The Other Olympians, by Michael Waters

Review by Dave Gamrath

One-liner:  Michael Waters new book The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports provides a history of the Olympic Games, sexism in sports, and the history of efforts to include sex testing as an integral piece of athletic competitions.

Book Review: 

In America today, we are living in “an era of intense governmental backlash to queer and particularly trans people.”  This seems especially true with recent attacks on trans athletes.  In his new book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, author Michael Waters explains how this type of backlash is nothing new, and, in fact, is rooted in the history of athletics.

Waters’ book “chronicles the lives of several European athletes” who publicly transitioned from female to male in the 1930s. As Waters tells their stories, he also provides a history of the Olympic Games from their beginning in 1896 through the Berlin Games in 1936. This history includes the many struggles faced by women in athletics. A key theme in the book is how the men who ran athletic competitions like the Olympics worked to restrict participation by women. Back then, so-called athletic experts (always men) claimed that it was dangerous for women to participate in athletics, risking serious damage to their bodies. For this reason, women were generally excluded from competition or limited to a small number of events. To challenge this, a French woman, Alice Milliat, formed the International Amateur Athletic Federation, or IAAF, to organize athletic events for women. Waters explains how the men who governed the Olympics persistently worked to kill the IAAF and how Milliat fought back and continued to promote athletic opportunities for women in the face of constant sexism.

A protagonist in Waters’ story is Zdeněk Koubek, a track athlete from Czechoslovakia. Koubek was recorded as female on his birth certificate but “grew up knowing he was different.” Koubek was a superb athlete and began winning athletic competitions. As his success grew, so did comments regarding his appearance, which some regarded as manly. Waters’ story also includes other successful athletes during these times who suffered from “the growing fervor over butch women athletes.” Waters’ research provides insight into the struggles of these athletes, including the English athlete Mark Waters, and examines the impact of their struggles on their personal lives, as well as on their efforts to gain acceptance within the communities in which they lived. When Koubek and Waters both publicly transitioned to men in the 1930s, it caused quite a commotion, both in general and within the world of sports. Though both had retired from athletics, many in the world of sports continued to refer to them as “cheaters.” Koubek, in particular, became a “media sensation.”

Waters’ history of the Olympic Games includes efforts to allow Nazi Germany to host the 1936 Olympics and how Hitler orchestrated these Games as propaganda to promote so-called Aryan superiority. Even though it was abundantly clear that the Nazis were already brutalizing all they deemed unworthy, especially Jews, the men who were the leaders of the Olympics pushed doggedly, over the protests of many, to stage the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Helping to lead this effort was the American sports authority, Avery Brundage. Waters provides a detailed history of Brundage, “who always seemed to have a scheme up his sleeve” in his efforts to promote Germany, as well as to deter women in sports. Brundage’s blatant support for fascism never seemed to hurt his standing as a leader in American athletics, even after the horrors of World War II.

Waters explores the thinking on the topics of sex and sexuality during these times and includes the story of Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 in Berlin, Germany. Hirschfeld conducted “early research into people who are today called trans, intersex, and queer, shaping the world’s understanding of sex.” Waters writes how Hirschfeld’s “central thesis on sexual identity – that homosexuality was not an illness but rather a character trait – seeped into international discourse,” and how, for a time, the LGBTQ+ community within Berlin flourished. This ended quickly and violently with the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s. “Soon after Hitler took power, Nazi leaders launched a campaign to crush Germany’s queer community.” The attacks were brutal. “People on the margins of gender and sexuality were arrested, imprisoned, and, at times, dispatched to their deaths.”

Waters’ research on the Olympics explains how the Games evolved and led to “the birth of a regime of gender surveillance in sports.” The Olympics and other bodies that ran athletic competitions crafted “rules around which athletes were eligible to compete,” which often included sex testing. Waters provides many strong arguments against sex testing. “When the International Olympic Committee decides whether someone should be allowed to participate in men’s or women’s sports, they are not reflecting some objective reality. Instead, they are making arbitrary decisions about what ‘male’ and ‘female’ mean to them at each historical juncture.” Waters writes how these rules have never been rooted in science. Waters’ book “operates from the premise that sex is not a stable category.” Waters explains that “today, many people understand that sex and gender are two separate categories: gender is a psychological and socialized identity, while sex is assigned, often at birth, based on your physical body.”

Waters follows the evolution of sex testing in sports up to current times. Sex testing began as invasive inspections of the athletes naked bodies, then included inconclusive chromosome testing.  “Today, sex testing most often takes the form of measuring testosterone, even though the evidence that testosterone confers any kind of athletic advantage is slim.” Waters writes that “the more we probe, the more we can see that sex testing does not exist to ensure ‘fairness’ in sports, as many supporters claim, but rather to lend credibility to the rigid separation between men’s and women’s sports. Sex testing allows athletic organizations to sort people into neat categories of male and female, and, more importantly, to push out the athletes – most often trans and intersex people – who complicate the binary assumptions of sex.” This effort continues. In 2023, World Athletics, the international governing body that sanctions competitions for sports such as track and field, instituted a “ban on nearly all trans women athletes.”

I found Waters’ book rich in detail and a remarkable work of history. The book shows that today’s appalling White Christian nationalist attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, and on trans people in particular, is not a new phenomenon, and sadly won’t be ending anytime soon. And so, it goes…

Reviewer Opinion:  Learned a lot.  Well written.

Reviewer Rating of Book:  Thumb up.