Fauxlympiad: Four Failed Olympic Imitations

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It's easy to criticize the Olympics, but only the truly motivated (or crazy) try to out-do them. It takes the hubris of a Josef Stalin or a Ted Turner to think, "Hey, I know: I'll start my own international multi-sport tournament and put those Olympics out of business!" Here's a look at four attempts to supplant the five rings, every one a result of tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and every one an unsurprising failure.

The Workers' Spartakiad, 1928

The modern Olympics were only about thirty years old at this point, so maybe this wasn't Stalin's craziest idea. But that's not exactly high praise, is it? This all-Communist alternative to the bourgeois 1928 Amsterdam Olympics was dominated by Soviet athletes before a home crowd in Moscow. Red-friendly competitors from around a dozen other countries played the Generals to the USSR's Globetrotters. A winter version, held later in the year, was equally pwned by Stalin's supermen.

"Both the Comintern Congress and the Spartakiad unite the working people fighting for socialism and communism," said a party official at the opening ceremony. "They are inseparable in the common struggle for revolution - classical physical culture and the revolutionary militant culture of Marxism-Leninism." That was all well and good in the first flush of revolutionary optimism. But by 1952, when the Soviets decided to compete in the real Olympics, all that was left of the Spartakiad was some forgotten athletes, some dusty Bolshevik rhetoric, and one awesome poster.

The Liberty Bell Classic, 1980



You're the fastest kid at your school. You win a few local competitions, then a few national ones. You train constantly, sacrificing everything else in your life for one goal: to compete in the Olympics.

Then the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and your government decides you're staying home.

Such was the quandary faced by American track and field athletes in 1980. So, along with athletes from 29 other boycotting countries, they were given a consolation prize: a shot at glory in the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia. Also prosaically known as the Olympic Boycott games, this competition actually had some better peformances than that year's Moscow Olympics. U.S. sprinter Renaldo Nehemiah's 13.31 run in the 110m would've won gold in Moscow, prefiguring his four-year run of glory on Superstars.

The Friendship Games ("Druzhba-84"), 1984



Four years later, the boycott was on the other foot. The Eastern Bloc nations stayed home from the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and threw their homebound athletes a similar stand-in showdown. But instead of playing all the sports in one city, or even one country, Druzhba-84 spread the action out across the Communist world. Boxing in Havana! Ping-pong in Pyongyang! Wrestling in Sofia! More wrestling in Ulan Bator!

Again, some of the competitors' performances would have won gold in the real Olympics that year, including 100m sprinter Marlies Gohr and discus thrower Irina Meszynski, both of East Germany. By this time it had been eight years since U.S. and Soviet athletes had competed against each other in a summer games. The sporting world had to know: which political-economic system produced the truly supreme athletes? And wouldn't it be fun to watch that competition on television?...

The Goodwill Games, 1986-2001

Enter Ted Turner, with his uncanny ability to wrap self-promotion in a crunchy shell of idealism. The Goodwill Games was born. With two major cable networks at his disposal and no political axe to grind, perhaps only he could've brought together the two sparring superpowers, although having Gorbachev in the Kremlin probably helped, too. So American athletes finally scored that trip to Moscow for the '86 Goodwill Games, along with 3,000 other competitors from 79 countries. For the first time since 1976 in Montreal, U.S. and Soviet athletes would compete on the same international stage.

But for one kid watching at home in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., the most anticipated sport was something called motoball. TBS plugged the hell out of motoball during its Goodwill Games coverage, and I was eagerly looking forward to a high-octane, thrill-a-minute hellride, some kind of cross between Rollerball and Deathrace 2000 with a little soccer thrown in. I mean, just look at this and tell me you're not pumped for some motoball action.

At last, the day came, the engines revved up, and... I was kind of bored. Turns out it's hard to manuever a motorcycle around a penned-in soccer field. All I remember is the ball repeatedly skittering away from the scrum of players, and interminable waits for one motoballer to putter off to some distant corner of the field to retrieve it. Maybe if the events of the TV miniseries Amerika had come to pass, we'd all be watching Major League Motoball in between documentaries about wheat-growing in the Caucasus and hydroelectric triumphs in the Donbass. As it is, motoball remains a quaint relic of a bygone age. A pretty cool-looking relic, too.

With the end of the Cold War, the Goodwill Games lost much of their raison d'etre. Attempting to recast the "goodwill" away from international relations and toward charitable works didn't help much. Games in Seattle (1990), St. Petersburg, Russia (1994), and New York 1998 saw steady declines in the numbers of athletes competing and in TV ratings. The first Winter Goodwill Games were held in Lake Placid in 2000; the general lack of interest meant that it was the only Winter Goodwill Games. Finally, so few athletes bothered to come to the last games in Brisbane in 2001 (theme: "It's Nice To Read To Shut-Ins") that hosts Australia wound up topping the medal count. Truly, a sad end for such a high-minded project.

But the Goodwill Games were the only Fauxlympics that caught on even a little bit, for even a little while. And for that, they deserve the gold medal in Olympic Imitation. But hey, the field for silver is wide open! Anybody up for an all-Woot Fauxlympics? Our exclamation point would look pretty sweet on one of those motoball helmets.



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