History lesson posted

The Olympic Games are not about sport alone

The Olympic Games are not about sport alone. In an exhibition of Olympic posters at Byculla's Bhau Daji Lad Museum brought down from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Anjana Vaswani finds a documentation of world history ufffd from how sponsorship was looked down upon in the early days to why Hitler refused to shake hands with non-German medal winners

Clockwise from top left

>>> Liberty of Expression, a poster issued in support of student protests before the Mexico City Olympic Games, 1968: Though Mexico outbid Buenos Aires, Detroit and Lyons to host the XIX Olympiad, the Games were mired in controversy. Ten days before the Games were to commence, students' protests against the Government's heavy investment in Olympic facilities resulted in the Tlatelolco massacre, where the Mexican army and police killed more than 300 students. Former V&A Museum curator Margaret Timmers' book A Century of Olympic Posters (Rs 1,000)u00a0 informs that this image, originally designed as a fine art linocut in 1954, was adapted by the artist to include the Mexico '68 logo to "make a sarcastic connection between its circles and the links of the imprisoning chain."

>>> Berlin skier, 1936:u00a0 Germany had won the bid to host the Games before the Nazi government came to power, and several countries threatened to boycott the event to raise a voice againstu00a0 Hitler's dark politics. These were among the most controversial of Games of the 20th century. Though no individual has been credited with designing this specific poster, it has been well chronicled that Hitler had commissioned his favourite filmmaker to create 'a look' for the game that would be in keeping with the Nazi party's ideals of physical perfection and promote the superiority of the Aryan race. Ironically, it was African-American athlete Jesse Owens who stole the show by winning gold medals in the 100 and 200 metres, the long jump and the relay.

>>> Edition Olympia poster for Munich Olympic Games, 1972: Three grades of posters were produced for the Games, and while artists were free to choose their themes, they wereu00a0 encouraged, Timmers writes, "to incorporate a relationship with the Olympic idea and the contemporary Olympic Games." Of this image, Timmers says, "Alfonso H ppi's split, puppet-like figure conveyed at once both, high jumper and diver, upward thrust and downward trajectory."

>>> Variant of official poster for Los Angeles Olympic Games, 1932: Explaining how before the '60s, the idea of commercialising the Games was immensely unpopular, Timmers writes, "Under the ethos of amateurism that prevailed during the first half of the 20th century, official commercialisation of the Olympic Games was shunned; the organising committee of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, for example,u00a0 endeavoured at all times to keep the element of commercialism out of the Games." Timmers goes on to highlight the irony of the fact that it was when the Games returned to LA in 1984 that "the full potential of corporate sponsorship and licensing agreements to yield substantial revenues" was realised.

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