Olympics

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No Asian athletes competed in Athens when the Olympic Games were revived in 1896, but an Indian athlete and an Iranian athlete may have competed at the second modern Olympic Games in Paris in 1900. In 1908, Turkey's Selim Sirry Bey became the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Japan's Kano Jigoro, the inventor of judo, followed in 1909. Three years later, Japan's National Olympic Committee (NOC), headed by Kano, was the first Asian NOC to be recognized by the IOC. Two Japanese runners competed in the 1912 games (in Stockholm), the first Asian athletes whose Olympic participation can be documented.

India's D. J. Tata joined the IOC in 1920, but, with the exception of numerous victories in field hockey, few South Asian athletes have been Olympic victors. Although C. T. Wang became an IOC member in 1922, no Chinese athlete competed until 1932. That year, Liu Changchun was joined in Los Angeles by an 8-man Philippine team, a 16-man Indian team, and a Japanese team that numbered 101 men and 16 women. In the many early Olympics in which Turkish and Iranian athletes competed, their best performances were usually in weightlifting and wrestling, two sports practiced in traditional Turkish and Iranian "houses of strength."

At Los Angeles in 1932, Japanese swimmers stunned the athletic world by winning four gold, two silver, and five bronze medals. Japan's track-and-field athletes, who had also begun to win medals at the 1932 games, competed strongly in the 1936 games in Berlin, where Korea's Sohn Kee-Chung, competing as a member of the Japanese team, won the marathon.

At the 1936 games, the IOC voted to hold the next Olympics in Tokyo, but these games were doomed by Japan's 1937 invasion of China. Japan's military government concluded that scarce resources were better spent on weaponry than on sports facilities. When the games were revived in 1948, Japan, having lost the Pacific part of World War II, was not among the thirteen Asian nations that sent three hundred men and one woman to London.

By 1952, a number of Asian men and women competed as members of the USSR's first Olympic team, but the world's most populous nation was represented by the Republic of China (ROC), established on Taiwan, rather than by the People's Republic of China (PRC), which had controlled the mainland since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949. Although the IOC had invited a team from the PRC to participate in Helsinki, the team arrived after the games had begun. The PRC refused to compete in Melbourne in 1956 after the IOC rejected the PRC's demand that the ROC's athletes be barred from the games. The PRC boycotted the Olympics from 1960 (Rome) through 1980 (Moscow).

In the course of its protracted conflict with the IOC, the PRC had an ally in Indonesia, which had joined the Olympics in 1952 (after achieving independence from the Netherlands). In 1963, Indonesia's dictator, Sukarno, refused to invite the ROC to the IOC-patronized Asian Games in Jakarta. When the IOC responded by suspending the Indonesian NOC, Sukarno, with strong support from the PRC and North Korea, launched a rival to the Olympic Games, the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), which attracted forty-eight mostly Asian and African teams to Jakarta. GANEFO sank into oblivion after the IOC decided, in 1964, to forgive a more or less repentant Indonesian NOC. The IOC, however, banned individual athletes from the 1964 Olympics if they had competed in GANEFO. Angered by this ban, North Korea boycotted the 1964 games in Tokyo.

The IOC was more tolerant of Israel's exclusion from the Asian Games and from the IOC-patronized Mediterranean Games (which began in 1951). The IOC reclassified Israel as a European nation. Since 1996, the IOC has allowed Palestine to compete as an Asian nation, but Israel continues to be classified as European.

The 1964 games were the first to be held in Asia. As a favor to the Japanese hosts, the IOC voted to include judo among its "sports obligatoires." Ironically, in the open class, Japan's Kaminago Akio was upset by Anton Geesink of the Netherlands. There was compensation. The Japanese women's volleyball team, "the Witches of the East," overcame an 8-14 last-set deficit and upset the favored USSR team. These games, beautifully documented in filmmaker Ichikawa Kon's Olympics, were the zenith in Japan's Olympic trajectory. With sixteen gold, five silver, and eight bronze medals, the hosts were third in the unofficial standings.

Japanese sports administrators had another moment of glory in 1972 when the Winter Olympics were held in Hokkaido. Eight years later, Japan's NOC was coerced by its own government to comply with demands issued from Washington. In order to protest the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, the United States insisted that Japan boycott the 1980 Olympics, which were held in Moscow. The Japanese were joined in this boycott by Iran, Pakistan, and a number of other Islamic nations motivated more by religious solidarity than by Cold War politics. North Korea participated in the USSR-led tit-for-tat boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

North Korea also boycotted the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the second summer games to be held in Asia. The motive for this boycott was the IOC's refusal to allow North Korea to host more than four sports at the 1988 games. North Korea rejected the IOC's offer of archery and table tennis, along with some of the cycling and soccer competitions. At Seoul, the host team shocked the Japanese by winning six of judo's eight weight classes.

In the course of the next twelve years, at Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), and Sydney (2000), the PRC finally surpassed Japan as Asia's dominant Olympic power. At Barcelona, Chinese athletes earned sixteen gold medals, more than the combined total of all the other Asian teams. At Atlanta, the number of Asian NOCs rose as a result of the IOC's acceptance of teams from Kazakhstan and other nations that had been part of the USSR. Despite the increased number of Asian opponents, the Chinese won twenty-eight gold medals, whereas the combined total won by other Asian athletes was a meager twelve. Another sign of the PRC's dominance was the decision of the IOC, in 2001, to accept Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics.

Speed skaters from the PRC won that nation's first Winter Olympics medals in 1992, but, at the close of the twentieth century, Japan remained the only Asian nation with a significant presence at the winter games. Japanese speed skaters, figure skaters, and skiers did well at Albertville (1992) and Lillehammer (1994). On their home snow and ice at Nagano (1998), Japanese winter athletes were even more successful. Among the most memorable images of the Nagano games was that of ski jumper Harada Masahiko leaning forward and soaring 137 meters to secure the gold medal that his mistimed jump had cost him four years earlier at Lillehammer.

Guttmann, Allen. (2001) The Olympics. Rev. ed. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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