Avery Brundage

Avery Brundage
5th President of the International Olympic Committee
In office 1952–1972
Preceded by	Sigfrid Edström
Succeeded by	Michael Morris
Personal details
Born	September 28, 1887(1887-09-28) Michigan, United States
Died	May 8, 1975(1975-05-08) (aged 87) Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany
Resting place	Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American

Avery Brundage (English pronunciation: /ˈeɪvri ˈbrʌndɨdʒ/; 1887–1975) was an American amateur athlete, sports official, art collector, and philanthropist. Brundage competed in the 1912 Olympics and was the US national all-around athlete in 1914, 1916 and 1918. Rising to president of the Amateur Athletic Union, he subsequently served as the fifth president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972 – the only American to hold the post.

An outspoken crusader for the unique significance of the Olympic Games, Brundage has been called “a high priest at the altar of Olympism.” An opponent of professional athletes in the Olympics and pioneer in gender verification in sports, Brundage has been criticized for controversial decisions and statements relating to women and Jews in sports, primarily made during his earlier tenure as president of the United States Olympic Committee during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. He is likely best remembered for his insistence that the Games of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich continue following the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes there – a decision for which he was both praised and criticized.

Early life

The son of a stonecutter, Brundage was born in Detroit, Michigan. The family moved to Chicago when he was five (shortly after which his father abandoned the family). He attended the R. T. Crane Manual Training School, where he excelled. He later studied civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1909.

During his time at Illinois, Brundage played varsity basketball for the Fighting Illini from 1906–1909, and excelled at track and field, the sporting events which were also at the core of the newly reinvigorated Olympic games. He also lobbied the school to prohibit the wearing of the school’s colors by any student who had not earned that privilege on the athletic field – an early foray into the rigidity and concern with symbolism and sportsmanship that would define his career in international sport.

Brundage was an all-around athlete himself, competing in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm in the pentathlon and decathlon events, finishing 6th and 16th, respectively, placing behind teammate Jim Thorpe. He also won the US national all-around title in 1914, 1916 and 1918. A few years after graduation from college, he founded the Avery Brundage Company, a construction business which would earn him his first fortune and pave the way for a life committed to Olympic service and sport.

Leadership in sport

In 1928, Brundage became president of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). He became the president of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) in 1929 and gained the vice-presidency of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) in 1930.

1936 Olympics

As USOC president, Brundage became entangled in the complex debate over whether the U.S. team should boycott the 1936 Summer Olympics, which were to be held in Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany (the Games had been awarded to Germany before Hitler's rise to power). Some voices in the sporting world had begun to suggest boycotting the Games in protest of the exclusion of German Jews from sporting events by the policies of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Jews were unquestionably being excluded, though the method was usually indirect: they were barred from membership in the sporting associations – membership which was one requirement to qualify for the Olympic trials.

Brundage himself, an ardent supporter of the principles of fair play, originally showed some concern about the conditions in Germany. In 1934, he traveled to Europe to conduct an "official" investigation of the allegations of excluding Jews. Much of his investigation consisted of speaking with his close friends among Germany's Olympic officials, although he did interview Jewish athletic organizers – but only while their government counterparts were standing by and listening. After he reported back to his U.S. colleagues that unfair exclusion was not taking place, Brundage's position hardened. He became an implacable opponent of any boycott, insisting that the Games belonged to the athletes, and not to politicians. He insisted that the Olympics should not become mixed up in the "Jew-Nazi altercation."

The most strident voice in favor of a boycott among International Olympic Committee insiders was American Ernest Lee Jahncke. Eventually, Jahncke became so outspoken about a boycott that he was expelled from the IOC, the only Committee member ever to suffer this punishment. His place on the Committee was pointedly given to Brundage himself.

At the Berlin Games themselves, racial controversy continued to dog the Americans. On the morning that the 400-meter relay race competition began, at the last moment, the only two Jews on the 1936 US track team, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. The public rationale was that the German coaches were "hiding" first-class athletes with the intention of substituting them into their relay team at the last moment; Owens and Metcalfe, it was argued, were better runners than Stoller and Glickman, and would stand the best chance of foiling this German ploy. Even on the day of the substitution, however, this justification met with skepticism, and another explanation has long been held up as more credible: that Brundage, whose sympathies toward the German government were not hidden, had pressured the American coaches to remove the only two Jews on the track team at the last moment, so as not to embarrass Hitler and the Nazis with Jews on the medals podium if the Americans won. As it happened, no hidden German "ringers" ever materialized to join the German squad at the last moment. Stoller and Glickman were the only athletes pulled from the U.S. rosters during the Games. The newly reconstituted American team did win easily, and set a new world record in the process.

In the end, one Jewish athlete was permitted to compete on the German team – fencing medalist Helene Mayer. Mayer had already been forced to leave Germany and settle in the U.S. because of the Nazis' purge of Jews from the German athletic scene – but, as a patriotic German, she hoped that her representation of her country might facilitate a re-entry into German society; it did not.

After the games, Brundage made no secret of his admiration for the Nazi regime and his distrust of Jews. He praised the Nazi regime at a Madison Square rally. He privately arranged for American showings of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, a film about the 1936 games, complaining that the film wasn't receiving wider distribution because the movie industry was controlled by Jews. And after the 1936 Olympics, Brundage's construction company was awarded a building contract to build the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. Brundage was notified in a letter from Nazi authorities acknowledging Brundage's pro-Nazi sympathies. Eventually, he was expelled from the America First Committee in 1941 because of his pro-German leanings.

As late as 1971, Brundage still claimed, "The Berlin Games were the finest in modern history...I will accept no dispute over that fact". And indeed, the lavish ceremonial excesses of the Berlin games have become the standard for modern Olympiads, and many of the grand flourishes invented for the 1936 games – like the torch relay bringing the Olympic Flame from Mount Olympus – have now come to be accepted as critical ingredients of Olympic magic, and their Nazi-era origins have been largely forgotten.

Gender and Gender Verification

Brundage opposed the inclusion of women as Olympic competitors; he insisted they have no role in the Olympic Games beyond the ceremonial or decorative. He was quoted in 1936: "I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors... her charms sink to something less than zero. As swimmers and divers, girls are [as] beautiful and adroit as they are ineffective and unpleasing on the track." (Brundage also suspended Eleanor Holm from the 1936 Olympic Games) Brundage, at the time of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, called for a system to be established to examine female athletes for "sex ambiguities", according to a contemporary article in Time devoted to what it called "hermaphrodites". He made this request after observing Czechoslovak runner and jumper Zdenka Koubkova and English shot-putter and javelin-thrower Mary Edith Louise Weston. Both individuals had sex change surgery and legally changed their names, to Zdenek Koubek and Mark Weston, respectively. Gender verification in sports did not exist at that time, but it began during his tenure as president of the IOC.

IOC

Brundage became vice-president of the IOC after the death of its president, Henri de Baillet-Latour, in 1942. He was subsequently elected president at the 47th IOC Session in Helsinki in 1952, succeeding Sigfrid Edström.

Opposition to professionalism

During his tenure as IOC president, Brundage strongly opposed any form of professionalism in the Olympic Games. Gradually, this opinion became less accepted by the sports world and other IOC members, but his opinions led to some embarrassing incidents, such as the exclusion of Austrian skier Karl Schranz from the 1972 Winter Olympics. Likewise, he opposed the restoration of Olympic medals to Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who had been stripped of them when it was found that he had played professional baseball before taking part in the 1912 Olympic games (where he had beaten Brundage in the pentathlon and decathlon). Despite this, Brundage accepted the "shamateurism" from Eastern bloc countries, in which team members were nominally students, soldiers, or civilians working in a non-sports profession, but in reality were paid by their states to train on a full-time basis. Brundage claimed it was "their way of life." It was revealed after his death that Brundage had been responsible for notifying the IOC of Thorpe's playing professional baseball years before. Following Brundage's retirement in 1972, Thorpe was reinstated as an amateur by the Amateur Athletic Union the next year. The IOC officially pardoned him in 1982 and ordered that his medals be presented to his family.

Politicization of sport

Brundage also opposed anything that he viewed as the politicization of sport. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to show support for the Black Power movement during their medal ceremony. Brundage expelled both African American men from the Olympic Village and had them suspended from the US Olympic team. Brundage had made no objections against Nazi salutes during the Berlin Olympics.

Brundage strongly opposed the exclusion of Rhodesia from the Olympics due to the nation's oppressive racial policies. He was bitterly resentful that Rhodesia was prevented from competing in the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, (the last Games of his tenure as IOC president). That controversy was soon overshadowed by the events now known as the "Munich Massacre," although Brundage famously equated both events as attacks on Olympic integrity.

Munich massacre

Brundage may be best remembered for his decision during the Munich Olympics to continue the Games following the Black September Palestinian terrorist attack which killed 11 Israeli athletes. While some criticized Brundage's decision, most did not, and few athletes withdrew from the Games. The Olympic competitions were suspended on the afternoon of September 5 (about 11 hours after the terrorists killed two Israeli sports people and took 9 hostages) for one complete day. The next day, a memorial service of eighty thousand spectators and three thousand athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. Brundage gave an address in which he stated

"Every civilized person recoils in horror at the barbarous criminal intrusion of terrorists into peaceful Olympic precincts. We mourn our Israeli friends [...] victims of this brutal assault. The Olympic flag and the flags of all the world fly at half mast. Sadly, in this imperfect world, the greater and the more important the Olympic Games become, the more they are open to commercial, political, and now criminal pressure. The Games of the XXth Olympiad have been subject to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail. I am sure that the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on."

— Avery Brundage, quoted in "One Day in September" by Simon Reeve

Retirement

Brundage retired as IOC president following the 1972 Summer Games, having had the job for 20 years, and was succeeded by Lord Killanin. He is the only Non-European to hold the IOC presidency.

Philanthropy

In addition to his role in sports, Brundage was a noted collector of Asian art. During his lifetime, and by bequest on his death, he gave much of his collection to the city of San Francisco, California. This formed the nucleus (and, as of 2003, still accounts for over half the contents) of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, initially founded to house and display his donation.

Private life

In 1927, when he was 40, Brundage married Elizabeth Dunlap, the daughter of a Chicago banker. The marriage produced no children.

During his marriage, however, Brundage fathered two sons out of wedlock with his Finnish mistress, Lillian Linea Dresden. His affair with Dresden was one of many. The children were born in 1951 and 1952, at precisely the time that Brundage was being considered for the presidency of the IOC. Though he privately acknowledged paternity, Brundage took great pains to conceal the existence of these children, concerned that the truth about his extra-marital relationships would take a toll on on his prestige as a sports figure. In order to avoid a political scandal, he requested that his name be kept off the birth certificates.

Elizabeth Brundage suffered a stroke in 1964 and died in 1971.

The following year, when Brundage was 85, he met and quickly married a 36-year-old German, Marianne Charlotte Katharina Stefanie Princess Reuss. Brundage died on May 8, 1975, aged 87 years, three years after his retirement as IOC president, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany. A long time Chicago resident, he is buried in the Rosehill Cemetery. He donated his personal papers to the archives at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Brundage's dalliances may have influenced his policy decisions at times. He refused to allow Eleanor Holm to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics because of supposed misbehavior; but decades later, Holm confided in fellow Olympian Dave Sime that Brundage's grudge stemmed from an incident in which he propositioned her sexually and she turned him down.

Further reading

• Guttmann, Allen (1984). The Games Must Go on: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231054440. 

External links

• Shirley Povich: Berlin, 1936 At the Olympics, Achievements of the Brave in a Year of Cowardice (Washington Post, July 6, 1996)
• The Work of the Executive Board
• Kirsten Anderberg: More Raised Black Fists at Olympics Ceremonies
• The Olympic Movement and the End of the Cold War World Affairs
• Avery Brundage Collection at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign