can barely make out. And then you think to yourself,
you know, oh my god, like he did this. You
have to get yourself in that kind of place to
(18:42):
appreciate every bondage.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Early last spring, I headed to Chicago to meet up
with Liz Patterson and Julia Backrock.
Speaker 6 (18:50):
So I'm just getting back on the main drive. You
that makes sense, Yes, yes, we need to head south.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
So they're both architectural historians, and they've done a lot
of work studying the buildings Avery Brundage built when he
was back from those games, creating his construction empire in
the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
Fourteen forty eight and fifteen forty at Lower Lake Shore Rio.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
We won.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
We just passed. Yeah, we pretty much just spent a
day driving around Chicago. I a New Yorker living in
a shoe box, kept being like a three bedroom costs what,
and they every few minutes would be like Brundage built that, Oh,
and that, and also that.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Julia I realized that we drove right by a couple
of the other Brandage building's in there. I think that's
gonna have to be okay, Yeah, rather.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Every down Avery Brandage didn't win a medal at the
nineteen twelve Olympics, but he did find his life's calling.
He glimpsed the world held up by two pillars sport
and wealth. He wanted both, so when he got back
from the Games, he got to work first the money.
(20:00):
Took his engineering decree and built buildings for Illinois Life
Insurance Company Public Life Insurance Company. He built the Canada
dry ginger Ale plant and the gigantic Chicago Ford Motor
Company plant on the banks of the River. And he
did it all by working harder and smarter than his competition.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
So the concrete work I think people were starting to
use a lot of they're called salamanders, but heaters inside
to get as much out of the winter months as
they could. But he found ways to position them better
so that everything kept warmer, and then the concrete could
(20:39):
be poured and cured more quickly.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And Brndage was honest. When he finished a project under budget,
he returned the extra money the jobs just like the
concrete came pouring in. He built the twenty third Street Viaduct,
the glamorous Shoreland Hotel, and a huge number of luxury
apartments on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago's most desirable address.
Speaker 6 (21:04):
He definitely got a lot of all the work that
was going on during that period.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
How much of Chicago was built in that period.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Oh, thousands and thousands of building permits were issued in
the twenties.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But he was also a bit of a local celebrity
if you search him in local papers.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
He was definitely a known commodity in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Every Rundage made of fortune, but the fame and the
wealth were a means to an end. Rundage was trying
to buy a ticket back to Olympia, to Fairyland. He
became a leader in amateur sport, like to Kubertin, an
evangelist for the Olympic cause, but with a harder edge.
He once wrote, not to develop the latent possibilities of
(21:45):
the human body as a crime, since it certainly violates
the law of nature. Once again, rules and laws. If
Charles Hitchcock Cheryl is the prototypical member of the IOC,
cheerfully enjoying life at the top of the pyramid, I
just never quite has the ease of being born to privilege.
He's all about striving and self discipline and the discipline
(22:07):
of others to shore up his position. By nineteen twenty eight,
Brundage was president of the American Olympic Committee, and given
everything that was to happen next, I have to believe
he'd already set his sights on the International Olympic Committee,
the IOC.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So this is the great paradox of Brundage. So here's
a guy who was resolutely not of the world of
the IOC. The OC is a bunch of pampered aristocrats
whose best days are behind them. He's from Chicago, He's
made millions building big buildings. He has a mixture of
(22:48):
envy and a desire to join this crowd, but at
the same time he must have contempt for them everything
he aspises.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yes, I think he does. I think some of it
is a some of it is just he understands that
they have something that he lacks, and he wants the
psychological security of being, you know, one of the as
kuber Tack calls them, trusted men. He wants to know
that within a very strict hierarchy he is at the top.
(23:16):
But I think the more complicated thing about him is
I also believe that he probably hates these people. It's like,
like you said, he probably knows that he can kind
of eat them for lunch.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
I was thinking about this in the context the transition
from Ryl to Brundage is a transition from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century. The nineteenth century is the you know,
the world of the aristocrats who are fundamentally unimpressive at
the end of the day, and who who you know,
are in power just by virtue of the fact that
they were born into some landed gentry family. And that
(23:47):
is the world of the IOC. He's like, he's the
twentieth century guy. He is and he is everything that
is in some ways fantastic about the twentieth century. It's
a self made, driven, ambitious visionary who just gets stuff done.
The man built half the Scotland of Chicago. But he's like,
(24:08):
there's something real here.
Speaker 7 (24:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's also like a faith in a meritocracy, like you
have this, like all of these structures of the meritocracy
of like, well, we actually want to find the best
people and elevate them. We don't just want to accept
whoever's been born to the highest class. And I feel
like he is. He believes that there's a pathway through
his brains to power and glory. But he's also maybe
(24:31):
he's still obsessed enough with the sort of nineteenth century
aristocratic idea where he knows these guys still have some
ineffable thing that he does not, and he wants it.
Here's a man who has everything, millions, a construction empire,
gorgeous lake front housing, but I think he's still dreaming
of the IOC. The problem is he, in so many
(24:54):
ways does not fit in there. And obviously Malcolm and
I are obsessed with one of those ways. In particular,
here we have a photo of the IOC in nineteen
thirty and what do we got we got mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache, mustache,
(25:15):
be and beard. They all have these very luxuriant mustaches.
And Avery Brandage crucially does not.
Speaker 7 (25:21):
Have the mustache, and wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
But Avery Brandage wants into the club, mustache or not.
He wants it intensely, and I think he wants it
so badly, not just because he's running towards the Olympics,
but because he's running away from his shame, shame about
his origins, but also shame about what happened on the
field in the Stockholm Olympics in nineteen twelve. I never
(25:46):
actually told you about that, did I. We'll be right
back In later years. An Olympic evangelist, Avery Brendage was
particularly fond of a quote from the Baron Pierre de
coubertin the French Founder of the modern Olympics. Forgive me,
(26:09):
I'm gonna do his accent now. The important thing in
life is not triumph, but the struggle. The inessential thing
is not to have conquered, but to have thought well.
And no event is so full of struggle as Avery
Brandage's main event in the nineteen twelve Olympics the decathlon.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It is in lore, the most difficult event in the Olympics, right,
It's everyone else is doing one event. The decathlete must
do ten at all of the events. Nine of the
ten events are all events that are require speed and strength. Right,
So you open with one hundred meters a sprint, You
(26:51):
do the long jump, the shop quote, the high jump,
the forward of meters. That's the first day. Those are
all events that suit one kind of athlete, the you know,
think about a fast twitch yeah, the football linebacker. We
kill those first five, right, and then day two starts.
Now you wake up on day two, you're exhausted and
you're sore. You've just done five times what a normal
(27:14):
athlete does in the Olympics. So now you have to
go back to the track, and then you do the
one hundred and ten meter hurdles again speed and strength.
The discus throw speed and strength, the pole vault speed
and strength, the javelin throws speed and strength. We've done
nine events now, and now we get to the fifteen
hundred meters, which is not speed and it's not strength.
(27:37):
It's middle distance. It requires a completely different set of
physical gifts. Right, So all decathletes have this crisis, which
is they're almost all linebacker types. Who are you have
to be? You got to master the first nine events,
but then at the moment when you are most exhausted,
at the end of the second day, you must do
(27:58):
a sport, an event for which you are wholly unsuited. Right,
You've got to be a distance runner. And you watch,
if you watch it, what happens is you watch them
all just die before your eyes. They're exhausted, they can't
do this, they hate it, they're terrified of it. And
you watch them lump, these big guys lumber around the track.
(28:18):
It's the only event in the entire Olympics where people
are doing something that they're not good at, right, the only.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Event that's interesting. Yeah, And in nineteen twelve it was
the most dramatic event.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
King Gustav of Sweden officiates at the opening of the
newly built Olympic Stadium in Stockholm. It is the sixth
revival of the modern Olympic Games.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
July thirteenth, nineteen twelve, seven days after the opening ceremony,
and a twenty four year old Avery Brandage is on
the field unsmiling.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
But decathlon was designed to epitomize the Olympic theme Sidius altius, fortius, swifter, stronger.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Remember, Brundage had quit his job in Chicago to compete
in these games. Over the past couple of weeks. He'd
moved in a class of wealth and privilege he'd never
even seen before, and were fully in the realm of
my speculation here, But I think he wanted in permanently.
So now the competition takes on a whole different meaning.
Right on the field, all those aristocrats are about to
(29:25):
see what he was made of. Maybe he thought he'd
impress them, and maybe that all fell apart when he
saw Jim Thorpe compete. Jim Thorpe is one of the
greatest athletes of all time. A tall, Native American man
with a singular ability in football, baseball, track and field.
He was a natural choice for a decathlon, even though
(29:47):
he wasn't even intocathlete. He was so green he didn't
even know how to throw a javelin at the qualifying rounds,
and yet in Stockholm, seven events in, he was already
five hundred and seventy nine points ahead of everyone else.
For three days, Brundage had strained to catch up to
Thorpe through the pouring rain, in the hot sun, and
(30:09):
on the last day of the contest, probably in the
back of his mind he was thinking about the Olympic
marathon runner who had died earlier that day from sunstroke.
And out of the decathlon's ten events, the absolute worst
was up ahead the fifteen hundred meter.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
So these huge guys are running as I'm a fifteen
nine meter runner, the times they are running are they're
absurdly slow, like absurdly slow, and they're just in such
pain and agony and they can't wait to be over.
And when they crossed the finish line, like it's this
moment of like just it's just relief. It doesn't even
matter if you win, you cross it, you just thank
(30:45):
god it's over.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
This is really interesting then, because that it's it's embarrassing
to do the fifteen hundred Oh, it's modifying and that
is and what does Avery Brundage date above all.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Is being embarrassed, right, Soage, if you look at the
nineteen twelve De Catalon, he's actually doing really well events
one through eight. He's a speed and strength guy. He's
like comfortably in like seventh, eighth, ninth, place. He's in
the thick of things. He's not gonna win, but he's
in the thick of things. He gets to event number nine,
(31:17):
the javelin doesn't do it. He drops out.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Jim Thorpe was so far ahead of him that Avery
Brandage in front of King Gustave and the Baron Pierre
de Coubertin threw in the towel, or he threw in
the javelin, or I mean he didn't throw the javelin.
You get it.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
He quit now.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
He question is why did you drop out in the javelin?
The javelin is not physically demanding, and the answer is
he drops out of the javelin because he's terrified of
the fifty note of Peters, the way they all are.
He can't face it. It's haunting him. He's on event
number nine and he knows Event number ten is the
thing where he will be humiliated before a stadium full
of spectators. He's exhausted, he's cold, he's tired whatever.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
All those royals he's just met over the last something.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
They're watching and he he's just like, I can't do it.
And he you know, this man who has sworn to
uphold an ethic of competition of putting you know, uh,
effort and courage first and questions of your own ego second.
That's the Olympus, The whole Olympic model of competition, right,
(32:26):
the game is that the participation is everything right, the spirit.
He just betrays it all. He's like, effort, I can't
do it, and and he just sort of SLINKs away,
and it's it is It's really impossible to communicate. I
think how deeply humiliating that is. Because it's your it's
your ultimate test. Everything is building towards that final moment,
(32:50):
and he just he just quits.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Avery Rendage is out of the race. Jim Thorpe goes
on to win the gold.
Speaker 8 (32:58):
Jim Thorpe was so pre the second place finisher was
more than eight hundred points behind the greatest margin in
Olympic the Catalan history.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
But for Brandage, the story doesn't end when he leaves
the field.
Speaker 9 (33:13):
It's my judgment, after studying his whole career, that I
think he probably was haunted by it and that it
had a definite impact on how he dealt with Jim
Thorpe the greater athlete.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
That's David Marinis, Washington Post editor and author of a
great biography of Jim Thorpe called Path Lit by Lightning.
We called him up to talk about Brandage and Thorpe
in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 9 (33:36):
He clearly was jealous of Thorpe, but he also maintained
throughout his career this definition of amateurism as something that
was pure and cannot be tainted in any way. So
from them throughout the decades, he made that his mission
to make sure that the money didn't get involved in
(33:59):
it too much, nationalism wasn't involved in it, that these
athletes were competing simply for the joy of sport.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Remember Brundage in Japan at the top of this episode
making that joke about being the last living amateur.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Something like the tattooed man.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
You know all that it's a joke with a deeper truth.
Brundage used to love to point out that the word
amateur doesn't mean what we think it means beginner or hobbyist. Etymologically,
it derives from the Latin amatore, which means one who loves.
It's ironic for such a grim guy, but he believed
so intensely that sport was for the love of the game,
(34:38):
not money. It was an Olympic principal a rule, and
we know how Brundage loved rules. Practically speaking, it meant
that athletes couldn't compete in the Olympics if they made
money for their sport.
Speaker 9 (34:50):
That's why when Jim tharb was found playing bush league
baseball for two seasons, making about a dollar a game,
the sport that he didn't compete in the Olympics, he
lost his medals.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Thorpe had won gold medals for the decathlon and the
pentathlon in Stockholm, but he didn't get to keep them.
If you look at the official report from the nineteen
twelve Olympics, everyone ranks one spot higher in the decathlon
than they ought to because Thorpe got erased from the records. Instead,
there's this note at the beginning of the results list.
Mister Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing
(35:29):
the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money
for playing baseball. The Amateur Athletic Union regrets that it
permitted mister Thorpe to compete in amateur contests and will
do everything in its power to secure the return of
prizes and the readjustment of points won by him and
will immediately eliminate his records from the books. And decades later,
(35:52):
when avery Brandage was in control of the Olympic movement,
it was only his pleasure to enforce that role.
Speaker 9 (35:58):
There were many many attempt to get Thorpe's metals restored,
and Brundage constantly rejected them and was so jealous of
Jim Thorpe for decades thereafter that he unjustly refused to
give back Thorpe's medals after they were taken away.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So this is the crucial bit about nineteen twelve in Stockholm,
avery Brandage discovered Olympia a perfect land where he could
have respect and access and achievement, and there, to his
enduring shame, in front of everyone who mattered, he violated
one of its most sacred principles. That quote from the
Baron de Koper teh struggle over triumph play for the
(36:39):
love of the game.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
I mean imagine, you know, I think if we had
to kind of choose one moment in his life as
being the defining one, it really is that because a
lot of what we've been talking about, his kind of
anger and his vindictiveness, it does it's of the sort
that makes you feel like it's being powered by some deep,
unconscious shame. Oh yeah, And the first you know, in
(37:03):
this fallen world that he finds himself in where nothing
can live up to the Olympics, the first fallen person,
the central fallen person, is himself, right, even he does
not live up to the Olympic ideal.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Years later, Avery branded wrote about that day, I committed
an inexcusable error which I was to regret. Ever, after
this failure to finish the competition was unforgivable.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Oh sport, you are all the.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
So what did Avery Brendan do with that shame? He
tries to earn his way back into Olympia. He goes
home to Illinois, He trains harder than ever, he builds
his empire, and he rises in the ranks of amateur
sports until he's the president of the American Olympic Committee,
one step below the International Olympic Committee. And then, finally,
(38:00):
in nineteen thirty four, Avery Brundage got another life changing
letter from a member of the IOC. It starts innocuously enough,
grousing about Irish cyclists trips to Rome, questions of amateurism
and then in the last paragraph of the last page,
a surprise, if there is a candidacy from the IOC
(38:24):
for the United States, the IOC member wrote, cannot I
then propose you? You are the one who knows most
of the sports in the US, and you certainly ought
to be a member of the IOC. It was a
dream come true. But at that exact moment, the very
foundation of the Olympic faith that Brundage had taken as
(38:46):
his own in Stockholm, that sport was a perfect world,
removed from all the politics and corruption of the real one,
was facing an existential threat.
Speaker 10 (38:55):
In the spring of nineteen thirty three, I had a
letter from my sports club. You are no longer welcome
here because you're Jewish Heil Hitler.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Soon he would face the choice of whether to preserve
their beauty and honor their principles. The Olympic Games had
to pull out of Nazi Germany. Wouldn't it be a
contradiction to have his fairyland, his Olympia there? Or maybe not?
It depends how closely you read that gold medal winning.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Poem, Oh sport, you are fecundity. You strive directly and
nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and
correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Revisionist History is produced by me Ben Matta Haffrey, Tolly Emlin,
and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
checking by Arthur Gomperts and J. L. Goldfine. Original scoring
by Luis Gara, Mastering by Flawn Williams, Sarah Briguer and
Jake Gorski. Ode to Sport was read by Ethan Herschenfeld.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(40:24):
Special thanks on this episode to Karen Chakerji and Stephen
when I'm Ben, mattap Haffrey. Oh, before we go, one
last thing. We couldn't find a home for it in
(40:44):
this episode, but we really need to be on the
record with our takes about the portrayal of Avery Brandage
in the twenty sixteen film Race, specifically the question of
playing him with a mustache.
Speaker 7 (40:56):
So you watch this movie, this movie, WHOA, This movie
is so bad and we have most most importantly Jeremy
Irons as Avery Broontage first off, but.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
One of the most fantastically miscasts. Yes, yes, yes he's Yeah,
what do they do in in race? Jeremy Irons plays
him with a mustache.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
It's just like, it's just there's violence to them. And
he wouldn't Rundage wouldn't have a mustache because the mustache
is the signifier for a certain kind of dandified elite. Yeah,
and every Bondage is not dandified.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
If he had a mustache, he would call it a
flavor saver.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
He's like a guy from the streets of Chicago.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
This.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
I also think part of it about Jeremy Irons is
I want to like, he's a real weirdo and he's
got these strange views about incest and gay marriage.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
I mean, taxwise is an interesting one because you see,
could a father not marry his son?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Will are laws against incest?
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It's not incest between men.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
I'm just saying the left turn into tax policy.
Speaker 7 (42:06):
He could be, he could be, he could be Sheryl
not married.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I just love I think all of that weirdness is
present in his portrayal of Avery Brandage. Complicated man, but
not a weird man.
Speaker 7 (42:23):
Not weird man.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
No, no, no, not weird in that way. Yeah. They always
like it's funny how they get it, you know, and
what's the Irons version of brandage is less interesting in
the real brandage. And that's the that whenever Hollywood makes
that mistake, that's where I lose patience with them.
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